Purpose in the Struggle:
A Woman's Journey Underground and Back
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1768/1/
by Dana Barnett
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Reviewed: Arm the Spirit: A Woman's Journey Underground and Back, by
Diana Block. Published by AK Press, 2009.
"We had gone underground in the early eighties, not a high-tide
period for revolutionary activity in the US. Unlike the people who
had formed the Weather Underground Organization in the sixties, we
were not swept into clandestinity as a response to the Vietnam War or
the militancy of the Black Panthers…As we saw it, armed struggle was
still a necessary component of every revolutionary movement, and the
movement within the US was no exception." Diana Block
How do we decide where to put our political energy? For many of us on
the left our politicization began with critiques of the dominant
ideology. Our critiques may have been a result of formal education,
though for many our critiques were lifeboats we clung to keep from
drowning in the chasm between what we were told and what we
experienced. Upon confronting contradictions we look for
explanations. We attempt to deconstruct the world and then
reconstruct it to make sense of it and find our place in it. We make
our underlying ideologies conscious. We develop our analysis and
principles and then attempt to act in a way that is aligned with
their logical conclusions.
As leftist revolutionaries we ask ourselves the same questions at
different times in our history. What is to be done? What does
revolutionary work look like in our time and what is my role within it?
Diana Block's memoir, Arm the Spirit: A Woman's Journey Underground
and Back, is an example of a leftist making sense of the world around
her, attempting to act with integrity, and searching for political
strategy and home. The memoir moves easily back and forth between two
aspects of her story. The book begins with Block's partner, Claude
Marks, finding a bug in their car in 1985 after several years of
organizing and living clandestinely, and only two months after she
gave birth to their first child. This main narrative details her life
underground and her re-emergence and re-engagement with organizing
from 1995 to the present. It is interspersed with the back story of
Block's experiences, politics, and the context that led to her
decision to form a clandestine revolutionary collective to support
Third World anti-colonialist armed struggles. Block's book is her
answer to the question of what it means to be a revolutionary in
one's own time. In particular, Block analyzes her role as a white
person in the US with feminist, lesbian/queer, anti-imperialist, and
anti-racist politics.
I do not feel compelled to use this book, or this review, as a site
to evaluate the usefulness of clandestine work, or the question of
armed struggle. Due in part to the fact that Block does not provide
us with enough information about the years of clandestine work to
fully evaluate or understand those actions, but mainly because the
debates that Diana engaged in around the question of armed struggle
are not those that are currently relevant on the ground in social
movements or at large in in broader left intentional spaces today.
However, understanding the climate in which these decisions came
about, the fissures, fractures, and traumas of past movements, and
the personal roads traveled by our revolutionaries, help us to
understand our current conditions. It assists us to recognize the
roots of our ideas about what is possible, and the state of our left
institutions and movements. For myself, at age 31 and with more than
a decade of movement involvement, and for my leftist identified
activist peers, the most interesting aspects of ATS are the ways in
which Block articulates the internal and external factors that
influenced her political trajectory, in her particular circumstances
and time. For this purpose I will ground this review in looking at
Blocks political circumstances, choices, and their consequences
through the lens of her memories and analysis.
In prose as engaging as a good novel Block depicts her childhood, her
politicization, her coming out, her search for the right political
program, her experiences with partnering and parenting, and the day
to day details of life underground. At the same time the book offers
a wealth of history lessons. Her experiences attempting to do
radical political work and then being underground in the US eras of
Reagan and Bush, and of solidarity organizing with what seemed a
radical anti-colonialist peoples' movement in Zimbabwe (and then
experiencing the profound disappointments of that movement), and with
the Puerto Rican Independence movement, have not been described in
other memoirs of revolutionaries from that era, such as those by Bill
Ayers, or Mark Rudd, or Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz. In particular, Arm the
Spirit is a great start for learning some of the history and
continued struggles around Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement in the US.
How did Block and her collective get to the decision to organize
clandestinely in support of the Puerto Rican independence movement?
According to her memoir, mostly through frustration. Frustration with
a lack of radicalism, holistic approaches, and strategic programs
within various aspects of left movements and the rollbacks of even
the most reformist social justice programs.
"Most of the white left had distanced themselves from the efforts of
Blacks, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos to develop
clandestine organizations and activity, denouncing these endeavors as
"ultra-left" and out of touch with the social reality of the masses
of Americans. We argued that a social reality dominated by electoral
politics, unions tied to the Democratic Party, white supremacy,
debilitating cynicism, and an increasing right wing backlash had to
be contested on many different levels in order for any significant
political breakthrough to occur..."
Block describes how she moved from group to group following her
political ideals. Arm the Spirit could be read as a series of
disappointments. As she tells it, Block was critical of the anti war
student movement for its patriarchal sexism, so didn't get involved
while in school. Living in NY, in 1968, she attempted to teach in a
Harlem program that was a response to the civil rights movement, but
was disappointed by the white supremacy within the teachers union,
and the limits of relying on institutionalized reforms.
She then became active in the radical anti-rape movement in NY and
then SF, helping to found San Francisco Woman Against Rape (SF WAR)
in 1972. Block became disappointed with the lack of connection and
commitment to larger leftist organization, the debates about serving
victims by building alliances with the criminal injustice system and
state law enforcement, and the unchallenged white supremacy in the
anti-rape and woman's liberation movement. As Block was becoming
disenchanted with SF WAR, she was exposed to the Weather
Underground's book Prairie Fire (1974) as it emerged from the
underground. In it, she found the anti-imperialist critique, clear
arguments for white revolutionaries to support anti-colonialist armed
struggle within and outside of the US, and the specific instruction
for action that she was looking for. Her excitement about the text
was augmented by witnessing the strong leadership of lesbian
feminists, like Laura Whitehorn, in the East Coast Prairie Fire
Organizing Committee.
Block joined the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and became
involved in, and inspired by, more directly building relationships
and working in solidarity with third world revolutionary groups.
After doing this work above ground for some time Block and her
collective threw all of their efforts towards supporting the Puerto
Rican Independence movement.
"The debates (over armed struggle) went on for years and in the end
we had to put our theoretical commitments to the test. We owed it to
the third world forces we worked with and to our own political
integrity. And so, as Ronald Reagan embarked on his effort to
consolidate counter-revolution worldwide, we went underground."
Supporting the Independentistas' movement for self-determination of a
colony of the US was an obvious fit with her anti-racist and
anti-imperialist principles and beliefs about the roles of white
revolutionaries. Yet even after making the decision to do clandestine
solidarity work there were sacrifices to Block's desire for strategic
political work. Block recalls her remorse that their clandestine acts
were not done in connection to a larger left movement as they had hoped.
Like many on the far left who ended up underground for fear of
prosecution, their political isolation dramatically intensified after
they found evidence of surveillance. During this time Block and some
of her comrades tried to find low profile ways to engage in political
work. For Block and several of the other women in the collective this
mostly took the form of doing local based work with women in the AIDS
movement and being involved with other parents in their communities.
Though they attempted to continue to live their principles and
transmit them to their children while underground, they were unable
to be explicit about their politics and were cut off from the
political communities that they had left.
When she resurfaces in the mid 1990s, however, she reports that much
of the political landscape has changed.
"There were dozens of political groups-anti-racist, feminist, queer,
environmentalist, globalist. Yet as I began to investigate their
programs and activities, it seemed each one operated separately from
the others, pursuing projects and goals that I supported, but without
the breadth of vision of ideological orientation that was necessary
to build a more unified political movement. In fact the burgeoning
non-profit industrial complex seemed, in many ways, to have taken
over the spirit and structure of the left."
As a reader it was profound to recognize that her observation upon
surfacing largely echoes her thinking about her political work in the
mid-70s. In the 70s she was involved in various campaigns and
commitments, including building SF WAR, working on immigrant
education and education local reform issues, and collective studies
of Marxism-Leninism. But this work lacked cohesion. "This was the
question that preoccupied me. All various pieces of work that I was
doing were good, up to a point. But there was no over arching vision
to fit them all together, no set of principles and no organizational
framework." I wonder after reading Block's memoir, how much did the
conditions change and how much of it just followed the trajectory
that was beginning in those early SFWAR debates? How could radical
voices like Block's have influenced the direction of these
organizations which had been born out of popular struggle as so many
colluded with the state to become a-political service centered nonprofits?
In Block's reflections from a SFWAR reunion that she attends in 2003,
she realizes that she had been oblivious to the women from her
initial group of founding members who committed themselves to working
with SFWAR. She had been so frustrated with the political choices and
debates within the group that she hadn't even been aware that they
had made the choice to stick around and commit to the group. SFWAR,
she writes, has resisted becoming co-opted by the system and has
struggled to maintain its anti-racist analysis both within its own
distribution of power within the organization and in its programmatic
work. Block credits this to her and other of the founding members
initial values, but this history would not have been enough if none
of those members had committed to domestic violence work and to the
organization.
The question of where to focus political work is one so many struggle
to answer. I have heard many anti-racist, anti-imperialist activists
of the younger generations who study revolutionary histories bemoan
that they do not perceive themselves to have obvious
anti-imperialist, people of color led movements to join or work in
solidarity with. Others relocate to countries in the Global South to
do just that. Others move from group to group working on single issue
campaigns, working for non-profits or in cafes, taking part in
political study groups and anti-oppression workshops, creating
community gardens, co-ops and other and new or alternative
institutions, creating queer social spaces with chosen families, etc
and still lament the lack of overarching left strategy, and diverse
inclusive political community. I am not encouraging one over the
other, but noting how these diverse options illustrate the ways this
lack of shared strategy plays out in a contemporary landscape.
Arm the Spirit is in part the story of an activist's search for
political home. This is a search that so many of us embark on. The
questions continue: Where am I most useful? Where am I fully my self?
What should I commit to? When is a group worth trying to transform
and when should I move on to the next group more in line with my
principles? Many of us want to commit, but we still find our selves
engaging in something, being disappointed, and moving on to find a
better fit--all the while critiquing and defending our own and each
others choices. How do we link our various left work to a larger
struggle? How do we have a strong unified left capable of socialist
revolution? Block's story, however compelling and insightful, cannot
provide us with a solution as to where to work. She is still active,
and still engaging with these same questions today. In her words:
"Superficially my life had begun to assume the same normalized
contours as those of my friends. Our relative privilege and the
support we received had allowed me to resume a viable life...But
inside I was driven by constant self-interrogation. What should I be
doing politically at this time? What would be the most effective
choices, given who I was? Was there any way to apply everything that
I felt I had learned from our history that didn't sound like a
didactic lesson from an anachronistic past?"
Block continues to be a principled activist working mainly with
political prisoners, and California Coalition For Women Prisoners,
and with this book acts as a historical resource for the next
generations. Her collective's solidarity work with the Puerto Rican
independence movement's militant challenge to US imperialism, their
support for political prisoners and grand jury resisters, and protest
of the violence of colonialism against independence activists was and
is needed and important. The importance of their solidarity work was
reaffirmed to Block by the Puerto Rican community's fierce support
and loving embrace of her collective when they resurfaced in 1995.
Our work on the left is on many fronts, but though the questions that
Block tried to respond to still remain, revolutionaries today can
benefit from her acknowledgment of the destructive processes that
surrounded determinations of strategy in the late 70s.
At a point early in the book Block talks about the years of
polarizing debates on the left that locked them into dichotomous
positioning. She reflects that if the arguments weren't so
polarizing, and if they weren't so headstrong, they could have
admitted and explored their own doubts and concerns about how to
strategically support anti-imperialist struggle. They could have
discussed questions about their clandestine formation and its
"sustainability at that point in history" and "which type of
activities were feasible at that stage of struggle." It's possible
that it wouldn't have changed their choice, but it might have changed
their preparation, their way of going about it, and their connection
to broader, public movements. Maybe there could have been a way to
make it more connected and more sustainable if only they had the
space to deeply discuss it? One of the most important lessons to
take is the necessity for multi-tendency discussions about left
strategy that are not polarizing.
Recent convergences in the US such as the Left Forum, the US Social
Forums, cross organizational attempts at "strategic dialogues," and
the abundance of movement people involved in multi-tendency political
theory study groups gives reason to hope that many revolutionaries
today recognize it as our task to have unifying discussions about
revolutionary strategy. While some from Block's generation still seem
to be hashing out the same debates with the ghosts of movements'
past, I believe that there are more possibilities for productive
dialogue for this generation of activists who have some emotional
distance from the past, a willingness to study, access to
contemporary and historic sources of information, and an analysis
rooted more strongly by anti-racism, feminism, and queer liberation.
As the last chapter of the book is titled: A Luta Continua! Block
concludes her book with a quote from political prisoner Jalil
Muntaqim, former member of the Black Panther Party*. Jalil was a
founder of Arm the Spirit, the prisoner-written and produced
newspaper of the late 1970s-early 80s, in which Block and many others
who were incarcerated and outside found a source of education and
inspiration. In response to the question of what the phrase "arm the
spirit" means to him today Jalil responded "The call to arm the
spirit is for revolutionaries to comprehend their capacity to love,
to give themselves to humanity, to know one's purpose in the course
of building and sustaining the revolutionary struggle." May it be so.
--
*For more information about the campaign to support political
prisoner Jalil Muntaqim visit http://www.freejalil.com/
--
Dana Barnett is a leftist activist, organizer, mediator, trainer, and
legal aide paralegal in Philadelphia, PA.
.
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