In 2005, we began the mission of constructing an anarchist organization in Bahia. We started as a work space – a small study group in Feira de Santana, where militants involved in the student movement, the Black movement, community organizing and counterculture gathered. We took part in the national construction of the FAO (Forum do Anaquismo Organizado) and gave ourselves the name of our group, “Vermelho e Negro” (Red and Black). Red and Black makes reference to the traditional colors of anarchism and Exu, the Black rebellion against slavery, the rage and anticolonial uprising.
Within the foundation of the study group, the organizational leap to an organized anarchist group was in 2006, as with the start of the construction of networks in other cities for the formalization of a state organization, until we lost consistency and decided to stop the activities of the Red and Black in 2011. Our activists were involved with militant struggles for the youth and working class students, women workers, those on the outskirts of town, for LGBT rights and against homophobia, for public transportation, for the right to the city, workplace organizing, struggles for Black people and against racism, in rural and urban occupations, popular education, struggles for indigenous people and dozens of solidarity activities and mutual aid. A quote from Bakunin in one of the documents from Red and Black really encapsulate the first phase of our organization, the Russian Anarchist in our first references, from “Tactics and discipline of the revolutionary party”, said that “we have for better or worse built a small party: small, in the number of men who joined it with full knowledge of what we stand for; immense, if we take into account those who instinctively relate to us, if we take into account the popular masses, whose needs and aspirations we reflect more truly than does any other group.”
The experience of Red and Black has also had a fundamental importance in breaking the Eurocentric block of Brazilian anarchism, a pioneering role in the country to merge libertarian ideology with anti-colonial thought, recognizing our ancestral values and affirming the role of black people in the process of revolutionary social transformation, re-vindicating anarchism as an ensemble of forged methods in the struggle for liberation of the people and dreams of emancipation.
In these 10 years since the founding, and with only a period without functioning in our organic instinct, we resumed our political line as the core founder of the Red and Black, we reaffirmed our strategy and we continue improving our methods. We do not recognize the necessity of anarchist organization with a public face like before. We see the need to promote a libertarian and anti-colonial current; in which we propose to call “quilombismo”, as synonymous to the militant anarchism that we defend, a revolutionary and libertarian concept that breaks statist logic and the pacifism of “quilombismo reformism” and the white and Eurocentric hegemony within anarchism the same time; and it fuses elements of Pan -Africanism and of “Panterismo”. [Black Panther Party tradition in the US]
We continue our task, to bring down our capitalist civilization, to defeat white supremacy, the state and capital, constructing the struggles of our people on the way to liberation.
Estrategia Libertaria, February 2016, Bahia, Brazil. Special Edition, 10 years of Red and Black.
* Tradução do texto em inglês publicada originalmente no caderno Black Anarchism: A Reader, da Black Rose Anarchist Federation / Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra.
