By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“All power is truly in the hands of the people, and in the end the people will win.”

-Kuwasi Balagoon

With November rapidly approaching and a Biden victory appearing more and more plausible, Donald Trump, our petulant man-child in chief, looks to have chosen the Culture War as his Alamo, forgoing his previously hip harangues against those plague spewing Chinese communists for more homegrown boogeymen. It’s now Chicago, not Beijing, that offers the true threat to American exceptionalism, and two time honored tropes of American conservative bigotry in particular have been dusted off to frighten elderly white suburbanites to their diseased polling places, the Blacks and the Anarchists. To hear Trump and company tell the tale, our Democratically run cities are being burned to the ground by a motley crew of nappy-headed Willie Hortons and their lawless Antifa-fied honky allies, and for once, the GOP has set their sites on a legit threat to their morally bankrupt way of life.

Anarchism has always been the deadliest foe to authoritarian structures for the simple fact that it’s the hardest school of radicalism to commandeer. When done right, there are no leaders to be bought off, no central authority to sabotage, just an autonomous grab bag of pissed off kids shouting “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Similarly, Black people have always been a minority treated as an existential threat to the majority because of their seemingly unstoppable resilience in the face of unimaginable odds and their generations of startlingly successful resistance to cultural assimilation. The White menace of Anglo-American Capitalism has claimed every pale negro from the Jews to the Irish, but the Blacks have remained its most stubborn foe. Everyone from Hoover to Lenin has observed that if America has a revolutionary class it is the one we brought in chains to build this infernal experiment rotting on the hill. The biggest mistake that Trump and both his slovenly followers and reactionary detractors alike make is assuming that these Turner Classic boogeys, the Anarchists and the Blacks, are mutually exclusive. You can just here crusty Old Man Biden retorting at a debate, “Anarchists ain’t Black!” Oh yes they are, you pandering zombie, yes they most certainly are.

While the majority of the much hyped Antifa allies to Black Lives Matter are most certainly of the pale-faced variety, a growing contingent of young Black urban warriors are embracing a decidedly stateless mindset. One of the most effective and fearsome of this class combatting police aggression in the Seattle area are the Salish Sea Black Autonomists who have expanded the fight against the police state to its womb in the state itself, and this is no anomaly. Black folks have played pivotal roles in the larger American Anarchist Movement going back to Lucy Parsons, and the modern Black Anarchist Movement has its roots in the same gorey gears of the Prison Industrial Complex that the George Floyd Uprisings have rightfully placed front and center as the root of post-Jim Crow Black oppression.

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