A-Infos (en) Ireand, Interview in Anarchist Bookfair Dublin, Building a Non-Eurocentric Anarchism in Our Communities: Dialogue with Ashanti Alston

The following is an interview with Ashanti Alston Omowali, an African descent anarchist 
activist, who started his political militancy back in the ‘60s in the Black Panther Party. 
He was also a member of the Black Liberation Army, and because of his revolutionary 
activities spent more than a decade in prison. In prison he moved forward to anarchism and 
after his release he has participated with numerous libertarian initiatives and 
publications, and is one of the founders of Anarchist People of Color (APOC), a network 
that brings together anarchists of colour in the remarkably racist US. Ashanti also 
participates in a number of initiatives ranging from solidarity with political prisoners 
in the US to the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

     This interview was done on March 9th, 2009, during the time he spent in Ireland when 
he came as a speaker for the 2009 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair. In the interview we talk 
about the APOC initiative, the links between exploitation and other forms of oppression, 
of the need to go beyond Eurocentrism and the place of people of colour and Third World 
struggles in shaping a really internationalist movement that learns from experiences 
everywhere. He also reflects on the roots and legacy of the Black Liberation Movement and 
of his own experiences in it.

Ashanti Alston speaks at the Anarchist Bookfair in Liberty Hall, Dublin, March 7th 2009.
http://www.anarkismo.net/cache/imagecache/local/attachments/jun2009/460_0___30_0_0_0_0_0_ashantitalk.jpg

1. How and why the idea of Anarchist People of Colour came about?

In the US the anarchist movement I would say since the ‘90s it grew a lot and a lot of 
people wanted to know what it was about, including many people of colour, because the 
traditional revolutionary groups that were Marxist-Leninist or nationalists were not 
appealing to them for being so rigid in their ideology and the loyalty they wanted you to 
adhere to, it was something that a lot of folks did not want. But folks that were moving 
into anarchism from Black, Latino and Asian communities, and even indigenous communities, 
found that their experiences within anarchist groups were racists.

It may have been good in the sense that they were practicing direct democracy, or they 
would be active in the street demonstrations, but they though themselves to be 
“exoticised” within these predominant white groups, because they were from African, Asian, 
Latino or Indigenous descent that they were treated as if they were so special, that 
wasn’t a good experience. Or the racism of white anarchists was just too much to put up 
with, and people weren’t fighting racism.

So at some point towards the late ‘90s, the call went out to have a conference that would 
be for anarchist of colour, anti-authoritarians of colour, or people who were interested 
in something beyond traditional ways of organisations, so in 2003 it was the first APOC 
conference. And I said about 300 people came to Detroit, Michigan, in the US, to a 
university called Wayne State University. And that was a great conference which allowed 
many of us to see each other for the first time, and we realized we had so much in common, 
but we needed to work from foundation where we knew that we would respect each other, and 
we’d have a way to work in our communities in a more wholesome way.

2. You talk about having to face discriminatory or racist practices within the anarchist 
movement, which was often not explicit practices but part of a culture, we could say... 
how do you think that this racism that is entrenched in people’s culture can be fought 
within the movement and within society at large?

In the anarchist movement we were basically asking to white anarchists to deal with racism 
within anarchist organisation. Many of them were not understanding that being born in a 
racist society, and if you were born white in that society, you were not only being raised 
with a sense of superiority but that you have privileges, and we wanted them to face that 
fact in their interactions with us, because most of them from the anarchist movement come 
from privileged background. So deal with the fact that you have some behaviours that come 
up very offensively to us, that are very insulting to us, since they have never lived the 
type of circumstances in which we’ve had to live in, and we want us just to be with you 
and not recognize that when we go back to our communities we are with our backs against 
the wall, but when we are with you things are pretty nice and you just want everything to 
always be pretty nice. We want to tell you that in the US you pretty much got communities 
of colour that are locked down. So we need to fight racism not only in the institutions, 
whether it is schools, around jobs or police brutality in communities of colour, but fight 
it within anarchist institutions, as a way to fight racism in the US in general, what’s 
all still one struggle.

3. Women found the same experience within the movement, and they were pushed to form women 
only groups. How do you fell that this relates to the fact that there are other types of 
oppression that interact with class struggle, but in which class struggle alone does not 
explain everything... I feel some sectors within the anarchist movement seem to be blind 
to these other forms of oppression, what do you think about it?

Something I’ve learnt, and that I’m still learning by reading and listening to other 
people, is that we have to look at the fact that most of our understanding of anarchism 
comes from Europe. And I don’t think that we realize that it may have taught us a lot, in 
terms of another ways to live and organise, or how to be open to differences, but we don’t 
really get that coming out of Europe it will also brings us a perspective on class 
struggle that they pretty much want to adhere to as if it was something Biblical, that if 
other struggles are anarchistic and they don’t come out of working class struggles that 
does not make them any less anarchists because it is not workers taking it on. It may be 
peasants taking it on, it may be people tied to the land in other ways. So for me one 
cannot just read the anarchist classics coming out of Europe, but one have to learn from 
other people’s living experiences and writings on their experiences. Even if those 
experiences and writings are not from people that say “I am an anarchist”. But you can 
tell pretty much from their writings and experiences that these are anarchistic struggles, 
you know, that play a big part even today in being at the foremost of some of the most 
challenging struggles against the Empire.

4. You have mentioned Chiapas as being a big influence to you. How do you think the 
struggle of the people of Chiapas relates to the type of anarchism you defend?

I think the struggle of the Zapatistas played a big part because it made you realize that 
revolutionary thinking can come from many social categories... for instance, in Chiapas 
you are talking about the South East of Mexico, which is one of the poorest regions of 
Mexico, predominantly Mayan people that have been written off by capitalism and 
imperialism. And yet here there’s a struggle that is producing the most cutting edge 
thinking on revolution today. To me the Zapatista struggle really made important, for 
example, not only ethnic community struggles, but the struggle of women, struggle in the 
universities, struggles in the cultural field of life, and how all of these are part of a 
larger picture. But when they say that we can create a world where many worlds exist, they 
also want you to recognize that you are in a world where many worlds do exist and that no 
one world can come along and predominate over all the other ones, "I have the only 
solution, I have the only revolutionary way to go".

5. You mention other important point, and it is that classic socialist thought has been a 
struggle for a hegemonic thought for a uniform culture, and yet your views come from the 
opposite view, that is diversity. How do you think the anarchist movement can shape this 
view of diversity with the need for unity of struggle, so we can talk of a movement that 
while having unity preserves this diversity?

Well, it is interesting that some of the things that have allowed me to look at struggles 
around the world and even struggles in my own community differently, was me reading a lot 
of revolutionary thought that came out of some of the older liberation struggles and some 
of the most recent university struggles that may have taken place in France and Germany, 
so we are dealing with people like Michel Foucault, or we are dealing with German thinkers 
who were talking for example of hegemony and some other different concepts on the 
intersection of different oppressions and how we have to look at the world in a more 
complex way. What it tells me is that if anarchism wants to be vibrant, if anarchism is to 
remain vibrant it must be open to difference, it must be open to be enriched by other 
people’s struggles, other people’s thought, other people’s practices which challenge even 
some of the core beliefs of anarchism proper.

So for me again the Zapatistas the thing around difference becomes so important, because 
you have to have struggles from people from different worlds, from different realities, 
yet we can figure out a way within the same space and push our commonalities forward but 
in a way that respects the individuality of the struggles. So if I’m an African in 
America, if I’m of African descent in New York, I want to be involved with the Mapuche, I 
want to be involved with the struggles in Africa, Asia, the Irish Republican movement, in 
a way that they all see me in the way I am, and I see them, and we realize that we can 
still move in a common way that brings down the Empires that affect all of our lives.

But we’ve to do it in a way that we don’t have to submit any part of our identity that 
makes us who we are. We are not all workers, we are very much multifaceted people wherever 
we come from, but our specific histories and specific space in time, makes us who we are, 
and with that comes out our richness and it has to be respected. We don’t have to submit 
who we are like the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and even I would say the 
Cuban Revolution, and all the major so called revolutions wanted people to submit to a 
mass line, and if you did not fit there, if you were still living in traditional ways or 
what they may call the jungle, tribal ways, some State power is going to say no, you are 
coming to the modern world or we will wipe you out. Today we see that that’s not the way 
we want to go.

6. What you say makes a lot of sense in terms of learning from other people’s experiences. 
Anarchism was a very strong movement earlier in the XXth Century, then it declined and now 
it is certainly coming back with great strength at potentials. But somehow it seems that 
we largely ignore what happened in terms of struggles in the middle... Yes, we are going 
back to the Spanish Revolution, to the Russian Revolution but we forget that in the 
meantime the whole of the African Continent was in revolution. Yes, they did not lead to 
anarchist socialism, as neither Russia nor Spain did, but something came out of it in 
terms of experience, lessons, and a lot of other stuff... do you think there are 
experiences such as this that could actually enrich anarchist thought today?

It’s like you say. When you can get away from all of the classic struggles that are pushed 
over and over for you to learn about, whether is China, Russia or Spain, we forget that 
there are struggles that are right around you most likely, or in local areas all around 
the world that provide examples. So for example in the US those of us in the Black 
nationalist movement, in the Black liberation movement, we studied the examples of the 
Maroon communities from the North American to the South American continent, of Africans 
who broke away from slavery, who were in many cases able to hook up with indigenous 
communities and formed free communities, communities in resistance, of resistance. They 
are worth studying. For instance, in Africa you also have the Igbo women’s war in 1929. If 
one wants to see an anti-authoritarian struggle lead by women against British colonialism, 
you have to start studying the Igbo women’s war of 1929 in Nigeria.

These are just examples of how people dealt with their economic needs, the needs to feed 
themselves. In places in Africa where you have borders, you have folks that out of 
necessity, who say, well, fuck the borders. We want to trade with folks across the border 
because we were connected with them until the Europeans put up an artificial borderline to 
our lands. But in them defying the borders they are creating new anti-authoritarian 
experiences where they say, we don’t need borders. Borders are oppression. The Chicanos 
say all the time about the border between Mexico and the US that it is not them crossing 
the border it is the border crossing them. Because that border was artificially border was 
put there to oppress them and now the US has the balls to say that Mexicans coming over 
into the US is illegal, when they are really coming to what is historically their own land.

So there are many things we need to re look and study, and not just confine ourselves to 
certain areas that we feel can only give us an example of some kind of proper anarchist 
struggle or anarchist revolution.

7. In the US Anarchist Tradition you have some remarkable anarchists who were also people 
of colour... I’m thinking of people like Ben Fletcher, Lucy Parsons, who also was a 
woman... do you think that they made a sensitive contribution to the movement as such, 
what would you take from their experience and teachings?

Ben Fletcher you know is someone like workers in the US still don’t know anything about 
him, neither do they don’t know about Lucy Parsons. But Ben Fletcher was part of the IWW, 
the Industrial Workers of the World, an organisation which was so powerful in the US like 
in the 1910s, ‘20s and probably up to the 30s... and they were very effective because here 
there was a revolutionary movement that also fought to include many different ethnic 
groups, you know. So they had indigenous folks who were members of the IWW, they had folks 
of African descent, they had folks who spoke Spanish, the Italians were coming, everybody 
was making their way to the IWW. But a lot of people don’t know that this movement waged a 
fierce battle against what can be called the labour aristocracy up to the government and 
the corporations at the time, who were brutally ruthless in their repression.

One of the things about Lucy Parsons that many people don’t know is that she was a woman 
of mixed heritage... I mean, she was Mexican, African and Indigenous, and although at a 
time in her life she denied to have an African ancestry, to many people at the time it was 
obvious that she did. Yet, she was a woman who was extraordinary and played an 
extraordinary part in the growth of the anarchist movement within the US. She did things 
so outrageous as to marry Albert Parsons, who was a white man who was a part of the 
Confederacy, that was on the side of the racist who wanted to enslave black folks, but at 
some point, like the soldiers who went to Vietnam, he came into a consciousness that it 
was the US and the capitalists who were the enemy, so he and Lucy Parsons married and they 
moved to Chicago. Both of them become outspoken proponents of anarchism for working class 
people. Lucy Parsons even though she may have had her problems with people calling her 
black, she still spoke against lynching and for the rights of people of African descent in 
the US. So she goes down history in the anarchist movement as being a key figure, but few 
people to this day know about Lucy Parsons. But she was a courageous woman up to the day 
she day.

But it’s like for her, Ben Fletcher, all these other people... there was also a very 
important Native American that was assassinated, but there’s a lot of other heroes and 
heroines we need to know about, especially folks of colour, to see that there were many 
people that were inspired by anarchist ideas, what it basically is “we don’t need bosses 
even though they should be considered themselves as revolutionary bosses; we need to be 
collective, we need to be communal, we need to be as they say today horizontal in all that 
we do”. So I am looking for ways today to spread information about people like Ben 
Fletcher and Lucy Parsons.

8. You know better than me, but the two key figures of the African-American movement seem 
to be Malcolm X and Martin Luther Kin... what would you get from them and learn from them? 
And what would you reject from them?

They were definitely two very key leaders. I would also include among them people like 
Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and a few others... Ella Baker was key in the early Civil 
Rights Movement where she pushed for the students and the young folks to reject the older 
black leadership that were pretty much held by the black ministers, the preachers, you 
know, because they kept holding the students back. And Ella Baker, who was an old woman at 
the time, told the students: “you must become your own leadership” and she pushed for a 
kind of leadership that was community based. She wanted people to get away from the 
charismatic preachers or the leadership of the educated ones. Fannie Lou Hamer because she 
was just this poor Black woman who got involved with the Civil Rights Movement and became 
such a dynamic leader, because she brought everything she learned from being just a 
regular community person, a church person, in to the movement, what meant that she cared 
about people.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had a relationship with them. One of the preachers that 
Ella Baker criticized was actually Martin Luther King! Because he was part of that 
preacher leadership, no matter how great he was in many other ways. And here you have Ella 
Baker telling the students “be your own leaders, no matter how brilliant and charismatic 
they are, be your own”. But Martin Luther King was great in other ways too. Because, just 
like Malcolm, they both showed that when they were challenged by a reality that they found 
hard to accept, they were willing to look at it and change their thinking and change their 
ways on it. So when Martin kept confronting the failure of the non-violent movement, he 
had a key thinking about the role of violence. When he was challenged to stop being so 
local and to start looking at the international scene, he began to look at the Vietnam 
war. When he was challenged to look at the role of workers, or the activity of workers, he 
began to support workers. And those three things, how he began to oppose the Vietnam war, 
how he began to support workers, and it was obvious even to the FBI that he was rethinking 
his position on non-violence, a lot of us believe that it was then when the system had him 
killed.

Similarly, Malcolm challenged us even like not to confine ourselves to thinking about 
civil rights. Malcolm said civil rights is when you keep everything in the hands of the 
enemy, we got to get out of that, we need to get our own thinking. Malcolm X also 
challenged us to think that if you want to be free, you must be willing to do it by any 
means necessary. This “any means necessary” part became so popular, because it gave us a 
way to really think that if we want to be free, even if that means bring down the American 
system, we got to be willing to engage our life in that direction. But Malcolm’s life too 
was one where when he saw that he was wrong, he had the courage to face it, admit it and 
move on. So many of us look at Malcolm as someone who’s not that egotistical to keep on 
going on one path, even when it is clear that this path don’t work. When his mentor, 
Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, started to obviously betray his own teachings, it 
took Malcolm a way, but when finally he had to face it, he had to reject the practices of 
his mentor and move on his own as it was necessary. But Malcolm was so important with 
moving people towards revolutionary thinking that when he went to Africa and other parts 
of the world, he came back talking about socialistic revolutions. He brought back messages 
saying that people were moving more towards socialism and getting away from capitalism. 
And that was important for us to know, because most of us did not think about that. We 
just wanted to get rid of racism, but he got us to see that there was a connection between 
racism and capitalism, that you can’t get rid of one, without getting rid of the other. So 
Malcolm was really important.

If the two of them had come together in some kind of unity, we don’t know how it may have 
changed the course of our struggle, but we can’t live with that now, we just got to learn 
from them and just keep moving and learn from our own mistakes and go forward and figure 
out how we are going to win. They are dead, everything is on us now, the future is on us, 
but their lives they still are here, close to us.

9. If there’s something you think was a crucial learning in your period in the Panthers, 
what is it?

Ok, then that would be sitting in prison as I did. This is the long stretching prison, 
this is like 12 years. And all that time you are turning that prison into a university; 
you got to think, you got to reflect on the past. It helped me to see the strengths and 
the weaknesses of the Black Panther Party (BPP). And I think that both of them are key to 
me to this day, because I think they are still relevant today.

The strength of the BPP was that we were willing to think about the revolution. We 
understood the role of criticism and struggle and we were willing to go into our 
communities with programmes. We were not the intellectual types that all we did was being 
intellectual towards each other, day in and day out. If you got something that you think 
is good, you put it into practice. Practice will tell you whether it works or not, if it 
doesn’t, you go back to the drawing board.

I think the weaknesses of the BPP was that we were young, that our enemy was very 
experienced and that we did not have a strong enough what may be called a “decolonisation 
programme” whereas while we are doing this work in our communities, while we are combating 
out enemies, that we are consciously trying to work this system out of our bodies and out 
of our minds, and out of our most intimate relationships. Because I think those are the 
areas that our enemies use to bring us down: the sexism, the authoritarianism, the fears 
of freedom, the fears of death, all those things. We didn’t have ways to deal with those 
areas and I think it weakened us a lot.

10. You are talking about the intimate relationship between capitalism and racism, sexism 
and other types of oppression... I think it’s a tough one, because they are not 
necessarily linked in very obvious ways at all times. So do you think there is any single 
main link between them? How do they interact within a capitalist framework? How can you 
bring together a programme to end exploitation while at the same time finish all kinds of 
oppression what is the main purpose of anarchism?

Now, going back to prison, I did a lot of reading into revolutionary and feminist 
psychology, on Critical Theory that gave a lot of understanding on authoritarianism and a 
lot of the writers had been Jews who were put away in concentration camps. But what it 
helped me to understand, and this goes back to Franz Fanon, is that oppression gets 
internalized, that you are not just fighting a system out there, outside of you, is like 
when the anarchist say “you have to kill the cop inside your head”. The capitalist system 
is also inside of you. So I think one of the most important lessons while in prison was 
thinking and reflecting on the movement, was that we have to find ways to combat the 
system inside of us, the enemy inside of us, as it comes out in our relationships. And I’m 
talking of relationships very broadly, because it is not only family, personal, intimate, 
friend relationships, but is also your relationships with your comrades, and what ways do 
you act out oppressions within your relationships.

So it is important, of course, to be anti-sexist, but we can’t just take an anti-sexist 
verbal position; we got to really understand what is it about us men and the way we act 
that shuts down women, and shuts down people who are less powerful, because it also shuts 
down children and it gets into an ageist thing as well. If we say that we want to end 
white supremacist society and a lot of times you look at all the ethnic groups which are 
not part of the white race as inferior to you, but you may not realize it, you are doing 
it in an unconscious way. So when we organise, even the most simple type of organisation, 
a mutual aid organisation, we need to be conscious what we do with each other within that 
organisation that axe out the system that we are trying to bring down.

So if I’m in an organisation with women, I want to be aware of my sexism. If I’m in an 
organisation that is mixed in terms of ethnic groups, I want to be conscious of who has 
been historically silent within that group. If I’m in an organisation that has queer folks 
I want to be very mindful, if I’m not a queer person, what do I do that shuts that person 
down and make them feel unsafe. Because as an anarchist I want to be in organisation that 
in some way create the kind of world we want. So if I’m raising my kids, I don’t want to 
raise them traditionally, the same way my parents raised me... I want to be very careful 
that I’m raising them in a manner as free as possible, no matter how insane that may be 
sometimes, but I want to make sure that their individuality and initiative is respected. 
I’m going to be careful, I’m the parent. But I’m going to make sure also that I don’t make 
them just obey me, as an authoritarian preparation for the world we are going to release 
them into. We want to raise anti-authoritarian children, we want to raise children that 
have a deep love and respect for life. And at the same time we have to recover those same 
things within ourselves because we never realize how much we loss them.

11. How do you think that Anarchist People of Colour can play a positive role to make this 
movement you talk about a living reality?

I think APOC want to do two things: we want to push white anarchists and anarchists in 
general to deepen their understanding of oppression and liberatory practices. But also, 
within our communities, we know we got to deal with some oppressions that other folks 
don’t necessary have to deal with: for example, in the black community I have to deal with 
the low self-esteem of my community that has a history of four hundred years of being 
enslaved and having every American racist institution directed towards belittling us from 
the moment we are born. So it makes my struggle in many ways like a national struggle, you 
know, because there are certain things we need to do to help to raise our self-esteem and 
we need to see that we can self-organised without any white person involved at the same 
time we are always open to any kind of coalition work with any other groups, with white 
groups.

I think also in the US, anarchist of colour we can lead the way in terms of really being 
pretty good at being conscious on the oppressions that we act out on other people. So we 
try to be very conscious of shutting down women, shutting down queer folks, shutting down 
young folks. We seem to be more at to want to be very active in our communities, we seem 
to have more of a sense that our backs are up against the wall, so that we don’t have all 
the safeguards to fall back on that many other groups may have. But we want other groups, 
especially white groups, to know that if our backs are against the wall, our tactics and 
strategy may be more aggressive at points. But whatever they be, we want our white 
comrades support. We don’t want intellectual privileged ones to be in a position that they 
say, “well we don’t like what you are doing, so therefore we are not going to support you; 
we don’t like that you are going to try to stop the police from shooting you down in the 
streets with guns by arming yourselves”. We want them to understand that whatever we 
decide to do, we have brains, we are intelligent as anybody else and we can figure out our 
own way.

Some of that they should have learnt from studying to liberation movements of the past and 
is that every person has a right to self-determination, every people has to be respected 
and can figure out their way forward, whether it fits other groups prescriptions or 
understandings or not. Every form of free society is not going to be the same, yet we hope 
that every free society is one that does not allow any small group to put the masses of 
folks in a position of being exploited or oppressed again. But I envisage a society that 
allows Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Bikers societies, whatever, to be able to create their 
own societies yet to be still part of the same community and that we’ll use resources in a 
respectable way, that doesn’t put anybody else at a disadvantage, because we may live over 
a field of uranium or oil... we can think about those things now, but we don’t want to be 
in a position where those who feel they have all the intellectual readings on a particular 
thing can tell us what to do.

12. As you say there are many struggles, such as national liberation struggle, that a lot 
of folks dismiss because they don’t necessarily fit into this perfect scheme of how an 
anarchist struggle should look like, but they are not willing to go with the people to see 
how far we can go... I feel that you have covered many issues on community struggles and 
resistance very well, but I’d like to know if there’s anything you want to add to wrap up 
the interview, knowing that this will be read by comrades in many continents?

I want just to say thank you for the opportunity to talk with comrades from here to 
Brazil... I think the important thing is that folks understand that anarchism has to be 
vibrant, open to change, if it is ever going to be relevant... it has to be like jazz, I 
speak of US jazz a lot. Jazz comes out of African communities that are on the bottom in 
the US, where we were able to take nothing and create something. Obviously, part of the 
European experience and part of the Black experience come together and create this thing 
called jazz, which is improvisation. You know, for me is nothing but anarchy. People in 
the anarchist movement need to understand that anarchism takes different forms all around 
the world and all throughout history, whether they use the name or not. If we get holed up 
on whether a group publicly identifies as anarchist or not, we are no different from the 
Christians and the nationalists, and others who we are so quick to put off. I come from a 
Baptist family and I tell people that I’m close to the church, even if I’m an atheist, 
because it is very communal and that is even with the minister. If people can’t see 
anarchism in their daily lives, act it out in many different ways, how people live and 
treat each other, we will never see how we can seize the moment, you know.

If the moment is being seized by everyone having to declare Kropotkin or Bakunin’s 
anarchism in a particular day of crisis, that means nothing. But if we can see that people 
can seize their lives just adhering to what they really do on a day to day basis without 
authority, we’ll see that anarchism is probably here more than we can imagine. So in 
Brazil, for example, you have struggles with the landless peasants and what the anarchists 
are doing there, and in Colombia, and in Mexico, to the US and across the world all the 
way over here, which finds me in Ireland, there are struggles going on a daily basis, 
communities living their lives, and you got to realize that the task is to figure out the 
way to bring all of this together. But we need to do it with respect for each people’s 
struggles, so we don’t feel that we have to bring everybody in line with our particular 
interpretation. So I hope to see if a general strike comes here as is being talked, for 
me, I don’t look for that in terms of having to turn into an anarchist moment, other than 
an anarchist moment for me will be when many thousands of people in Ireland will realize 
that the solutions to the problems of Ireland lie on the hand of regular Irish people; 
that those who are bankers, those who are politicians, those wield the positions of power 
over the Irish people need to be the ones rejected. If they can see that, the anarchist 
will have done well.

If in the US, with Obama as president, if people come out of his term in office with this 
crisis affecting the US and just see that power lies with the people, it will be an 
anarchist moment. It will be what we need to do, as what Malatesta said: it ain’t 
important that everybody joins your organisation, but is important that we raise 
consciousness among people that they have to be their own liberators, their own leaders, 
their own authority and create conditions where never, never again, some people, because 
of money, because of the military, or politics can control our lives again.

A motuhpiece of the Black Panther Party
_________________________________________
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