Andrew Loucks
LINCHPIN

Ashanti Alston (b. 1954) came of age as the political action of the ‘60s was hitting its peak. He recalls struggling through Malcolm X’s biography as a teen and feeling awestruck at the 1967 rebellions that saw numerous American neighbourhoods temporarily taken over by the people who lived there, including his home town of Plainfield, New Jersey. “That was my entry,” recalls Alston. “I wanted to be one of them black revolutionaries.” (http://illvox.org/2008/06/22/an-interview-with-ashanti-alston/)

Alston joined the Black Panther Party while still in high school, starting a chapter in Plainfield, and later going underground with the Black Liberation Army. For a while, Alston straddled the above ground Panther work of selling newspapers and running breakfast programs with more aggressive underground tactics, such as attempts to free political prisoners. The BLA would also target police for their brutality, as well as drug dealers and banks, to both disrupt exploitation and help fund political work. In 1974 Alston was involved in a Connecticut “bank expropriation,” captured and imprisoned for 11 years.

Alston wouldn’t call himself a class struggle anarchist. He accepts few if any labels, but has been influenced by the Panthers, post structuralism, anti-oppression, Marxism, the Zapatistas, indigenous American thought and struggles, environmental justice groups (Earth First and others), anarcho-communists, primitivists, individualists and others. For Alston, strict adherence to one or another school of thought and praxis implies you have the answers for people: “I don’t want to be categorized as a particular school because I know if I do, the world I would hope to be created won’t have room for all kinds of tendencies of anarchism, or all kinds of tendencies of people living their lives according to their own terms.”

Nevertheless, Alston is firmly an anarchist, and he knows why: “Even with the white anarchist community, I really feel like of all the groups, the anarchist mindset is still open to understanding all the different oppressions, that they’re not stuck on that it’s just the system out there and you have to change the system. Anarchists, I think, understand the power thing more than others, so for me there’s potential there. Already, anarchists will deal with movements that silence queers, folks of color, even on an age level — ageism, ableism. And when we start talking about how we have centered everything around us as human beings [at the expense of other species and ecosystems], I think that’s great shit. For that, I’m going to stay with the anarchist movement. I just want that movement to figure out more ways to be relevant to the broader communities.”

Today, Alston is active in the prison abolition movement (Critical Resistance and the National Jericho Movement), in Anarchist People of Color organizing, and in efforts to connect organizers of colour in the north with the Zapatistas (Estacion Libre).

For a much more thorough account of Ashanti Alston’s life and politics, check out:

http://illvox.org/2008/06/22/an-interview-with-ashanti-alston/

http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/3021

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