America in Flames: Historic Uprisings Against Slavery

“Slave rebellions and resistance were means of opposing the system of chattel slavery in the United States. There were many ways that most slaves would either openly rebel or quietly resist due to the oppressive systems of slavery. According to Herbert Aptheker, “there were few phases of ante-bellum Southern life and history that were not in some way influenced by the fear of, or the actual outbreak of, militant concerted slave action.” Slave rebellions in the United States were small and diffuse compared with those in other slave economies in part due to “the conditions that tipped the balance of power against southern slaves—their numerical disadvantage, their creole composition, their dispersal in relatively small units among resident whites—were precisely the same conditions that limited their communal potential.” As such, “Confrontation in the Old South characteristically took the form of an individual slave’s open resistance to plantation authorities,” or other individual or small-group actions, such as slaves opportunistically killing slave traders in hopes of avoiding forced migration away from friends and family.”

America In Flames pdf

9 Thesis on Insurgency: Institute for the Study of Insurgent Warfare

Text from the zine:

“To be an insurgent means re-evaluating our relationship to so-called social movements, and also our role outside of them. For example, liberals are not allies, even though there is often confusion on this question. Fundamentally, their goals always involve some paternalistic attempt to define everyday life, and to use the state to do so; it should then be no surprise that they often work with the police. This does not mean that they cannot be used, or that engagement with social movements may not be effective, but to be able to re-evaluate the relationship that any of us may have to social movements we have to re-conceive of what the so-called social movements are, and this requires a move away from understanding them as a necessity towards the conception of them as a tactic, a form of engagement that has dramatic limitations, but that may not be all together useless given the right conditions. But, to move to this point means moving beyond defining what we are doing as a thing that exists in some consistent way across time and space.”

9 Thesis on Insurgency pdf