Autonomous resistance to slavery and colonization

The two pieces in this pamphlet, “The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America” and “The Dragon and the Hydra: A Historical Study of Organizational Methods” are valuable for our endeavors because they break out of the white workerist histories to which anarchy is too often confinedand tell the stories of the multiracial Maroon communes of the American swamps and other territories in the colonized world, which autonomously organized themselves for self­preservation and for attack against the white supremacist violence of slavery and colonization. In the second essay of this anthology, Shoats states, “First off, let me state that I’m not an anarchist. Yet, a lot of what you’ll read here is gonna look a whole lot like anarchism!…to the anarchist reader, what follows cannot properly be termed anarchism, simply because the practitioners themselves never knew that word, nor were they in contact with people of that view, as anarchism is a European ideology and these parties – for the most part – were Africans and Amerindians with very limited input by a small number of outcast Europeans.” In some of Shoats’ writing, his reference points within the Marxist­-Leninist ideologies of the past can seem heretical to anti­authoritarian readers, yet if one takes his writing as a whole they can see that this investigation into history is one that ultimately indicts Leninism for its strategic uselessness and offers instead a proposal for decentralized, autonomous attack.