exist as distinct categories.
Here, we understand the term ‘radical’ in the sense that Ella Baker, a central figure in the civil rights movement in the US who played a pivotal role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, uses it: understanding and resisting the root causes of economic, social and cultural oppression embedded in racial capitalism. The aim of such praxis is not simply to reform aspects of the current system, but to radically transform the totality of social relations through oppositional and coalitional politics. It is steeped in the long histories of Indigenous, Black, and Third World resistance to colonialism and imperialism, and radical imaginaries for a better world that were forged in relation to and dialogue with each other.
Ella Baker famously emphasised the importance of education to develop every individual’s leadership capacity, allowing every person to be a full participant in their own liberation rather than an observer waiting for orders from the top of hierarchical structures. Every social movement and/or campaign mentioned in the following interviews utilised a variety of strategies, tactics, research, alliances and modes of outreach and internal education. They produced knowledge, debated methods and made their fair share of mistakes, as well, while holding a deep belief in the ability of ordinary people to both understand and translate daily conditions into radical demands for change. Each experience deserves a book in its own right, to excavate the modes of knowledge production and community building that took place, and continue to take place, in its respective geographic and historical contexts. As social movements scholar Aziz Choudry notes, oftentimes, ‘given the academic emphasis on whether an action, campaign, or movement can be judged a “success”, the intellectual work that takes place in movements frequently goes unseen, as do the politics, processes, sites, and locations of knowledge production and learning in activist settings’.56 In light of this, we use the space that remains here to simply highlight a few common threads among the forms of praxis that are relevant to ongoing struggles.
The praxis emerging from collectives like the Combahee River Collective, the Brixton Black Women’s Group, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, and Southall Black Sisters focused on the complex reality of the lived experience of class oppression and gendered racism within and beyond the workplace. This pushed against some strands within left politics that saw radical action as taking place only at the so-called point of production, thus fetishising the industrial male worker. Their understanding of the totality of social relations as located within the body, home, community and workplace, in turn, opened up important avenues for organising in multiple sites. For example, in the UK context, Asian and Black women’s collectives were at the forefront of a number of long industrial struggles, and they also organised against racist anti-immigration campaigns such as the infamous virginity tests, while at the same time tackling issues of domestic violence and actively organising against fascist violence targeting their communities.
This multi-scalar organising was vital to building coalitions between Black and South Asian feminists – coalitions that worked to tackle state-sponsored racism and sexism while openly discussing how communities and individuals are differentially racialised. This required very patient and conscientious work to study how class, race and gender operate in specific historical conjunctures. The analytic link they drew between class and race helped to articulate an inclusive and militant Black political identity. As we have noted, there were tensions and contradictions in this form of coalitional politics – yet it remains an important moment that foregrounded political unity.
This political identification was also reflected in novel forms of organising. Specifically, cultural production took on a vital role, as discussed above. Our interlocutors, in the following pages, invoked the potent work of poets and authors like June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand, among many others, in helping to shape their politics, while powerfully naming racism as a lived reality. As Bannerji has put it elsewhere, ‘the greatest gain, was meeting with young Black women, whose experience and politics matched with mine, whose poetry along with mine named our world’.57 Theatre, music, poetry, poster art and spaces of leisure, as well, helped to create a sense of common struggle and community, but also to address challenging subjects. For example, in her interview, Brah explains the importance of community theatre productions in tackling taboo topics like domestic violence.
There are important lessons to draw from this mode of organising, whereby campaigns were orchestrated not from above but in collaboration, utilising varied repertoires of oppositional practices while continuously reassessing the political situation, allowing for shifts in tactics and multiple entry points for campaigners, as well as room for mistakes. As Brah puts it, ‘we must take politically thought-through positions. Because I don’t think we can have blueprints for all situations’ (49). Thus, organising can develop with sensitivity to particular contexts, foregrounding community voices and needs. The prison abolition organisation Critical Resistance is a good example of a formation that has incorporated important aspects of this praxis, ensuring a multiplicity of tactics. Apart from more attention-grabbing legal cases against government departments, the group also produces a variety of media for outreach and builds grassroots coalitions whose aim is to stop prisons from being built in the first place.58 Some of the most crucial work is mundane and hidden from public view – from setting up regular meeting times and places to ensuring continuity and access to the organising space.
Finally, a critical aspect of the praxis we are discussing is its internationalist orientation, and the struggle to build feminisms that stretch across national borders and mobilise against multiple imperial interventions. As noted above, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism are foundational to Black, Indigenous and postcolonial feminism(s), and an internationalist stance continues to inflect their organising. Historically, its influence is evident in the profusion of statements and practical support for international solidarity campaigns against militarism and military occupations, including the anti-apartheid movement, solidarity with Palestine, and anti-imperialist opposition in Central America and Southern Africa. In more recent times, this has included a feminist response to the more overt racialisation of Arabs and Muslims under the guise of the War on Terror. The opposition to direct regional military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, long-term support for the state of Israel, and the internationalisation of racialised surveillance practices aimed at Arabs and Muslims have generated a rich body of feminist literature from within North Africa, West Asia, Europe and North America.59 In Europe and North America, anti-racist feminists have advanced an anti-imperialist analysis and worked tirelessly to build multiracial anti-war coalitions and, especially, to add Palestine to the agenda of the progressive feminist movement. They have argued for a feminist praxis that centres support for anti-colonial struggles and understands solidarity with Palestine as a feminist issue.60 More recently, this has included advancing the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which in turn has galvanised discussions within the feminist movement. As Palestinian scholar-activist Rabab Abdulhadi has asserted however, this work was underpinned by much-longer-standing solidarities, built through decades of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist organising in different contexts.61 In other words, there is nothing spontaneous about solidarity; it is historically rooted and comes about through consistent dialogue, learning/unlearning, and joint struggle.
It is common to present the contemporary moment as one of multiple crises and ongoing emergencies; as Lauren Berlant puts it, ‘politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure.’62 If we are to face this ‘infrastructural failure’, the reimagining and revitalisation of anti-capitalist and anti-racist feminist politics is crucial. It is no coincidence, then, that we are seeing social movements take on multiple issues and make the links between political, economic, environmental and social demands. Various movements, from Black Lives Matter, Idle No More and the Women’s Marches to the teachers’ strikes, the square occupations across southern Europe and the Arab uprisings, have brought with them critical questions about forms of organising and sustainability, as well as a growing interest
