The world is in crisis.
Anderson sees a way out by Mansa Musa, The Real News Network May 27, 2026 https://youtu.be/r3KZ-lsFXfc In 2026, fascism in the US is rising while “the left” descends further into powerlessness, goofiness, and irrelevance—but, author William C.
Anderson argues, it doesn’t have to stay that way.
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Anderson returns to the show for an unflinching conversation with former political prisoner and host Mansa Musa about the state of the political left today and the lessons organizers and everyday people can learn from the Black Liberation Movement and figures like the late Russell Maroon Shoatz.
Editor's Note: This conversation was recorded on May 1, 2026.
Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, AL.
His work has appeared in outlets ranging from The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, British Journal of Photography, to Pitchfork.
He is the author of The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition, and co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation.
He’s also the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and provides creative direction as a producer of the Black Autonomy Podcast.
Additional links/info: William C.
Anderson, Prism / TRNN, “Another Way Out: We need a mosaic movement, not fragmented ‘leftism’” Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors.
A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa: Joining us today again is William C.
Anderson, author and columnist of Prism.
If you missed our first conversation where we explore how Black citizenship has historically been called into question, you can find it on our YouTube channel.
The history feels especially urgent this week following the United States Supreme Court's ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act.
This is clearly part of the continuation by the right to reverse black progress.
William, before you dive into your latest prism article which critiques the current left and offer a path forward, what is your assessment of what you see coming out of the Supreme Court this week? William C.
Anderson: Yeah, it's something that I've been thinking about quite a bit.
I saw the news, and I wasn't surprised by it.
I thought it was to be expected.
As you might know, this is something that I wrote about in the Nation on No Map, and specifically I mentioned the 2013 Voting Rights Act decision in terms of the case with Shelby v.
Holder, just following it up to that point because the book came out in 2021.
So with things being where they were at that stage, I was anticipating it getting to this point and becoming even more dismantled and even more deconstructed.
And the thing that I would say about it is it's an especially personal matter for me because I'm from Alabama, From Shelby County, who brought the case against the Obama administration withholder.
And in that original ruling at that point, one of the things that Chief Justice John Roberts had said was that something to the effect of that at 50 years later, things had changed quite dramatically and it was kind of implying that there was enough progress that had been made that is not necessary anymore to have something like the Voting Rights Act.
And that's what kind of underscores a lot of these white supremacists and fascist attacks on Black history and on legislation that has been beneficial to Black people.
It's kind of trying to illuminate some sort of postracial society that we know clearly doesn't exist because they're becoming increasingly racist.
They're not becoming less racist.
So it's really just more evidence that if we really want to be able to see better conditions that are permanent and that are only making progress for the betterment of our lives and the sustenance and the resources that we need, then we have to have liberatory politics that actually push for those things in a way that is wholesale, that is comprehensive, that is expansive, and that's not incremental.
And that's not to do anything or say anything that diminishes all of the blood, sweat, and tears that were put in by the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement across the board from the more radical ends to the more moderate ends of the civil rights [movement].
What is to say is that we should be able to learn from this history that no matter what, when we're relying on the halls of the White House and Capitol Hill and representative democracy to try to do something for us that we know it's not designed to do, that it's always going to end up like this.
It's always going to be dismantled.
It's always going to be rolled back.
It's always going to be trying to correct itself to get back to serving white supremacy and capitalism in the fullest extent, and not doing anything that it's not meant to do originally.
Mansa Musa: Yeah, I agree 100%.
This week, Prism published a new installment of your series, Another Way Out, titled We Need a Mosaic Movement and you write, "instead of a call for resentment field, unity or traditional fronts, we can look to what former Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army members, and political prisoner Russell Maroon Schultz called The Mosaic." Could you walk us through the core argument of your article and could you provide a brief introduction to the life and legacy of Russell Maroon Schultz? William C.
Anderson: For sure.
I'll start with Russell Maroon Shoatz.
And Russell Maroon Shoatz was a really interesting and spectacular and dynamic individual.
He was a former Panther and Black liberation army soldier, and he became active in politics, I want to say in the 60s, and was a founding member of the Black Unity Council in Philadelphia, and they later merged with the Black Panther Party.
So he put in a lot of work.
He has a deep history in movement and in struggle and he got locked up in 1972 for the first time, and he becomes a really extraordinary political prisoner because he's writing, he's thinking, and he's developing over time.
And what's so interesting about Russell Maroon Shoatz is that he's prolific.
He's a prolific thinker and individual in the sense that he spends a lot of his time questioning.
He doesn't get incarcerated and kind of sit there holding the same position for 30, 40, 50 years.
He's asking questions the whole time.
He's developing, he's expanding his analysis, and he is moving towards politics that are ultimately really, really interesting and fascinating.
So one of the things that I really appreciate about his work is that he was bringing in elements that I would say he wasn't necessarily always speaking about or being influenced by.
There were things that were coming to him later over time If you look at the chorus of his work, the development he had as a person.
And so one of those aspects is something that comes forth in the essay that I'm referencing in my latest column at prism.
And this is from an essay called The Dragon and the Hydra.
The Dragon and the Hydra is an essay that is an organizational study that looks at the maroons and the slave revolts and the struggles of African descended people in the Americas and the fights against slavery, colonialism and imperialism.
And what is so dynamic about this essay is that you can see a departure really with Schoatz and certain aspects of his past.
So he is making a critique of democratic centralism, he's making a critique of vanguardism, and he's making a critique of some of the politics that are associated with the Black Panther Party.
And he's calling in to question even a lot of the projects of Marxist Leninism and the state socialist projects that were struggling in building national socialism.
So he is making a critique that is, I think, probably controversial in some regards for some people.
And he also at the same time he's critiquing these things, he draws from them still.
He still talks about his influence, the influence that these things had in his life.
but he also brings in element.
He says at the beginning of the essay, "I'm going to say a lot of things that sound like anarchism." And he says, "I'm not an anarchist, but as long as anarchists are willing to stand on mutual footing in the struggle for intercommunal self-determination, that you should be able to see the overlap and see where things have parallels." So ultimately in this essay, Schoatz, he puts forth this organizational study and he says that it's important for people to be able to learn from the past and not just keep doing the same thing over and over again.
That's at the core of that essay.
I was drawing on in the essay that I wrote for prism, it is about this last section that's included in the collected writings of Russell Maroon Schoatz called Maroon the Implacable.
And what is in that last section is called the Mosaic, It's a section called the Mosaic.
What is in that last section is a solution because he doesn't just put forth the critique.
He offers a solution for how people can struggle separately and autonomously but understand their collective interest as different groups, as different genders, as different ideologies, as different political backgrounds and so on and so forth.
And it's not a traditional or typical call for a united front.
It is a call for people to understand their common interest and to be able to have mutual respect enough to come together and to struggle to overthrow the conditions that are oppressing them.
So the core argument of my essay is about challenging what I feel is really a lot of silliness with the current state of the US left, especially with my generation and, unfortunately, a lot with younger generations than me, there's just a lot of sectarianism, there's a lot of beef, there's a lot of conflict, and there's a lot of issues over things that really don't have anything to do with the current different denominations of the US left.
And what I mean by that is that the current US left doesn't have control over anything.
It doesn't have any blocs that it controls.
It doesn't have any territory that it controls.
It doesn't have power in the government.
It doesn't have a party.
It doesn't have an army.
It doesn't have a military.
These are different fragmented individuals who at best might have an organization that can do something in the community here or there or might be able to serve some interest or need in some other way, but this isn't like some massive part of the US population.
In the article I was saying, if you put all of these folks together, these different factions of the left, they don't even equal half a percent of the US population.
So I was just trying to really say that this is a good time when we understand that fascism is not even at the door, it's inside of the house.
It's a good time to let go of a lot of the rhetoric, a lot of the dogma, and a lot of the silliness that is just so prevalent on the US left, people thinking that they're way more relevant than they actually are, way more powerful than they actually are and bring forth an analysis like what Russell Maroon Schoatz offers with the mosaic.
Mansa Musa: Your critique of the left is blistering to say the least and rightly so.
You state as it stands, we do not have an oppositional or even a functional left.
We have leftists and leftism, and there's a difference.
Could you expound on that distinction? William C.
Anderson: The current state of the left, the lefts, because it is different groups and different factions and sects.
The current state of things is it is basically nonexistent.
When I'm talking about the left, I should first make the distinction that there isn't really a functioning coherent unified or homogenous group that we know as the left.
When people say the term the left, they oftentimes are grouping lots of different things that are in conflict with one another.
So some people say the left and they mean like liberals and progressives, and then maybe some of the more further left elements.
Typically when I'm talking about the left, I'm talking about the historical movement that divided up in the struggle to ultimately build socialism.
And I'm talking about the people who would identify as Marxists, as Marxist Leninist, as anarchist, who are formerly known as libertarian socialists in the socialist movement before the meaning of that term changed, and also talking about all of the different offshoots and developments within those respective things because then you have different types of people within each of those larger umbrella terms.
That's typically what I'm talking about, which is for some people, the more radical left.
So I think that it's important to first make that distinction.
Secondly, I would say that since it is not a functional opposition and it's not really something that exists because it's so fragmented and divided up into these different kind of sporadic groups, it's interesting because a lot of what you see from within these different elements that I'm referring to is largely posturing because there's no power base that warrants the level of arrogance that you see coming from a lot of people within these different factions of the left.
If you're not in control of anything and you don't have the power to actually overthrow or to seize or to dismantle the oppressive instruments that you're constantly talking about, then you have to operate from a place where you're in touch with reality, the reality of yourself and the reality of what you are in the country that you inhabit.
So I'm ultimately a bit confused because when I'm saying that there's a lot of posturing, I'm looking at these people who might reference something like the Black Panther Party as an endorsement of their ideology.
Saying they're a Marxist Leninist, and they say, "Well, the Black Panther Party used Marxist Leninism or Maoism or anything to push their organization forward and do this, that, or the third." The thing is, okay, that wasn't you though.
If you're a person who identifies as an anarchist and you glorifying the zapatistas and talking about what they've been able to accomplish and how it influences you, that's not you either.
You're talking about Lenin and the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks and talking about what that means to you as a Marxist, that's....
