This is a conversation with William C. Anderson, author of the book The Nation on No Map (AK Press 2021) and co-author of As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018). He’s also the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and provides creative direction as a producer of the Black Autonomy Podcast.

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS.

Topics Discussed:

• Long conversation on Black anarchism
• The influence of Zen Buddhism
• Seeing the world as a janitor
• Critiques of black nationalism, capitalism and liberalism
• The legacy of slavery and Reconstruction on Black people in the US
• Tensions between ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’
• The legacy of the Black Panthers Party
• Internationalism vs Intercomunalism
• Afro-futurism and Solarpunk

Recommended Books:

• A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand
• The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership by Cedric J. Robinson
• Facing Reality by C.L.R. James and Grace C. Lee

The James Baldwin clip I mentioned.

Also: check out the Black Autonomy Podcast, Offshoot Journal and The Sostre Institute.

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

For Huey P. Newton, revolutionary intercommunalism meant seizing the means of production and redistributing wealth and technology, in a way that was egalitarian, to communities across the planet. He was questioning nationhood, nations, and states and their existence in the process of re-envisioning their ideological position, talking about how to achieve a stateless society without it being reactionary.

William C. Anderson: My name is William C. Anderson; I’m a writer from Birmingham, Alabama. I started writing when I was encountering a lot of issues as an organizer that I wanted to share my feelings about. So I’ve been writing and doing all sorts of movement work at the same time for a while now.

I’m still learning a lot and doing my best to put my thoughts together when I have something that I think is worth sharing.

Elia J. Ayoub: Thanks a lot for being here. We’ll primarily be talking about your latest book, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition. You’ve written other books; feel free to bring them up as well.

Would you talk a bit about the book? What is it about? How did it come about?

WA: The Nation on No Map is a continuation from the line of thinking that I’ve been going down for quite a while now, for almost the last ten years of my life. It’s many things: it’s a warning to young radicals or people who are new to left movements, and it’s also a shedding—me getting some things off my chest, and getting away from some stuff that I don’t want to get caught up in.

More generally, it’s a rejection of the state as a solution to the problems facing Black America; this book is working against the idea that the formation or reform of the state is necessary as a practical or political goal. On the traditional orthodox left, the predominant solution to most things is based in nationalism, statism, and a desire to seize or abolish state power in order to have what some feel is an “appropriate” version of state power, or a reformed version: a “revolutionary state.” I’m using Black anarchism to look at these conflicts as it relates to abolition, immigration, Black history, nationalism, and the left.

EA: This is really a fantastic book. You wrote that by the time you finished writing it, you were a new person. Can you talk about that a bit?

WA: That goes back to what I was talking about when I said it was “shedding.” It was a process where I was letting go of a lot of different things about what we call “the left,” which is something that doesn’t actually exist in the way many people imagine it—but it’s also something that encompasses a lot of different factions that disagree and have a lot of issues with one another. 

It’s bigger than that, though. It’s also me addressing some of the things I thought about nationhood and nationalism, and things that I felt about Black history—things that I was raised in, things that I thought for the majority of my life. I’m calling a lot of those things into question, and I wrote in a summary of the book that it’s informed by the iconoclasm of Zen. What I mean when I say that is: when you look at a lot of the early Zen texts and Zen Buddhist monks, they’re pushing against doctrine and dogma in a way that is such a ruthless self-reflection and self-criticism that it becomes apparent they are actually working to overcome themselves and the very idea of what has been established as a doctrinaire approach to Buddhism.

I’m doing the same thing, in some ways, with all the things I just mentioned: with Black history, with nationalism, with leftism—all of it. I’m trying to encourage other radicals to push for more, and to push for something greater by admitting the shortcomings and failures in history rather than glorifying it and pretending that everything has gone right. We have to look at the limitations. 

EA: As it happens, we’re recording this at the end of January [2022], and a week ago Thich Nhat Hanh, the famous Buddhist monk and thinker, died. I will try and channel him a bit in this conversation, because I read a lot of his books about a decade ago.

At the beginning of your book you mention how, as a janitor, “you learn intimately what’s wrong with this society because you have to clean it up. You get to know society very well through its messes: how much someone despises you or fails to see you is apparent in what they leave behind for you to clean up. I repeatedly met capitalism and white supremacy with a mop in my hand, and often wished it was a blade instead.”

When I read this—obviously this is a podcast that’s named after the title of one of James Baldwin’s books, The Fire Next Time. One insight that I took to heart, and is still with me in a lot of the things I do, is a clip on YouTube where he was talking to an interviewer who is white, and he said, I am not the N-word; this is not me. But the fact that white people created the N-word means they have to figure out why they did so. The way he framed it is: I throw this problem back at you; you are the ones who invented it, you are the ones who have to deal with that category.

I got a bit of that sense while reading that paragraph, because quite literally as a janitor you are cleaning up society’s messes, and at the same time you get to see what society wants to hide, what society wants to render invisible, and through that you get to understand society in ways that society tends not to want to see. You end up understanding society better than society understands itself. This is why I thought of Baldwin, because he always had this thing: that the oppressed understand the oppressor better than the oppressor understands themselves.

WA: That is definitely there. I’m glad that you tapped into that. You do get an intimate understanding of your oppressors being a Black person doing janitorial work. I’ve spent the majority of my life doing janitorial work. I grew up working class, without many guarantees in terms of family income and with both my parents doing that sort of janitorial work. So I learned I had to work from a very early age. I really started working, helping my family clean, when I was tiny. I was maybe seven or eight years old.

Cleaning made me have to grow up fast, and my father also did carpentry work that I helped with on the side, too. So I spent a lot of time with day-laborers and undocumented immigrants, and people who were also dealing with all sorts of various oppressions that you experience under those circumstances. I had to work nights, after school, with my family—and on the weekends too—and it was really hard. Doing that work as a Black person in the South gives you an intimate understanding of the legacy of slavery, labor exploitation, and subjugation.

Cleaning up after white people taught me very quickly what white people thought of me. I saw their theft, I saw abuses, I saw advances, and disregard made very plain. There were a lot of times I saw and experienced horrific and oppressive things that made me so mad that I wanted to get violent. People treat you like dirt, like you are a piece of trash, because you take out the trash. I have stories for days about every kind of abuse you can imagine, and I was doing this from my childhood—and it’s worsened by the fact that you’re doing it in a conservative, rightwing, Christian fundamentalist place that romanticizes and longs for chattel slavery. So you can imagine everything that one can experience in those conditions.

EA: There are a number of names you mention in the book, and one of them wrote the foreword and another wrote the afterword so clearly you know them well. Can you talk to us a bit about folks like Saidiya Hartman, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin—the two I just mentioned—and also folks like Lucy Parsons, Kuwasi Balagoon, and others in how they’ve influenced your thinking and reaching the conclusions you’ve reached in the book? 

WA: I’m really fascinated by Lucy Parsons; I find her particularly inspiring as a radical who was so confrontational at a time when things were very different. Her labor organizing history and organizing work, and even her fashion sense—all of it intrigues me. Her writings and her speeches are, in my opinion, horribly underappreciated. She’s definitely been a huge influence on my thinking, especially with regard to electoralism and the pitfalls of liberalism and reform.

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin is foundational to contemporary Black anarchism, and obviously I’m looking at things through the lens of Black anarchism in this text. His work influenced me after I met him and JoNina Ervin, who is the last editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper and an anarchist herself, in my early twenties. Lorenzo’s book Anarchism and the Black Revolution—which was recently republished by Pluto Press—changed my whole way of seeing the left. He takes a blowtorch to conventional, orthodox leftism, and says a lot of things that are extremely controversial; he just lays out the conventional, statist left, and calls it all into question. He is just smashing orthodoxy and questioning it all, in a really needed way. His bluntness is something that inspires me very deeply.

Someone like Kuwasi Balagoon also brings a special bluntness in his own right that I find amazing. He wrote with a flexibility that I admire, and his New Afrikan perspective—he was a New Afrikan anarchist—frames a lot of my thinking around statelessness and anti-imperialism, and also the ways he thinks about anarchism in a really digestible and approachable way.

Saidiya’s work in Black studies is pivotal, absolutely dynamic. It speaks for itself, really. Many people know Saidiya’s work and how important it is to Black studies. She’s thinking about anarchism in ways that feel align with the ways I’ve been thinking about anarchism as well, and that was why I asked her to write the foreword; there were some shared ideas there. I try to make some of those comparisons in the text.

Those are all people who were very influential to me, and very special to me, and who I cherish for teaching me a lot of things that I’m still processing, and still learning and growing with.

EA: On Lucy Parsons, recently I had a friend over who had heard of Lucy Parsons but had no idea she was Black; she assumed she was white. You’re talking about Black anarchism, and you make a very convincing argument as to the difference between what we call Black anarchism and what we might otherwise call “classical” anarchism, which is largely European anarchism.

Can you make that distinction for us, and why in the end you still felt that it was important to use the term Black anarchism?

WA: One of the most important things I’m trying to point out is that Black anarchism is a movement that is distinct, and contemporary Black anarchism is a Black movement that finds its early beginnings with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin writing Anarchism and the Black Revolution after Martin Sostre, a famous political prisoner at the time, introduced it to him about a decade earlier. That’s a really pivotal text that underscored this movement coming into being of people from the Black Power and Civil Rights movements toward anarchism.

There were people like Ojore Lotalo, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, and others who rejected the vanguardism, hierarchy, and so on that they’d encountered in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and these former Panthers and members of the Black Liberation Army who developed this critique of the doctrines of Maoism, Stalinism, and Marxist-Leninism based on issues they identified within movements. Their departure creates a breakaway movement that draws from what informed it but also critiques it—all of the above. It addresses the shortcomings of the ideologies it breaks from.

But it also does that with classical anarchism, too. That, to me, is where its greatest potential lies, because it doesn’t just say simply, We’re going to go from one side of the binary to the other—it also critiques where it ends up. So Black anarchism is definitely anarchism, but it also exceeds and works against the anarchist canon, and doesn’t necessarily seek inclusion in it. It actually, in my opinion, gets closer than any other ideology that I’ve found to exceeding the left. 

That’s what underscores so much of this; it’s not just about saying, Be a Black anarchist! or Embrace Black anarchism! as much as it’s saying, Look at the truth of what Black anarchism does. Look at this contribution that it shows us, that it gives us, to pushing for something more, for transcending these binaries and boxes that people are trapped in and can’t seem to escape because of limitations.

EA: I think you’ve said elsewhere that the word “anarchism” isn’t something you necessarily go towards, or something that you escape from either—something along those lines.

WA: That’s been coming up a lot. It’s something that I got from Modibo Kadalie, who is a dear friend and a very influential person and teacher in my life. Modibo Kadalie gets called an anarchist, and he’s not. He’s not an anarchist; he doesn’t claim that as an ideological label. He says a lot of things that are anarchist-friendly, but he doesn’t go around saying, I’m an anarchist.

One time when we were talking about that—we talk pretty regularly at this point, and I asked him about it—he said to me, I’m not an anarchist; I don’t run from it, but I don’t run to it. I thought that was really cool when he said that, so I kind of took it as my own way of describing myself. Because ultimately, if someone describes me as a Black anarchist, I’m not going to say, No I’m not! and if somebody says that I’m a communist, I’m not going to say, No I’m not! I don’t necessarily feel tethered or tied to those labels—but that also doesn’t mean that those things don’t accurately describe my politics.

My politics absolutely encompass and contain Black anarchism as well as communism. But the thing I’m trying to say here is that oftentimes what happens with ideology is that people bring a religiousness to it, and they get trapped by it, and then they can’t exceed it. They can’t admit failures and they can’t overcome it, because it becomes more about preserving the ideology than it is about actually using the principles and the truth of an ideology to achieve liberation. 

That’s what you see with so many people in movements: they’re much more interested in preserving the doctrine and having a religious, overzealous approach to upholding and preserving the doctrine rather than doing what the doctrine is supposed to be achieving, which is bringing about liberation and new freedom, and a new world. People get so caught up in the dogma that they lose sight of that.

EA: That makes me think of something David Graeber would say. I kind of knew him, and we were on good terms though we don’t share all of our politics, and he said something along the lines of, Anarchism is a verb. It’s something to do, rather than something to be. 

I suppose it’s something along those similar lines, of actually focusing on what it’s supposed to achieve: What do we mean by freedom? What do we mean by liberation? What do we mean by changing society? and taking the steps towards making that a reality rather than using all those things as labels that we just attach to ourselves and use as more of a security blanket, or as a badge to put on ourselves and compare ourselves to others rather than making it useful.

WA: Absolutely. That goes back to the Zen aspect of the text. I don’t talk about Zen at length, I just mention it in passing, but Zen has been influential in that way because I think about early Zen texts where there are monks writing, I’m trying to destroy Zen doctrine; I’m trying to kill the Buddha. You have to work to be critical and thoughtful about everything you embrace if you’re going to make progress, because if you start becoming so attached to ideology and getting stuck in it, you’re not going to be able to admit failures and shortcomings.

That’s what we see with so much of the left: it’s so caught up in having really silly ideological squabbles, and I never wanted this book to be something that contributes to that. I’m trying to make that clear. Anybody who reads this book and thinks it’s simply about saying, Anarchism is good—it’s so much deeper than that! It’s not just saying, Be a Black anarchist! Anybody who tries to make it that didn’t really see what I was saying, or didn’t understand what I was saying, or they didn’t read the book. It’s actually pushing for something much greater than anything we know or have the language for.

You can’t just say that any ideology has figured everything out—if these ideologies had already figured everything out, maybe we’d be free already.

EA: We don’t often think of anarchism and look at the contributions of Zen Buddhism. How did that come about for you? How did you start thinking about Zen Buddhism?

WA: I started thinking about Zen Buddhism because I was on a journey when I was younger, when I was a teen, and I was looking at different spiritual practices and faiths. I found myself doing a lot of study, and I ended up becoming really fascinated by Buddhism—because Buddhism was one of the first places that I encountered writings that were saying, Question me! Critique me! in terms of monks and figures who were influential in Buddhism, including the Buddha.

Reading those different monks who were saying, Question everything that I’m saying; don’t just believe it actually intrigued me because I found it so rare to come across anything with regard to religion that was saying, Don’t just have absolute faith and go based on that—question what I’m saying and put it to the test. That pulled me in. I started out being engulfed in Tibetan Buddhism for quite some time, and then I started encountering dogma and religious practice along the way that led me to look a little bit more in different places, and I arrived at Zen.

Thich Nhat Hanh was someone who I was reading a lot at that time, to open my mind to considering what Zen was saying. Then I started reading beyond Thich Nhat Hanh, other monks, and I ultimately came to a place where I started to understand what Zen was saying much more in terms of understanding our own nature and having that be something that can be transformative rather than just being attached to a practice in certain forms.

EA: I went through a very similar phase. I remember saying I “converted,” I became a Buddhist when I was about sixteen. It was first also Tibetan Buddhism; I read a lot of Dalai Lama stuff, and then I moved to Thich Nhat Hanh—same timeline. It’s one of those funny things, because I never became “not Buddhist,” I just don’t use the term anymore (which is a very Zen thing, funnily enough). But I did use the term for some time, and it was a way I would identify myself and find others like me online back when Facebook was still a thing.

But it’s still part of the sensitivity or the framework, trying to focus on the essence instead of the form, that sort of thing.

WA: So you see what I’m saying about how it parallels so much with anarchism.

EA: That makes a lot of sense. It’s a good way of softening some of the tendencies that we might see when someone identifies a bit too much with the word “anarchism” or with the practice, or focusing on the form rather than on the essence (to use that terminology again).

This book is very contextual as well. You mention Saidiya Hartman, and she has a sentence I wrote here, talking about the “afterlives of slavery.” It’s a DuBois quote: “The slaves went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again towards slavery,” talking about Black Reconstruction in America. I think most of our listeners aren’t from the US—can you contextualize this a bit?

What is it about Reconstruction that tends to be overlooked or not thought about in ways that are more critical, the way W.E.B. DuBois does, that could be missed, not just in the US but in our non-American audience? The reason I’m asking is: because America is a superpower, an empire, most people know the headlines of US history. They sort of know the “founding,” they’ve heard of George Washington, Lincoln, and so on. They would know about the civil war, of course; they would know about slavery. And most people would also know about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement and all of that.

And some people, if I have this right, would have heard about Reconstruction, but maybe not the details. It sounds like a good thing—what is it about that period that still lives with us today? What was its legacy and how did you start thinking about it?

WA: The Reconstruction era was a period following the civil war where racial inequalities were supposed to be addressed, and the “defeated” Confederacy was supposed to submit to new forms of integration and burgeoning Black institutions. This was a time where things changed for better and for worse, for Black people. While there were Black people experiencing new gains, there was also a building white resentment that became very deadly.

The institution of slavery was reshaped into things like debt peonage and convict leasing, and the prison system as we know it now. That’s where the DuBois quote hits really hard. I bring up Reconstruction because I’m trying to highlight how one version of oppression can take new shape and be given new life when the state uses its authoritarianism to reconfigure and adapt to social changes.

Some folks believe for sure that we can cut off one tentacle of this monster and then we’ll be better off. I wanted to show a place, historically, where that happened—and the tentacle grew back with new shape and different reach.

EA: That’s one of the best contributions in this book, the link to abolitionism and abolition. Recently, from what I understand, there’s been a growing appreciation of the link between the police and prison system and the legacy of slavery; since the advent of Black Lives Matter and especially since the 2020 protests after the murder of George Floyd (and others of course), there is a sense I get that a lot more people know there is a direct link. So thanks for that, it’s very useful.

I wanted to ask about the tension between “reform” and “revolution.” It’s a very complicated thing, and I admit it’s something that’s still very difficult for me. I’m doing okay; I don’t have any existential threats—but I’m also a non-white migrant in Europe, and an Arab at that, and there is lots of stuff that still makes me very worried and afraid for sure. That’s why, while I don’t subscribe to it myself, I do understand the tendency to seek reforms, to seek what you call “relative improvements.” Understanding it doesn’t mean I accept it as a final goal, but I empathize with people who have that tendency, and that’s how I try to talk to them.

I feel like people who have that fear—let me give you a concrete example. If I am afraid of the far right in Europe (which I am), the EU can look like a relative improvement compared to the far right. And the fact that the far right is capturing part of the EU worries me, even though I have very fundamental disagreements with the EU itself as a foundation. I do think of it as tied to white supremacy, for example; I don’t think it’s possible to deny that. It’s just not manifested in the same overt way as what goes on in the far right, in fascists. That ends up being what I’m forced to choose from: something I don’t like, or something I’m actively terrified by. 

You have a great quote: “We must be able to distinguish between relative improvements and actually achieving liberation. This isn’t a dismissal of any past victories; instead, it’s an acknowledgment of the work that needs to be done, given the ongoing disaster we’re living in that is not being reformed away.”

I do appreciate that it isn’t a dismissal of past victories, because there is a tendency on the left of dismissing those past victories, dismissing Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin (and others, obviously), because they haven’t achieved perfect “revolution,” whatever that means—I don’t think anyone who uses that term actually knows what they mean by it or what it looks like—and therefore nothing they say or have achieved matters. I see this across the board: from how protesters in Hong Kong were treated by those circles on the left online, to how the Syrian revolution was treated and still is, to so many other examples that I’ve spent too much time talking about on this podcast.

How do you deal with that relationship between “reform” and “revolution?” How do you approach it?

WA: The first thing I’m thinking here is that sometimes we get consumed by a fantastical re-envisioning of history that makes reforms into liberation—I find that to be extremely dangerous. Disasters and these issues look like many things, but among them is turning a gain or a victory into the totality of a fight—so you sit back in your chair and say, We did it! when a problem is still there and oftentimes is growing stronger.

We see this a lot with regard to Black history in the USA. The state actually has taken up Black history and absorbed it for its own purposes. It uses the Civil Rights Movement and the legacy of someone like King to push the narrative that Black people have perfected US democracy and made it work, when we’re not even experiencing democracy. So Black people live under the authoritarian threats of the state and its violence carried out by murderous police and white supremacists, but if you think that a reform brought about liberation, then you can come to the conclusion that the movement is over and that freedom has been won.

What makes this even more complicated is that this also happens with regard to left politics where there are different factions of the left looking at state socialist revolutions and saying that new governance, new administrators of the state, are liberation. And instead of looking at the larger picture, that failures existed, that problems still exist, and that it’s not over, you have to look continuously at what’s going wrong—and not just with regard to the domination, oppression, and exploitation of imperialism and what it’s doing to state socialist projects, but also with regard to what’s happening internally, what’s happening and has happened inside of those projects, to make things go wrong and cause more problems.

You end up there with a different question about reform, which is the reform of the state in a different context, in a state socialist context, and asking: If we know that this is not over, if we know that things have not gone as well as they should have, then what needs to be done from here? What needs to be questioned? What needs to be reconsidered?

These are a lot of the questions that come up for me with regard to reform and revolution, because they’re connected in so many different ways. A lot of the time, I think people don’t actually realize that they’re pushing for reform under revolutionary language. So I’m trying to call a lot of that into question in this text, because I don’t dismiss past victories and past gains that have come from places that I might depart from politically and ideologically; I don’t dismiss them, I will give them credit where it’s due. But what I’m saying is that when you look at the truth of failure, and the truth of shortcomings, and the truth of corruption and problems of injustice and limitations—when you look at those things honestly, then you’re able to develop further and push for something greater, push for something more, rather than getting caught in the cycle of trying to preserve, mimic, and make the past into a completion of a new liberatory condition.

It’s like saying, Hey, let’s actually be truthful about what did and didn’t work, so we can push for something more, for something greater, rather than just pretending that everything has already been figured out.

EA: I recently had Anna Malaika Tubbs on; she wrote this book called The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. The story is on Louise Little (Malcolm X’s mother), Alberta King (MLK’s mother), and Berdis Baldwin (James Baldwin’s mother). In that book, she tells a story; she mentions how the very idea of Black people owning property was constantly under attack, often brutally, by white people. There is the example of Atlanta, Georgia—this is one of the stories that she uses in the book—when on September 22, 1906, Black-owned businesses and private properties were destroyed by white supremacists, who also murdered dozens of Black people. It’s described as a massacre.

I thought of Georgia because of a separate story: the role of Georgia in defeating Donald Trump in the recent presidential election, with the notable efforts of someone like Stacy Abrams. This is what I mean when I say I don’t have an answer when I’m put in a position or I’ve had certain conversations where I agree electoralism isn’t enough and is part of the problem (same with private property, same with the notion that all we need to do to be better is to be owners—to own businesses and property); with all the reservations I have, I do understand the tendency to think that way. Because it clearly threatens white supremacists in the ways that we know, and we know that the GOP especially and other Americans on the far right are actively trying to disenfranchise Black Americans.

What would you tell people who are thinking that way? They may not disagree with what we’re talking about, and they might say, Ideally, I would like the world to be this way, but we live in this world, and in this world we need to think about A, B, and C.

WA: With regard to the question of property and having ownership, that comes up in the text around this Black capitalist rationale. When we look at what happened in Tulsa with what’s called Black Wall Street, or at what happened with regard to the MOVE bombing, you begin to understand that Black capitalism’s promises that accumulation will bring us freedom are not true, for many reasons.

Ultimately, I’m trying to push back against that idea because my thinking about property is mostly influenced by the fact that I’m descended from people who were property. That throws the whole idea of property into question, once you learn that about your ancestry, being descended from enslaved African people. The same way that people abuse the environment and extract from it, they’ve done as much with my ancestors. So it gives you a direct line to how capitalistic notions of ownership have to be disrupted, and be pushed back and fought against, to end up bringing about a better world.

Because capitalism has created so much of this crisis, and so much of this situation that we’re in, thinking that it’s going to be our way out is absolutely something that I’m against. That’s how I feel about the state as well, and the appearance of the state form with regard to the history of capitalism, accumulation, and trade, and the way the ruling class is now positioned globally. 

There are a lot of parts of this book that are saying we have to call into question these various forms and ideas that we have been told are a way out of the predicament we’re in—and that happens across the spectrum. That happens with regard to liberalism, with regard to the left, with regard to nationalism, and so on. So regardless of the fact that this is the world we’re living in, and this is the way that people do things in this group or in that group, the bigger question for me is: Do you want this world as it is, or do you want something greater than this world?

We’re seeing the results of all these things I’m talking about and how they’ve manifested and taken shape. If we want something new, then we have to ask new questions; we have to push for something new, and we have to think in ways that are new. We cannot just repeat and parrot the past and what we’ve been told in these various sections of the political spectrum.

EA: The world as it is now, you describe as a disaster—and I would agree with that. Sometimes I try and imagine someone listening to this podcast in a decade or two decades. How would you describe this disaster to someone in ten or twenty years? The reason I’m asking is, we have a tendency (it’s a very human thing) to flatten past complexities. We think of the hundreds of years of chattel slavery in the US as if that were one period, and there’s a before and after that period—which tends to erase what enslaved people were doing in that period. It wasn’t just passive; there was active resistance, and lots of people fleeing, and killing their enslavers.

That’s sort of what I’m getting at. This specific period, 2022, being listened to in the 2030s—given how this decade is most likely going to be “eventful,” how would you describe this period we’re going through?

WA: I’d describe this period as a capitalistic onslaught, and a period where the world is in a state of ongoing environmental and ecological crisis. What we see, in terms of the state of this world and this period, is a strong need to start going in another direction. A big part of that redirecting, for me, has to do with working against the priorities of the nation-state form and what it does to fuel this capitalistic onslaught.

I mean that in terms of trade, in terms of migration, in terms of territory, borders, and the institutions that nation-states rely on to preserve themselves, like prisons, policing, militaries, and so on. These things are driving many of the problems of this world, and regardless of what nation-states may choose to call themselves, or what their constitutions may offer in terms of promises, or what citizenship might mean in different contexts, we know that there is definitely a global crisis.

For me, the war and the domination that has been inflicted on this planet by the state form, by imperialism, by capitalism, absolutely frames the major problems of this era that we’re in. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s what I’m thinking about right now.

EA: Another thing I wanted to ask is on the legacy of the Black Panther Party. How would you see that today? And a second question which intersects with that one: you argue in the book that a lot of its legacy is cosplayed rather than truly learned from. Can you make that argument again, if that’s okay?

WA: One of the things that comes up for me with regard to the Black Panther Party is that there are things we should do that the Panthers were doing, but there are also things that occurred within the Party that don’t have to be repeated. So instead of just trying to copy what the Panthers did and said, we have to analyze what went right and what went wrong.

The Panthers were not one thing; there were different chapters and different people. There were different leaders, and there were internal conflicts. But people reduce them to one thing, and one ideology, which shows that we’re not doing them justice in our study. In order to do justice to the Panthers and take their work further, we have to sit with the elders and see what they said about them, but also listen more closely to those who were overlooked for the sake a glorified elite; the everyday women, children, and others whose testimony also matters to what was accomplished get lost in the glorified tale of leadership that only remembers the famous Panthers, the famous chapters, and the famous events.

There’s a need for a complete historical study of the Panthers, a complete remembrance, and a complete analysis of the different things that happened within the Party and as a result of the Party, as well as the departures and different ways that people went off, such as the folks who ended up creating the Black anarchist movement that I’m writing about.

EA: You have quite a few critiques of Black nationalism, from various angles that you explore, whether we’re talking about the Nation of Islam, the UNIA (Louise Little was involved in that one if I’m not mistaken), the New Black Panther Party, and many others. You use the work of someone like Paul Gilroy, for example, to critique those movements and ideologies. I’ll quickly say that Paul Gilroy for me was—when I read The Black Atlantic for a class assignment, that was one of the most useful ways of thinking about different things. 

The very idea that one can belong to a certain heritage across state lines, and specifically the Atlantic being this place of enforced movement, is helping me rethink the Mediterranean sea. It’s on draft mode, but I’m trying to think about what the Mediterranean sea represents these days. If you look at ancient history, it’s a place of adventure, trade, the Odyssey—whereas today it’s quite literally a graveyard. Thousands of people have died there, drowned, in the past few years because of the EU’s obsession with thinking of the continent as a fortress to be protected, and the bodies to be protected against tend always to be Black or Brown.

That being said, how does Paul Gilroy’s work inform your critique of Black nationalism? And what is that for those who don’t know?

WA: I’m really talking about nationalism generally in this text, and there are different types of nationalism. There is revolutionary Black nationalism, and there is reactionary Black nationalism, with the latter being much more problematic. But I’m critiquing Black nationalism more broadly.

Maybe it’s not even a critique, maybe it’s more of a warning of some of the risks that come with Black nationalism. I’m drawing from Gilroy and his writing in an article called “Black Fascism.” Sometimes people cling to nationalism in a way that I’m trying to work against, because ultimately this version of nationalism that I see a lot of people clinging to, even revolutionary nationalism, is about working towards the nation-state form and looking for liberation in it, or through it. 

I think that can be let go of, largely because I see variations of it where it becomes homogenizing and relies on essentialism in ways that bother me. I quote Gilroy because he points out the danger in many of these forms with regard to how they take up an essential innocence. He warns that when you mix biological notions of innocence and inherent goodness with race and nation and ethnic ties, then you run the risk of fascism. He notes that those things get even worse when you pair it with the modern nation-state, which conditions it and helps expand it. 

Understanding this raises questions for me about [Marcus] Garvey, about Black nationalisms that drew from him, and more—because someone like Garvey, as complex as he was, did credit himself at one point with influencing Benito Mussolini, and he was also very apologetic towards white supremacists. And you have to ask questions about why that was, and what sort of credit he was giving them, and what sort of favor he might have done to giving them a sort of legitimacy in some of the various things he said that were apologetic—and maybe even generous.

This has been a recurring problem for many versions of nationalism. Then there are issues of hierarchy, belonging, and exclusion that I take issue with, tied to the idea of the nation. So ultimately, I’m pushing back against the idea that just having a Black nation is going to be something that frees us and that brings about liberation. There’s a lot historically that throws all that into question.

If you are looking at a more critical history of Black nationalism, and the successes and the failures, that’s pretty clear; I’m not saying anything controversial. But what has to happen is: there has to be a truthful admission that there’s a lot of risk and danger, and it’s not just, Hey, we just need to do revolutionary Black nationalism and we’ll get free.

EA: This makes me think of the many limitations, historically, of something like Pan-Arabism. I’m not going to get into it too much, but there is an argument to be made that in some of the founding mythology of Pan-Arabism, at least after 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel, the general tendency was to see Pan-Arabism as the answer to Zionism—and if not theoretically, at least in practice the politics was that. And what that ended up doing, among other things, was exclude the very possibility that one can be Arab and Jewish at the same time—and this ended up actually benefiting the state of Israel, ironically, because the state of Israel was able to say to Mizrahis (“eastern Jews”): Well, you’re not welcome “over there” in the Arab world, so you should come over here. 

I’m simplifying, but that’s part of the general historical trend. And Pan-Arabism, in its ideological rigidity, wasn’t able to conceive of plurality, wasn’t able to conceive of the fact that one can be Jewish and Arab, Christian and Arab, Muslim and Arab—in practice this became more and more difficult to do, because there was a tendency to focus on the hierarchies, on having leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser and some others as the center of the ideology. And when that happens, you really end up seeing its fragility, because all that requires is one or two military defeats, and the death of Nasser himself, for the entire project to be put into question and ultimately see its own demise. Its foundations were very weak, because they didn’t accept a grassroots focus, diversity, pluralism, and so on. 

Weirdly enough, this is a segue into a couple of questions I wanted to ask related to how we think about the left, and all the problems you were talking about: the difference between internationalism as it’s usually understood and something like intercommunalism. I’ll ask you to explain that difference, but it made me think of something that Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the Syrian writer and intellectual, said about the pitfalls of solidarity, and solidarity from the perspective of a Syrian intellectual, radical, activist—we’ve really seen in the past decade how limiting it’s been.

Saying “limiting” is being nice. Because it’s okay if you’re a Syrian refugee; most people on the left will say we need to be pro-refugee and “extend a welcoming hand.” In London the chants would be, Say It Loud, Say It Clear, Refugees Are Welcome Here! That’s all fine and well. Obviously I agree with that. But that did not extend to recognizing that a lot, if not the majority, of those refugees were fleeing the Assad regime, fleeing the state, and that many of those were seasoned revolutionaries. They had practical knowledge, they had done things that most of us never had to do because we’ve been luckier. They had organizational skills that are very valuable to recognize—not to skip over their agency, but even from a pragmatic point of view on the left, if we supposedly have this desire for liberation, freedom, to challenge oppression, then it should follow that we would learn from people who have had different experiences; they have something to tell us.

We could accept them as refugees, because then you use humanitarian language, which is very dehumanizing a lot of the time, but we wouldn’t treat them as equal political agents, as people with agency who have done things that we can actually learn from. That would be the critique of solidarity, as it’s usually talked about, that someone like Yassin al-Haj Saleh would put forward and which I definitely agree with.

That being said, I see something similar in the difference between something like internationalism and something like intercommunalism—or even something like charity and something like mutual aid. It seems to me that the main difference is: How involved do I have to be? How much do I feel like this is a shared project, a shared political project, a shared communal project? I have something to give to that person, but also that person has something to give to me.

Can you explain the difference between internationalism and intercommunalism?

WA: Sure. I’m really talking about intercommunalism as the ideological departure from revolutionary nationalism, to an updated outlook that addresses the changing nature of conditions as it relates to nation-states and communities of the world. Huey P. Newton theorized it, and it is often overlooked to a large extent, likely because it has admissions that contradict his preferred nationalist historical image with some people. But Newton was talking about the global nature of the ruling class, and suggesting that nationalism was increasingly obsolete since the world was becoming more and more in a state of what he called reactionary intercommunalism.

Reactionary intercommunalism is the imperialist siege upon all the communities of the world, dominating the institutions that people have to such an extent that they were not being served by the institutions where they lived. He was pushing for what he called revolutionary intercommunalism, which informed the survival programs of the Panthers. With regard to the survival programs, you’re talking about the free breakfast program, the free healthcare programs and so on, that they had to meet the material needs of people who were not being served by the institutions around that are supposed to be serving them, from the state. 

For Huey, revolutionary intercommunalism meant: seizing the means of production and redistributing wealth and technology, in a way that was egalitarian, to communities across the planet. He was questioning nationhood and nations and states and their existence in the process of re-envisioning their ideological position. The revolutionary and reactionary binary of nationalism is transplanted here to describe conditions and talk about how to achieve a stateless society without it being reactionary.

Huey was pushing against Marxist-Leninist doctrine at the time. He gave a speech at Boston College where he is talking about this, and he said, People think they are Marxist-Leninists, but they’re not creative and they refuse to be creative. He said that they were tied to the past, tied to these types of thoughts that are just dogma—which Huey called “flunky-ism.” He called dogma flunkyism!

He was pushing something that was a reconfiguring politic that goes beyond the nation and questions the state, and takes up a new look at the world. It’s a politic that, if nothing else, brings an emphasis on meeting material need beyond borders into new perspective. And it questions the orthodox in the process, so based on the conversation we’ve had thus far, it’s pretty clear why something like that would inform a lot of what I’m saying, as well as it’s informed a lot of Black anarchists and Black anarchic politics and autonomous politics.

EA: This idea, the lack of imagination, is a good segue to the last question I wanted to ask before the book section. I’m very much into stuff like solarpunk, climate fiction, futurisms—Indigenous futurism, disability futurism—and Afro-futurism, which is what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to get your thoughts on Afro-futurism more specifically and futurism more broadly, and the role that it can have. For those who don’t know, I’m talking about speculative movements—it’s largely fiction-based, stories in the future and so on, but the very first episode of this year was on the political economy of solarpunk with Andrew Dana Hudson, and it was very much about this.

You might call it the non-fictional application of something that’s otherwise fictional—although I tend to like to challenge those two binaries as well. What do you see as the role of futurism and Afro-futurism specifically—and the others, Indigenous futurism, disability futurism and so on—in creating the conditions for more liberation? What’s the role between futurism and liberation, if I can put it that way?

WA: I don’t actively use the term Afro-futurism a lot in any of my work, but I do talk about thinking about poetry from the future, drawing from Marx, and really it’s pretty simple: I’m saying that ultimately, if we are going to overcome the problems that we’re facing, we have to stop over-emphasizing the past. We have to actually think, and put more emphasis—it doesn’t have to be an imbalance, just more than currently exists—on thinking about the future than currently exists in a lot of movements that I feel are stagnant because they are so caught up in the past.

And that has a lot to do with my critique of the left. I think that the left is really stuck in the past, and seems like it can’t escape it in many ways. For me, I’m actually, maybe even ironically, pulling from Marx—who is over-represented in the imagination of the left, who I feel gets over-emphasized. I’m actually pulling from him to talk about that poetry of the future, and what it means to actually imagine a movement and to envision liberation and achieve it, and work towards it without being stuck in historical debates and predicaments and problems where people are trapped in these cycles and these binaries.

EA: When it comes to solarpunk specifically—that’s what I’m engaging with most; I don’t write it, I’m pretty crap at fiction, but I like to read it. Later today I have a class on climate fiction, because I’m hoping to get better at it. But the reason I want to is, I have some background in the sciences; I did environmental health as an undergrad, so I understand the threat of climate change very well—and often the fear of that is very paralyzing. It’s what you might call climate anxiety or climate grief even; it can be very paralyzing, it can be very heavy.

One way that I’ve found to challenge that, to make it more palatable, is to read these stories. Most of the time, something is set in fifty years, and something is happening, and it doesn’t deny the ongoing difficulties that may still be with us in fifty or a hundred years, but the entire idea is that we adopt this “optimistic-while-realistic” view of things, in the sense that maybe we did find some solutions, maybe we did find some ways of restoring the balance between mankind and nature. Those are fictional stories; you don’t read them thinking this is what’s actually going to happen. But just reading about them makes it slightly more real, which helps me in the day-to-day, because otherwise it would just be me reading through the news, and the news is very bad, and reading through the predictions, and they tend to be very bad, and not being able to do much about it.

One intellectual, Amitav Ghosh, called it “the unthinkable,” like climate change is this unthinkable thing. My point is to try to make it thinkable, essentially. That’s where I’m coming from, and Afro-futurism has a similar role, in the sense of thinking about the future as being very different from the present—and also: in order to change the present we have to be able to have different imaginaries about the future. So it’s along similar lines of what you talked about.

WA: Yeah, it’s directly tied to what I’m constantly talking about when I discuss this text. When I was just talking about quoting Marx, saying we have to take our poetry from the future and not just from the past, and strip off the superstition with regard to the past—it is absolutely important to be able to learn from failure by removing mythology and superstition about what’s already taken place. It’s absolutely crucial.

EA: Can you tell folks about the podcast you co-produce? And what are three books you’d recommend to listeners and why?

WA: The podcast is called the Black Autonomy Podcast, and it is with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin and JoNina Ervin, and they’re just telling their story and talking about Black anarchism, talking about the history. It’s really heavily focused on organizing and tactics and strategies—it’s for people who want to hear things explained pretty simply and quickly; it’s designed for people who are not necessarily into podcasts (we keep it short and sweet). I think it’s a good podcast, I highly recommend people listen to it.

Also check out the work we’re doing at Offshoot Journal, a great publication that me and a couple friends launched last year. We’ve been trying to do great things with it; it’s a fun project, and we work on it when we can; it’s been going well. We also have the Sostre Institute, which is tied to Offshoot Journal, where we’re highlighting the work and writings of Martin Sostre, who influenced and was one of the founding figures of Black anarchism, so check that out too.

Three books I’d recommend to listeners are Dionne Brand: A Map to the Door of No Return—that’s just an amazing book that asks a lot of the questions I’m bringing up in this text; it was very influential on me writing this text. I read it when I was first starting to ask a lot of the questions that come up for me, and it blew me away. I don’t know how to sum it up, but Dionne Brand is an amazing, fascinating, dynamic writer and poet who does so many things in this book that it just blows your mind. All the different questions that are raised, all the different confrontations that are had, the poetry and the prose—it’s all there. So check out that text, it has a lot to offer to many diasporas and many people thinking about belonging, thinking about place, thinking about citizenship, nationalism, and so on.

I would also recommend The Terms of Order by Cedric Robinson. That book changed a lot for me when I was working on this text as well. It helped me think about anarchism in a critical way, and it helped me think about the left, and Western radicalism more largely, in a big way. It’s a text that gets left behind sometimes in favor of Black Marxism (which is the work that most people think about when they think about Robinson).

Also check out Facing Reality by C.L.R. James and Grace Lee Boggs. Again, when people think of C.L.R. James, they think of The Black Jacobins or History of Pan-African Revolt, but C.L.R. James wrote much more than that, and when you read his other writings you get a much bigger picture of his politics and the contributions that he had to offer. Facing Reality is a text where he, alongside Grace Lee Boggs—they are pushing against a lot of the problems of state violence and the state form. They’re also pushing against Stalinism, and they’re pushing against sexism and union bureaucracy—so many things are happening in that text, and it revolves around the uprising that took place in Hungary.

EA: William, thanks a lot for your time, this was fantastic.

WA: Thanks for having me, this was a fun discussion.