Reflections on Ransby’s Ella Baker bio

OK. Ella Baker developed a distinct practice of democracy and commitment to

democratizing both organizations and movements writ large through the careful and
deliberate cultivation of reciprocal relationships with everyone she worked with,
privileging what Ransby called "indigenous leadership" - involving people as
leaders in the political struggles in their own communities

It's not just that she valued people - she strenuously included marginalized people
in the development and execution of campaigns and strategy, privileging the voices
of those most directly affected by the issues at hand

The relational character of her politics rankled a lot of people, who were used to
a much more hierarchical, command-and-control type politics that is deeply bound up
with class and gender in addition to race

Ransby doesn't really ever say this explicitly, instead letting it develop and
unfold over the course of the text, doing an excellent job of showing instead of
telling

Which also made the book excellent for discussion, because we were all teasing this
stuff out and explicitly articulating what Ransby shows over the course of ~400
pages

I related her work, especially the synthesis of Marxist economic and structural
analysis with African-American communalism and social practices, to a passage in
the Boggs piece, "Yet there is within anarcho-communism the embryo of a political
theory of socialist democracy that cannot be found in Jacobinism and structural
reformism. Its preoccupation with small, face-to-face, "organic" institutions of
popular control reinvigorates and democratizes praxis by stressing the subjective,
self-activating principle against the "external element". While in some sense anti-
political and partial, it nonetheless resists suppressing prefigurative goals for
instrumental needs. Closer to everyday life, it more effectively confronts problems
of consciousness. It seeks to generate a leadership that is part of the collective
life of the community and directly accountable to it. Through small-scale
organization, it can combat bureaucracy and the social division of labor. It can
incorporate a wider range of issues, demands, and needs-for example, by not
reducing the transformation of social and authority relations to questions of
production. Finally, by constructing forms that encourage social and political
involvement centered outside the dominant institutions, its potential to counter
deradicalization (indeed, to advance a more total vision of socialism) is enhanced.
Anarcho-communism thus advances one side of the dialectic. But it is not yet a
complete theory of socialist transformation, and in some of its variants (e.g.,
anarcho-syndicalism, the new left) there are hardly the glimmerings of such a
theory. The dilemma persists: how to combine prefiguration with the instrumental
concerns of political effectiveness."

So, organic traditions of African-American communalism, of the sort drawn on and

developed by Ella Baker, can supplant or at least substantially augment what Boggs
refers to as "anarcho-communism" in liberatory syntheses of macro-level marxist
political economy with grassroots traditions of democracy. This could overcome a
lot of the weird pitfalls and idiosyncrasies of capital-A Anarchism (and
insurrectionism) as developed out of the European tradition of
Godwin/Blanqui/Proudhon/Bakunin/Kropotkin/etc.