Anyone who has found their bodies in the physical tumult of revolt can understand this sense of temporal rupture, this idea that “time stops.” We use fluid concepts like the messianic moment or the revolutionary rupture to talk about the break of linear time that occurs during acts of refusal, sabotage, or transgression.
While it is safe to say that any term can become religious or ideological, it is our expressed desire to not overly reshape the already distorted figures of our past. This might be where we take our greatest liberties, in the spirit of historical materialism rather than ideology. We believe the subjects in this book made tiger leaps through history, not simply to secure a better future for themselves or their families, but for their ancestors whose memories were in danger. We, too, write for our ancestors—to redeem their past as our own, to hold a séance to invite them into our present terrain and help guide us to make our own ruptures. In particular this concept of messianic time appeals to us in opposition to the progressivism that suffocates so much of southern history, through distorting acts of resistance and delegitimizing conflictual narratives in order to align them within a vision of the future as a path of conciliatory and gradual reform.
This idea of a messianic break with time also points directly to the insurrectionary rupture sought by much of contemporary anarchist practice, and in particular to those individuals who refuse to wait for the correct “objective conditions” before acting. Just as a riot, land seizure, or occupation might be an opening move in an insurrectionary situation, an insurrection can in turn become an opening move in a larger revolutionary moment. Whether or not this happens, we see these opening moves, not as “necessary phases” that subjects must pass through but as breaks or ruptures with the existent world, as fundamentally changing experiences that seek to render impossible the return to normality.
On the Illusion of Peace and Other Enemies
Counterposed with this insurrectionary rupture is social peace, a vague term that we sometimes use in this book to describe the assemblage of conditions and dynamics that exist to maintain the illusion of a functioning, democratic, or egalitarian society. In a southern context this has roots in the mythology of the peaceful plantation, commune-like, where slaves and masters worked together to create wealth for the nascent nation. In the riots of the 1960s, it was the perversion of an imagined peaceful transition of Civil Rights integration, social welfare, and equality that was the real threat that rioters posed for both the newly constituted Left and national security. The idea that a discrete granting of rights was not enough to satiate the demands of urban youth or women in prison was infuriating to those organizations and institutions that sought to route others’ rage into their own gain. These are the defenders of what we call the social peace.
Related to our use of this term is our use of “the Left,” an admittedly overbroad and fluid term referring to the set of actors, institutions, and political interests that seek to preserve and guide the structures of capital and state toward their own ends, usually through the reform of a system in order to incorporate their own political base. In this sense the Left is characterized as the loyal opposition, those organizations and leaders that aim to “politicize” or “institutionalize” revolt into manageable and controllable forms, so that such revolt can be digested and spit back out as various reforms or cosmetic changes. This nexus of institutions has played a particular role in the South, ideologically pairing technological and industrial modernization with democratization and civil rights.
We understand that we’re using this term in a way that may be unfamiliar to many readers.3 We also acknowledge that “the Left” is by no means monolithic or homogenous. It has changed throughout history as its strategies and structure have shifted from the parties and organizations of Reconstruction and Radical Republicanism to the trade union management of the mid-twentieth century to the nonprofits and horizontal networks of the twenty-first. Likewise, this set of institutions and interests has, at any given point in time, reflected a wide degree of ideological difference and internal conflict, presenting itself as revolutionary and reformist, nationalist and internationalist in scope. Nevertheless, certain identifiable patterns exist throughout, from an emphasis on modernity, rights, progress, and industry on the one hand to a reliance on bureaucracies, political parties, civil society, legalized protest, and the federal government on the other. In all its forms the Left—whether that of Quaker activists, Democratic politicians, Communist Party members, trade union militants, or twenty-first-century community organizers—continues to play a crucial role in containing and managing revolt. Even the most “revolutionary” of these forces have always sought to position themselves as mediators and representatives of the dispossessed, turning angry mobs into controllable constituencies and numbing our capacities for self-organization and social conflict. As such we draw attention to this Left as an obstacle and an enemy, something entirely distinct from the kinds of rebellion and struggle we wish to see. Not surprisingly, the Left has also tended to present the history of this region in certain ways, which we hope to identify and depart from in this book.
Toward a History of the Present
To our knowledge, none of the protagonists in this book called themselves anarchists; few in fact subscribed explicitly to any known political label. Most of them, particularly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, left behind no words of their own, leaving the record of their deeds written only in the language of their enemies. As authors, this has sometimes left us in a bind, as we seek to present the actions in as honest a light as possible but find it difficult or impossible to present the rebels in their own words. We think it is just as profane and anachronistic to assume these protagonists were fighting for anarchy as for an industrial democracy, and we have no desire to “claim the dead” for our own. This is not a history of anarchists, but rather a history of revolt written by anarchists, who see in the complicated and contradictory dynamics of struggle multiple threads of antiauthoritarian possibility.
If we write history, we write it with confidence in the autonomy of those who rebelled, with the assertion that these people acted on their own behalf, with means they knew and innovated through need, and with their own ways of finding joy and fighting for freedom in an unlivable world. There is no single narrative that can encapsulate rebellion against oppression, no single revolutionary subject that can seize the reins of history to deliver us from our misery, no politician that can save us from this hell. There are many other stories of revolt yet to be liberated from archives or recirculated from a grandmother’s mouth, but we can only find them if we stop needing them to be legitimized by anyone other than ourselves.
In that spirit, this project started a long time ago as a single ’zine, cautiously testing the waters of research and historical writing. Since then it has grown and evolved as a collaborative project with more ideas and curiosity than resources and time, but it has been a joy all the while. With every new experience gained in the streets and meetings and occupied spaces of the last few years, we’ve been forced to reflect anew on the material herein. As such, Dixie Be Damned aspires to be a history of the present. We hope that this book will resonate with others both of and beyond this region, perhaps inspire similar efforts by comrades in other parts of the world, and above all contribute in some small way to struggles here in our homeland. We are part of a long arc of revolt and defiance in this land that we love—let’s fight as fiercely as if our ancestors were watching over us, guiding our hands and our hearts forward. They are.
A Home in Your Heart
Is a Weapon in Your Hand.
s. & n.
Endnotes
1 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 12 (our italics).
2 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations,
