A-Infos (en) US, BRRN: IV. Black Rose Anarchist Federation - Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra (USA) IV. (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

1. What is the history of Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation 
(BRRN)? When and how was it formed?
BRRN: BRRN was officially founded in 2013 and announced publicly in 2014 
following several years of discussion and debate between existing 
regional anarchist communist organizations in the United States. This 
began with a series of invitational Class Struggle Anarchist Conferences 
(CSAC), a multi-year process of building relationships and sharing our 
organizing work which then resulted in what was called the rapprochement 
process, which was a formal series of debates and discussions by 
delegates from each group.

Most organizations participating in conferences were new formations, 
though some, like Workers' Solidarity Alliance, had been around since 
the 1980s. For nearly everyone involved, the dissolution of Love & Rage 
Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1993-1998) and the 
anti-globalization movement were fresh in memory. While participants 
drew a range of lessons from these events, most were in agreement that 
the substitution of loose networks for formal political organization was 
a dead end, as was the activist orientation to summit hopping protests 
rather than long-term deep organizing within social movements. 
Widespread pain and immiseration amid the aftershocks of the 2008 
financial crisis-and popular upheavals such as Occupy Wall Street and 
the Arab Spring kicking off around the world-meant fertile ground for 
critiques of both capitalism and the state. The time was right for a 
renewed push for organized revolutionary anarchism.

Coming out of the 2010 CSAC meeting in Seattle, WA, a number of 
participating organizations established a framework to formalize the 
process for exploring unification. This included: Worker's Solidarity 
Alliance (National), Common Struggle/Lucha Común[Formerly known as North 
Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists], Four Star Anarchist 
Organization (Chicago, IL), Miami Autonomy and Solidarity (Miami, FL), 
Wild Rose Collective (Iowa City, IA), Rochester Red & Black (Rochester, 
NY), First of May Anarchist Alliance (Upper Midwest), Amanecer 
(California), Common Action (Pacific Northwest), and Prairie Struggle 
(Canada).

By 2012, the question was called: was it now time to formalize the 
merger? At this point some organizations, such as Workers' Solidarity 
Alliance and First of May Anarchist Alliance, withdrew from the process. 
Along the way other organizations, such as Amanecer, Common Action, and 
Prairie Struggle dissolved, though many of their members would go on to 
join BRRN.

In November 2013, delegates from each participating organization met in 
Chicago for the founding convention of Black Rose/Rosa Negra. Early the 
following year the organization made its public debut.

2. In recent years BRRN has developed its program-'Turning the 
Tide'-which the organization describes as a 'living document'. Why has 
this become a focus for BRRN? Why call it a 'living document'?

BRRN: Having a shared program is essential for putting shared principles 
into practice. It's a reflection of our theoretical and tactical unity 
and a tool for collective responsibility that ensures that we are, as 
the Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro (FARJ) said, "rowing the boat 
in the same direction."

The effort we undertook to construct our program, beginning in 2021, 
profoundly reshaped BRRN as an organization. In our first 7 years we 
tended to place a large emphasis on ensuring ideological alignment 
within the organization, using our mostly unchanging 'points of unity' 
as a sort of checklist of political positions that we believed put 
everyone on the same page. This was not the case.

We now center our unity around the program, which guides our analysis, 
strategy, and tactics. But the program is not a static document, it is 
remade on a yearly basis through the required participation of every 
member, local, and committee in the organization. Its much more holistic 
vision and framework guide our collective work in all aspects of the 
organization. Moreover, through its maintenance we generate the kind of 
organic unity (instead of prescribed unity) necessary for a political 
organization to function. Indeed, we've come to realize that in the 
early years of Black Rose, though we referred to ourselves as a 
political organization, we were functionally closer to a network. We see 
now that a political organization without a program is like a sailor 
without a compass.

As to being a living document, there are aspects of our program, such as 
the structural analysis, that tend to have a longer shelf life but can 
change over time depending on our evolving understanding of these 
questions. Other aspects, like our conjunctural analysis and limited 
term strategy, are updated every year following discussion at our 
convention, so we are regularly trying to think about and examine how 
the conditions and political terrain are evolving.

3. BRRN is widely recognized as an especifista organization, though the 
organization's earlier public documents mention that it also draws on 
the "tradition of platformism." Is this still the case and If so, how? 
Further, is 'platformism' still a relevant framework 100 years after the 
publication of the document?

BRRN: Especifismo has had a major influence on our ideas and practice, 
especially given that it is a living tradition with more continuity than 
"platformism." Beyond the starting point of the need for political 
organization and social insertion (which conceptualizes the role of 
anarchists in mass movements), many of the key concepts of especifismo 
have also profoundly shaped our thinking. This includes the sectoral 
approach to organizing and the concepts of transversal 
issues/organizing, the social vector of anarchism, and that of popular 
power. While not exclusive or specific to especifismo, through its 
influence we've incorporated methods of conjunctural analysis and 
concepts such as actors of struggle and the mass, intermediate and 
political levels.

Platformism at its core emphasizes that anarchism is a revolutionary 
social movement forged in the flames of class struggle, as opposed to an 
abstract or utopian philosophy conceived by individual philosophers or 
intellectuals. It is precisely because the Platform emerges from the 
direct experience of the authors in a massive revolutionary struggle 
that its lessons are so valuable. For us, the organizational principles 
named by the Platform continue to be guiding reference points for our 
organization: the need for political organization based around 
theoretical and tactical unity, collective accountability, and federalism.

Though especifismo does not come from the experience of participation in 
a revolutionary upheaval on the scale of the Russian Revolution, it 
similarly grows out of the real experience of organizing within mass 
militant social movements (including under dictatorship) in Uruguay.

Ultimately, though platformism and especifismo are each marked in unique 
ways by the social and historical contexts that produced them, both 
recognize organizational dualism as a core tenet. Traceable to Bakunin's 
effort to build the Alliance for Socialist Democracy within the 1st 
International, organizational dualism asserts the need for two mutually 
reinforcing levels of organization: the revolutionary political 
organization and mass organizations.

4. How has BRRN changed throughout its 10+ years in existence? What 
obstacles has it faced?

BRRN: Despite the lengthy process of unification that led to BRRN's 
founding, it's clear to us that the organization came together without 
the level of tactical and strategic unity necessary to function as a 
serious political organization. Some of this was due to many of the 
above referenced concepts and frameworks not being known to us at the 
founding while other aspects we needed to learn through experience. In 
the early stages of building the organization, we tended to place far 
too much emphasis on hammering out political consensus and failing to 
construct a common strategic framework and set of tactics to enact our 
politics in the world. This produced a fragile prescribed unity rather 
than a durable organic unity, as mentioned earlier.

Because of this we faced growing internal disagreement on what direction 
the organization should take. Questions with seemingly self-evident 
answers, such as whether the organization should have a national 
strategic framework at all, became highly contentious. These 
contradictions fed into related internal disagreements over 
organizational culture-including competing conceptions of revolutionary 
feminism-combining with external pressures during the revolts and 
repression of the summer of 2020, ultimately leading to the departure of 
members from several locals.

Though painful and difficult, the debates before and after those 
departures spurred a process of radical reform inside BRRN. Part of this 
reform process was structural and cultural, aimed at more equitably 
distributing organizational work. However, the most significant efforts 
were aimed at finally constructing a shared analytical, strategic, and 
tactical framework. This is the process that produced our program and 
which has made us into a far more effective and coherent organization today

5. What areas of mass work are members of BRRN embedded in?

BRRN: BRRN takes a sectoral approach to organizing, meaning that we 
engage in areas of mass organizing where there are identifiable actors 
of struggle who are similarly located within a structure of domination 
or exploitation, who share a common set of conditions, and who have the 
capacity to exert organized leverage toward the end of extracting 
concessions from those who oversee or benefit from their exploitation. 
Examples include workers in the workplace, tenants in the apartment 
complex, students on the campus, etc. Significantly though we see this 
approach in contrast to isolated efforts that lack a social base, 
animated by moral outage and cycles of protest, or activism driven by NGOs.

Members of BRRN are most active in the labor and tenant/territorial 
sectors. In the labor sector our members work in the building trades, 
public service, K-12 education, higher education, healthcare, food 
service, and others. Our approach to labor organizing centers around 
building a militant minority on the shopfloor. Where unions already 
exist we organize within them to advance our principles around 
rank-and-file democracy, class struggle, militancy, and 
internationalism. Where unions don't exist we seek to organize the 
unorganized into official or unofficial unions. Ultimately, our aim is 
to build the confidence, militancy, and self-organization of workers 
through successive campaigns of direct action. In this way, we work to 
orient ourselves and our coworkers toward the long horizon of 
self-management and the abolition of class society.

In the tenant/territorial sector our members mainly organize within 
tenant unions or other experimental formations aimed at building power 
within discretely defined geographies like neighborhoods or even certain 
city blocks. We seek to help build and strengthen independent, 
member-driven tenant union formations, especially those that are 
associated with the Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN).

6. What relations does BRRN maintain with other anarchist communist 
organizations around the world?

BRRN: BRRN has long maintained strong ties with organizations around the 
world and this is especially true when it comes to our relations with 
organizations and groups in South America. In fact, one of the first 
major efforts we undertook as an organization was to arrange a national 
US speaking tour for Chilean anarchists.

Over the years we've sent BRRN militants to strengthen our relationships 
with sibling organizations on nearly every continent, participated in 
international conferences such as ELAOPA (a semi-annual conference of 
autonomous and anarchist influenced social movements in Latin America), 
coordinated cross-border organizing campaigns, and raised solidarity 
funds for comrades in Sudan, Turkey, Syria, Kurdistan, and elsewhere.

We recently participated in the founding of International Coordination 
of Organized Anarchism (ICOA) which brings together nearly two dozen 
especifista and platformist organizations around the globe. While the 
coordination is still in its early days, it represents a significant 
step forward for the international anarchist movement.


https://www.blackrosefed.org/platform-100-interviews-vol-1/#black-rose-anarchist-federation-federacion-anarquista-rosa-negra-usa
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