Black Rose/Rosa Negra 10th National Convention Report
From Black Rose Anarchist Federation
Introduction
Every year, Black Rose Anarchist Federation / Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra (BRRN) holds a national Convention in a different city somewhere in the United States. Delegates from Black Rose Locals gather to debate and deliver the votes of members on proposals that would substantively change the structures or direction of the organization; collectively reflect on our past year’s organizing failures and successes; and deepen crucial relationships among our militants from Locals spread across the country’s wide geography. Since adopting our first comprehensive political program Turning the Tide in 2023, our Convention has also served as the venue for revisiting certain elements of this core document.
From August 9th through 11th, the Bay Area Local hosted militants from across the country in Oakland, CA for our 2024 proceedings that marked a particularly important milestone: a decade since our organization’s founding.
To offer a lens into our organization’s internal life and share some of the lessons we learned during this landmark Convention, what follows is a brief summary of each day’s proceedings.
Day One
Our tenth national Convention was opened with remarks from the federation’s outgoing secretary. Following this, attendees read aloud greetings received from our sibling organizations across the globe, including:
- Organização Socialista Libertária (Brazil)
- Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira (Brazil)
- Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (Uruguay)
- Federación Anarquista Rosario (Argentina)
- Federación Anarquista Santiago (Chile)
- Grupo Libertario Vía Libre (Colombia)
- Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (Australia)
- Geelong Anarchist Communists (Australia)
- Anarchist Communists Meanjin (Australia)
- Black Flag Sydney (Australia)
- Union Communiste Libertaire (France/Belgium/Switzerland)
- Embat (Catalonia)
- Batzac – Joventuts Llibertàries (Catalonia)
- LiZA (Spain)
- Federación Estudiantil Libertaria (Catalonia/Spain)
- Perspektive Selbstverwaltung (Germany)
- Têkoşîna Anarşîst (North East Syria/Rojava)
- Perhimpunan Merdeka (Indonesia)
Our comrades’ celebratory messages not only heartened us but reminded us that Black Rose / Rosa Negra is part of a living, vital, and growing worldwide current of organized anarchism inspired by the Platform and especifismo.
Next up was an organizational history panel, where former members of California-based Amanacer, Miami Autonomy and Solidarity (MAS), Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (later, Common Struggle), Workers Solidarity Alliance, and Common Action recounted their experiences in these regional anarchist organizations during the rapprochement, or unification, process that established Black Rose/Rosa Negra. Veteran militants explained how our history begins from a culmination of a years-long process spurred by invitational Class Struggle Anarchist Conferences (CSACs).
Beginning amidst the 2008 financial crisis, CSACs intended to cohere an anarchist strategy and practice beyond the limits of the period’s summit-hopping protests. Conference coordinators did not set out to forge a national organization, but by the close of the 2010 proceedings in Seattle it became increasingly clear that the basic level of unity between participating organizations warranted a serious exploration of the question. Buoyed by 2011’s surge of social movement activity in the Wisconsin Capitol protests and the Occupy Movement, as well as the popular social explosion in reaction to the racist vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, members of MAS strongly appealed for national organization at what would become our inaugural Convention in 2013. After many years of careful construction, BRRN would publicly debut in 2014.
More than just a trip down memory lane, the panel emphasized lessons hard learned by militants who share many decades of accrued experience between them. Their reflections reminded us of a central reason we emphasize the need for political organization: to reposit collective memory that can be transmitted from one generation of militants to the next.
If you are interested in reading more about the process that birthed Black Rose/Rosa Negra, we recommend our history page and this more detailed account of the rapprochement process that birthed our organization.
Afterwards, the organization’s national elected officers shared reports and reflections from their one-year terms. These administrative, immediately recallable roles are structured in such a way that they wield no ability to alter the collectively determined course of the organization.
Day One closed with a panel discussion from members of the organization’s Housing and Territorial Sectoral Committee and organizing highlights from BRRN Locals around the country. In the latter session, BRRN militants emphasized the importance of deep organizing in solidarity with Palestinian national liberation. Deep organizing entails not just passively attending marches and demonstrations as a political organization, but working consistently within our sites of social insertion—the workplace, the neighborhood, the school/university—so that we can effectively bring fighting mass organizations in these sectors into struggles that they may not typically recognize as their own.
Day Two
We began Day Two with discussion and debate on updates to our conjunctural analysis. Conjunctural analysis is the practice of assessing the various social forces and conditions at the local, regional, national scale that are coalescing to shape the present moment, allowing us to identify strategic opportunities to tip the balance of power. Although our organization has previously undertaken efforts aimed at ‘naming the moment,’ this was the first time that the exercise was directly and systematically incorporated into adjusting our limited-term strategy.
In their assessments of the conjuncture, delegates shared what members around the country had identified as important factors bearing on the present, including, among others: a national cost-of-living crisis squeezing social reproductive capacities; simultaneous erosion of legitimacy for certain State institutions like the Supreme Court with renewal for others; and the continued slow decline of U.S. hegemony abroad coupled with the explosion of a domestic anti-imperialist social movement demanding a ceasefire, arms embargo, and in some cases full-throated support for Palestinian national liberation. A more detailed and complete conjunctural analysis derived from this Convention session will be published at a later date.
After wrapping our preliminary conjunctural analysis, the Convention body moved to critically self-assess our progress on our limited-term strategy. Reports from Locals helped us identify where we had made significant advances toward our objectives—including around increasing our rank-and-file concentrations in the building trades, public education, service, and healthcare industries; spearheading or playing crucial roles in organizing the unorganized; gaining ground in localized fights against the construction of new ‘cop campuses’; and further developing our relationships with sibling organizations internationally—as well as where we have fallen short or failed, requiring a recalibration in strategy.
Convention proceedings on Day Two ended with Sectoral Committee breakout sessions for participating delegates to further discuss and refine how to implement our national limited-term strategy in each respective area of organizing.
In the evening, we threw open the doors to the convention hall for a public panel discussion and party. Reflecting on their past year in campaigns, the panel of speakers featured Enrique, a Southern public high school teacher fresh off a successful union campaign; Dera, an organizer salting at a shop in the service industry, and Alex, a member of faculty who has been organizing on her public university campus around the Palestine solidarity movement.
With around 70 people in attendance, the panel’s facilitator framed the organization’s theory of strategy.
“We aim to build popular power,” Cameron, himself a rank-and-file union steward, explained. “For us, popular power means the creation of fighting social movements animated by principles of class struggle, class independence, self-management, internationalism, democracy, and direct action. History demonstrates that it’s fighting movements built on this basis that can challenge the state and capital…not only to wrench reforms from them in the short term, but to build the necessary power to kickstart a revolutionary social transformation that can topple them both.”
Answering the facilitator’s questions, panelists discussed the wins, losses, and lessons learned from their organizing efforts. Alex emphasized the need for rooted, on-the-ground organizing around shared needs, rather than cliquing up with others based solely on common ideology: “To make progress in what I’m doing, I’ve had to work with people in my workplace who are far from radical.” She continued, “That even means bringing along people who, for example, consider themselves staunch Democrats.”
Dera, a college student who was also active in sustaining the encampments on her campus last school year, spoke to the transferability in lessons between that setting and her current salting effort for an independent union campaign. “I’m taking lessons from student organizing into the workplace, like emphasizing participation in our decision-making processes, meeting people where they are at and really getting to know what people’s motivations and fears are to build their confidence so they can act together collectively,” she said. Dera also plans to take her salting experiences back to campus where she can organize student-workers and student-tenants to exert real leverage on university bosses.
After some questions from the audience, the panel broke down their side of the stage to make way for People’s Disco DJ Jared G to set up his turntables. Over beers, attendees and BRRN delegates talked, danced, and enjoyed themselves late into the night.
Day Three
The final day was devoted, in the main, to the delivery of membership votes by Local delegates on proposals, constitutional amendments, and nominees for national administrative officers. While not quite as exciting as Days One or Two, this portion is crucial to keeping alive the directly democratic processes that sit both at the heart of our organization and our vision of the world we are fighting to bring into existence.
As our tenth national convention drew to a close, delegates said their goodbyes, no doubt tired from the long weekend but enjoying in equal measure a deepened commitment to one another and to the “long and patient work” of building toward a social revolution that will abolish class society and the system of domination which keeps it in place. “Black Rose is my political home” said one delegate as they left to catch their flight, “without you all, I would be fighting alone.”
Onwards, Together
From our prehistory through to the present, members of Black Rose/Rosa Negra have faced more than our share of obstacles, made mistakes or missteps, and sometimes struggled to find direction. Through it all, though, members—who are the organization—have approached our work with honesty, humility, camaraderie, and a commitment to our organization’s principles. We believe that this is evident, most importantly, to those who we are embedded alongside in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools.
As our organization enters a period of growth, we invite those who share our principles, agree with our program, and are engaged in long-term organizing to reach out to us at blackrosefed.org/join. Don’t fight alone.
FOR POPULAR POWER!
FOR LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM!
Black Rose / Rosa Negra
August 2024