Our Manifesto
By: The staff of The Outside Agitator: a new radical tradition
It appears outsiders only become agitating to our government when they are questioning the power structures that legitimate racialized capitalism.
Rev. Matthew V. Johnson ‘A letter of concern to black clergy’
The Outside Agitator: a new radical tradition is a publication founded by CJAA (Community Justice, Abolition, and Antiracism collective) and run by the people. It is a home for articles, weekly digests, mutual aid spotlights, art, poetry, and more.
In producing The Outside Agitator, we create and disseminate works with a commitment to supporting resistance rooted in direct action, liberatory imagination, lived and embodied truths, sanctified community, mutual aid, and an ethics of radical love and transparency above all else. We maintain that journalistic neutrality is a myth, resistance is necessary, and collective liberation will abound.
On the myth of journalistic neutrality
Constant assertions of deepening sociopolitical and ideological divisions have frequently been used to justify the need for “unbiased” news sources. These “unbiased” — inherently centrist — news outlets do little to call into question the systems of oppression they are actively profiting off of. We cannot be unbiased during genocide in a capitalist white supremacist settler-colonial state or during the ever-intensifying police presence on campus and in our communities.
The idea of neutrality — especially journalistic neutrality — is not only a danger but an impossibility. The definition of neutrality is geo-politically and culturally subjective; it is an inconsistent measure. It is impossible to write or think critically of systems of power “neutrally”: those very systems get to define neutrality. If our mediums of sharing thought do not take clear stances on the systems that continue to marginalize our communities, they are complicit in the violence and oppression that these systems continue to enable.
The Outside Agitator recognizes our predispositions and utilizes them as a tool of resistance. Our goal is to offer an alternative to mainstream media — one that embodies the central principles of journalistic integrity while combatting and critiquing the “neutral” injustices that impede its process. Our work is grounded in anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, as we aim to dismantle and divest from our participation in existing systems while actively building new worlds outside of them. We understand the effect of these systems in our daily lives and thus, their impact on our thoughts, feelings, analyses, and creative expression, making it all the more essential to have a medium of information dissemination that promotes active analysis and critique.
On the interconnectedness of liberation
We are all a part of the same struggle. Local & global affairs alike are significant and deserving of candid coverage in context that unites community and amasses knowledge in context for the people. We are an explicitly abolitionist publication, working for the collaborative and collective liberation of all peoples through both the creation of community- and care-based systems and dismantling of the carceral state. Putting local happenings in conversation with movements worldwide gives us the power to move in solidarity, disseminating challenges and strategies against entrenched power, and fortifying one another. None of us are liberated until we are all liberated.
On the purpose of art
Art and other creative expressions, whether written, visual, performance, or otherwise, can be incredibly radical. Art can be the physical manifestations of our yearning for new words, expressing desire and imagining worlds alternative to mainstream paradigms. Thus, creation is an inherently liberatory act. Art inherently responds to its surroundings and creates unique choreographies, filling spaces and continuing stories. It is a form of language, and all language (regardless of global positionality) is embedded with the ideologies of specific times, spaces, and peoples. In its truest form, art can take forms unfathomable to capitalism. It is a radical and unsettling tool for oppressed peoples to express their dissatisfaction with ruling classes, white supremacy, and capitalist ideologies alongside their collective experiences of community, love, and belonging. To isolate art is to isolate the people from visual and literary language and expression; the historical devaluation of radical creative practices is an intentional hegemonic design. Art is truth. Art is imagination. Art is resistance.
On the “outside agitator”
From the Civil Rights movement to Black Lives Matter to the Free Palestine movement, the powers-that-be repeatedly attempt to silence resistance movements, de-legitimizing them by placing blame on and rhetorically demoralizing “outside agitators”. We must instead target the entities that truly deserve the blame: the corporations and states that continue to operate on the oppression of marginalized populations. In the words of Malcolm X, “We declare our right on this earth… to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”
We must reject the arbitrary classifications that work only to divide our movement and dampen our power and influence. Instead, we embrace the power of our whole community, the marginalized, the outside agitators.
