Black Lives Matter Schism: A Vision For Black Autonomy |
PopularResistance.Org
Black Lives Matter Schism: A Vision For Black Autonomy |
PopularResistance.Org
popularresistance.org
https://www.popularresistance.org/black-lives-matter-schism-towards-a-vision
-for-black-autonomy/
Black Lives Matter Schism: Towards A Vision For Black Autonomy
Screen Shot 2015-09-28 at 11.07.22 AM
The Black Lives Matter movement exhibited a schism since the first few days
following the first Ferguson rebellion. I remember watching live streams of
the rebellion early on as Ferguson's youth waged small scale urban combat
armed with little more than rubble and glass bottles. The heroic resistance
to state power, against all odds of victory in forcing a retreat of the
occupying militarized police, and in the face of material consequences in
the form of a brutal crackdown, was a demonstration of courage that we all
should aspire to.
The repression by the armed apparatus of the state in Ferguson (
and Baltimore months later) provoked another popular response. But this
response took on a different character. It seemed to want to place distance
between itself and those who were engaged in combat with the police. Cloaked
in a veneer of inclusiveness, it drowned out the original spirit of
resistance that the rebelling youths exhibited nights before. The message
was "we don't want to be associated with them and we will 'resist' within
the confines of rules and regulations given to us by established power".
The latter trend did what it set out to do. It attracted a vast segment of
the liberal left, respectable quasi-radicals, nonprofit organizations and
sympathetic politicians. There were
denunciations of riots, looting, and property destruction as these tactics
were considered "infantile" and "alienating" to potential supporters and
allies. Think piece after think piece was written about the
merits and demerits of various tactics of resisting police occupation. The
ones who fought back against the police in Ferguson and Baltimore were
touted as "misguided" and "lacking in overall strategy" and they were
ultimately left with virtually no material support to continue their
organic, grass roots, militant struggle.
This schism between militant resistance and respectability has since become
more acute. The mass movement has become amorphous, and what should have
been channeled into organic revolutionary energy has dissipated under the
weight of having an incoherent structure and lack of a declarative
revolutionary political program that includes building international,
intercommunal alliances with other Black left movements and anti-imperialist
organizations worldwide. This flaw was seized upon by petit bourgeois
elements, who have seen fit to reduce the Black Lives Matter movement to a
"New Civil Rights Movement", hell bent on simply effecting policy changes
rather than assigning it the character of a revolutionary liberation
struggle that requires a coherent strategy and a diversity of tactics for
its success.
This notwithstanding, there have been enormous organizational strides made
my local chapters of Black Lives Matter that have challenged the status quo
at an operational level. It shouldn't be overlooked that the overall
indictment of institutional racism that the movement has reintroduced into
mainstream discourse has indeed had an effect on the consciousness of
various strata of the population. The question at hand is whether or not
this indictment can be carried through to its ultimate conclusion: that
those invested in maintaining our systemic oppression are not fit to rule
and should be removed from power. The longer Black Lives Matter waits to
answer this question, the more vulnerable it is to co-optation, derailment
and ultimately, dissolution.
Naturally, within a power structure that is programmed to halt all
revolutionary advances and counter all threats to its existence, the
reformist trend within the Black Lives Matter schism obviously picked up the
most steam; grant offers from foundations,
visits to see liberal capitalist politicians and airtime on CNN and MSNBC
ensured that. Now we have the ultimate bastardization of militant resistance
manifested in the form of
Campaign Zero, a series of policy proposals that seek to end police violence
in America, as if it's possible that an institution founded in order to
capture and torture runaway slaves and to protect slave masters' property
can be reformed.
Campaign Zero was proposed by so called leaders of the movement and twitter
celebrities alike, with virtually no consultation with the mass base of
people who put themselves on the line in the streets against the armed
apparatus of the state. It is an arbitrary and piecemeal attempt to
synthesize militant resistance with the "progressivism" of the Democratic
Party, which ultimately leaves white supremacist institutions intact. This
overt display of conciliatory politics is nothing short of a betrayal by
Black petit-bourgeois liberals who legitimately hate the system, but
couldn't garner the fortitude to imagine what they would do without it. It
is opportunist defeatism in writing.
Anyone who has a halfway decent grasp of history knows that the wanton
destruction of social movements spurred on by establishment liberals is not
a new phenomenon. At this point it's formulaic. The Democratic party exists
to adapt to the ebbs and flows of social changes in this country in a manner
that provides concessions while maintaining the current political economy of
white supremacist, capitalist society. This is the Democratic party's only
real demarcation from the outward and openly bigoted reactionary Republican
party. Both preserve the system. It is not far off to suggest that the
rapid resurgence of white nationalist fascism that is currently being
nurtured by the political right wing is a safeguard should the liberal wing
of the political establishment fail to disrupt the movement and quell Black
radicalism entirely.
With Campaign Zero and the corresponding frantic search for support within
the current bourgeois political milieu, the reformists within Black Lives
Matter are holding their breath for the 2016 elections, where the US ruling
class will ultimately decide whether the reactionary or "humanitarian" wings
of ruling power will respond to the political unrest in a way that
guarantees their continued existence. While this anticipation may signal a
decline in movement activity, it should be primer to those activists (who
don't have to be reminded that the white supremacist capitalist power
structure will remain in place no matter who wins the presidency) to begin
to nurture the elements within the movement that are not seeking to coexist
with the system.
"Black Lives Matter" should not be declared as an appeal to ruling power or
racist white America to accept us as human. They don't and they won't. Our
value in this country has always been directly proportional to the amount of
profit we produce. With the advent of financial mechanisms that no longer
rely on Black labor to produce wealth, we have now become disposable. The
increase of
extrajudicial murders by the state and relative impunity that racist
vigilante murderers of our people seem to have are indicators of this. We
say "Black Lives Matter" as a reminder to us as Black people that our lives
matter regardless if we're accepted as human by white society or not, and is
said as a declaration of resistance to our condition as beasts of burden for
capital.
But a declaration is not enough. Neither are policy reforms, symbolic
political actions and awareness campaigns. What is needed right now is an
entire shift in orientation. A complete overhaul of all of the resources we
have and can acquire at our disposal dedicated to the purpose of
relinquishing our dependency on the economic system that exploits us; the
building, maintenance, and defense of our own institutions and organs of
power, channeled for the general uplift of our people, for our people, and
by our people. The institutions that the state uses to oppress us must have
their diametrical counterpart built by us for liberation purposes and must
function to fill the void that has been left by the excesses and crises of
transnational capitalism. Responsibility for the defense of our institutions
rests with us, and this defense will also serve the purpose of resisting any
and all attempts to put us back on the capitalist plantation.
We must strive for nothing less than the goal of complete self-determination
and autonomy of African descended people in the US and abroad, working hand
in hand in communal fellowship with other oppressed peoples who have their
own contradictions with the power structure. Only by aligning ourselves with
the international anticolonial, anti-imperial movement can success be
achieved, as we represent only a little less than 13% of the national
population.
Our organs of power will create a situation in which dual power will give
rise to all manner of reactionary fascism and their corresponding weapons,
as we are under siege on two sides: one side by the state that wants to
continue our exploitation or annihilate us, and on the other side by the
nation's white nationalist and white supremacist silent majority which
simply just wants to annihilate us. Organization, preparation, and
development of the means to combat these threats is paramount and should be
considered an immediate priority.
This is our reality. We do not live in a reality whereby those who are
materially invested in our subjugation will suddenly come to their senses,
take pity on us, pay us reparations while we ride off into the sunset and
live happily ever after like the reformists tacitly imply by their attempts
at negotiating with US elites. The rest of the colonized and neo-colonized
world is ready to shake off their yoke of oppression the moment it becomes
clear that we've made our move. Evidence is seen in the way that African
Jews in Israel were inspired by videos of Baltimore's youth overrunning riot
squads. The
comrades shutting down traffic arteries and battling police in Tel Aviv were
hardly inspired by paid activists with forty thousand dollar a year salaries
and 401Ks, but by those who heroically abandoned all respectability and
asserted their identity as a threat to the establishment.
US fascism would not have established itself so securely, with every
safeguard in place and every mechanism utilized at its disposal to stifle
the growth of revolutionary consciousness of Black people in the US were we
not innately and at our deepest core threatening to the white power
structure. Acknowledgement of this orientation puts US fascism on the
defensive. A movement of angry Black people should be threatening. It should
heighten contradictions, it should make those invested in the status quo
uneasy, and it should provoke raging emotions in ourselves as well as our
class enemies.
The movement for Black Autonomy, although nascent, is the inevitable
outgrowth of a decaying strategy of reformist appeals to power. We know
Black lives matter. The question is whether or not we have the capacity to
check any attempts at devaluation by counterrevolutionary elements from the
outside and from within. The autonomous movement is building this capacity,
synthesizing elements of anarchism and revolutionary socialism. Modern
examples of this type of political self-determination include the
Kurdish PYD/PKK in Syria and Turkey and the
Zapatistas and Autodefensas in Mexico.
The autonomous movement explicitly rejects of the kind of
separatist reactionary nationalism which is unfortunately endemic to many
formations within the Black Liberation movement. It rejects the
hetero-patriarchal ethos that women should be relegated to servant status.
It rejects the demonization of Black queer and trans people and instead
uplifts them as leaders. We hold that one immediately relinquishes the role
of "vanguard" if one subscribes to Eurocentric authoritarian
hetero-patriarchal standards of gender and their corresponding roles as the
norm.
The movement for Black autonomy does not include coexistence with white
supremacist authority in its platform. We understand that the development of
a scientific, intersectional revolutionary political theory that is
applicable to our specific material conditions in the US, and our
development of a praxis that tangibly counters the power of white
supremacist institutions that control our lives, is the difference between
being victims of genocide or soldiers at war. We understand that the
striving for autonomy means provoking violent reactionary resistance to our
advances. We accept this. We understand that Black liberation means human
liberation, so we act in solidarity with the oppressed. Long live the Black
resistance. We have nothing to lose but our chains!
Black Lives Matter Schism: A Vision For Black Autonomy | PopularResisBlack
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Black Lives Matter Schism: Towards A Vision For Black Autonomy
Screen Shot 2015-09-28 at 11.07.22 AM
The Black Lives Matter movement exhibited a schism since the first few days
following the first Ferguson rebellion. I remember watching live streams of
the rebellion early on as Ferguson's youth waged small scale urban combat
armed with little more than rubble and glass bottles. The heroic resistance
to state power, against all odds of victory in forcing a retreat of the
occupying militarized police, and in the face of material consequences in
the form of a brutal crackdown, was a demonstration of courage that we all
should aspire to.
The repression by the armed apparatus of the state in Ferguson (
and Baltimore months later) provoked another popular response. But this
response took on a different character. It seemed to want to place distance
between itself and those who were engaged in combat with the police. Cloaked
in a veneer of inclusiveness, it drowned out the original spirit of
resistance that the rebelling youths exhibited nights before. The message
was "we don't want to be associated with them and we will 'resist' within
the confines of rules and regulations given to us by established power".
The latter trend did what it set out to do. It attracted a vast segment of
the liberal left, respectable quasi-radicals, nonprofit organizations and
sympathetic politicians. There were
denunciations of riots, looting, and property destruction as these tactics
were considered "infantile" and "alienating" to potential supporters and
allies. Think piece after think piece was written about the
merits and demerits of various tactics of resisting police occupation. The
ones who fought back against the police in Ferguson and Baltimore were
touted as "misguided" and "lacking in overall strategy" and they were
ultimately left with virtually no material support to continue their
organic, grass roots, militant struggle.
This schism between militant resistance and respectability has since become
more acute. The mass movement has become amorphous, and what should have
been channeled into organic revolutionary energy has dissipated under the
weight of having an incoherent structure and lack of a declarative
revolutionary political program that includes building international,
intercommunal alliances with other Black left movements and anti-imperialist
organizations worldwide. This flaw was seized upon by petit bourgeois
elements, who have seen fit to reduce the Black Lives Matter movement to a
"New Civil Rights Movement", hell bent on simply effecting policy changes
rather than assigning it the character of a revolutionary liberation
struggle that requires a coherent strategy and a diversity of tactics for
its success.
This notwithstanding, there have been enormous organizational strides made
my local chapters of Black Lives Matter that have challenged the status quo
at an operational level. It shouldn't be overlooked that the overall
indictment of institutional racism that the movement has reintroduced into
mainstream discourse has indeed had an effect on the consciousness of
various strata of the population. The question at hand is whether or not
this indictment can be carried through to its ultimate conclusion: that
those invested in maintaining our systemic oppression are not fit to rule
and should be removed from power. The longer Black Lives Matter waits to
answer this question, the more vulnerable it is to co-optation, derailment
and ultimately, dissolution.
Naturally, within a power structure that is programmed to halt all
revolutionary advances and counter all threats to its existence, the
reformist trend within the Black Lives Matter schism obviously picked up the
most steam; grant offers from foundations,
visits to see liberal capitalist politicians and airtime on CNN and MSNBC
ensured that. Now we have the ultimate bastardization of militant resistance
manifested in the form of
Campaign Zero, a series of policy proposals that seek to end police violence
in America, as if it's possible that an institution founded in order to
capture and torture runaway slaves and to protect slave masters' property
can be reformed.
Campaign Zero was proposed by so called leaders of the movement and twitter
celebrities alike, with virtually no consultation with the mass base of
people who put themselves on the line in the streets against the armed
apparatus of the state. It is an arbitrary and piecemeal attempt to
synthesize militant resistance with the "progressivism" of the Democratic
Party, which ultimately leaves white supremacist institutions intact. This
overt display of conciliatory politics is nothing short of a betrayal by
Black petit-bourgeois liberals who legitimately hate the system, but
couldn't garner the fortitude to imagine what they would do without it. It
is opportunist defeatism in writing.
Anyone who has a halfway decent grasp of history knows that the wanton
destruction of social movements spurred on by establishment liberals is not
a new phenomenon. At this point it's formulaic. The Democratic party exists
to adapt to the ebbs and flows of social changes in this country in a manner
that provides concessions while maintaining the current political economy of
white supremacist, capitalist society. This is the Democratic party's only
real demarcation from the outward and openly bigoted reactionary Republican
party. Both preserve the system. It is not far off to suggest that the
rapid resurgence of white nationalist fascism that is currently being
nurtured by the political right wing is a safeguard should the liberal wing
of the political establishment fail to disrupt the movement and quell Black
radicalism entirely.
With Campaign Zero and the corresponding frantic search for support within
the current bourgeois political milieu, the reformists within Black Lives
Matter are holding their breath for the 2016 elections, where the US ruling
class will ultimately decide whether the reactionary or "humanitarian" wings
of ruling power will respond to the political unrest in a way that
guarantees their continued existence. While this anticipation may signal a
decline in movement activity, it should be primer to those activists (who
don't have to be reminded that the white supremacist capitalist power
structure will remain in place no matter who wins the presidency) to begin
to nurture the elements within the movement that are not seeking to coexist
with the system.
"Black Lives Matter" should not be declared as an appeal to ruling power or
racist white America to accept us as human. They don't and they won't. Our
value in this country has always been directly proportional to the amount of
profit we produce. With the advent of financial mechanisms that no longer
rely on Black labor to produce wealth, we have now become disposable. The
increase of
extrajudicial murders by the state and relative impunity that racist
vigilante murderers of our people seem to have are indicators of this. We
say "Black Lives Matter" as a reminder to us as Black people that our lives
matter regardless if we're accepted as human by white society or not, and is
said as a declaration of resistance to our condition as beasts of burden for
capital.
But a declaration is not enough. Neither are policy reforms, symbolic
political actions and awareness campaigns. What is needed right now is an
entire shift in orientation. A complete overhaul of all of the resources we
have and can acquire at our disposal dedicated to the purpose of
relinquishing our dependency on the economic system that exploits us; the
building, maintenance, and defense of our own institutions and organs of
power, channeled for the general uplift of our people, for our people, and
by our people. The institutions that the state uses to oppress us must have
their diametrical counterpart built by us for liberation purposes and must
function to fill the void that has been left by the excesses and crises of
transnational capitalism. Responsibility for the defense of our institutions
rests with us, and this defense will also serve the purpose of resisting any
and all attempts to put us back on the capitalist plantation.
We must strive for nothing less than the goal of complete self-determination
and autonomy of African descended people in the US and abroad, working hand
in hand in communal fellowship with other oppressed peoples who have their
own contradictions with the power structure. Only by aligning ourselves with
the international anticolonial, anti-imperial movement can success be
achieved, as we represent only a little less than 13% of the national
population.
Our organs of power will create a situation in which dual power will give
rise to all manner of reactionary fascism and their corresponding weapons,
as we are under siege on two sides: one side by the state that wants to
continue our exploitation or annihilate us, and on the other side by the
nation's white nationalist and white supremacist silent majority which
simply just wants to annihilate us. Organization, preparation, and
development of the means to combat these threats is paramount and should be
considered an immediate priority.
This is our reality. We do not live in a reality whereby those who are
materially invested in our subjugation will suddenly come to their senses,
take pity on us, pay us reparations while we ride off into the sunset and
live happily ever after like the reformists tacitly imply by their attempts
at negotiating with US elites. The rest of the colonized and neo-colonized
world is ready to shake off their yoke of oppression the moment it becomes
clear that we've made our move. Evidence is seen in the way that African
Jews in Israel were inspired by videos of Baltimore's youth overrunning riot
squads. The
comrades shutting down traffic arteries and battling police in Tel Aviv were
hardly inspired by paid activists with forty thousand dollar a year salaries
and 401Ks, but by those who heroically abandoned all respectability and
asserted their identity as a threat to the establishment.
US fascism would not have established itself so securely, with every
safeguard in place and every mechanism utilized at its disposal to stifle
the growth of revolutionary consciousness of Black people in the US were we
not innately and at our deepest core threatening to the white power
structure. Acknowledgement of this orientation puts US fascism on the
defensive. A movement of angry Black people should be threatening. It should
heighten contradictions, it should make those invested in the status quo
uneasy, and it should provoke raging emotions in ourselves as well as our
class enemies.
The movement for Black Autonomy, although nascent, is the inevitable
outgrowth of a decaying strategy of reformist appeals to power. We know
Black lives matter. The question is whether or not we have the capacity to
check any attempts at devaluation by counterrevolutionary elements from the
outside and from within. The autonomous movement is building this capacity,
synthesizing elements of anarchism and revolutionary socialism. Modern
examples of this type of political self-determination include the
Kurdish PYD/PKK in Syria and Turkey and the
Zapatistas and Autodefensas in Mexico.
The autonomous movement explicitly rejects of the kind of
separatist reactionary nationalism which is unfortunately endemic to many
formations within the Black Liberation movement. It rejects the
hetero-patriarchal ethos that women should be relegated to servant status.
It rejects the demonization of Black queer and trans people and instead
uplifts them as leaders. We hold that one immediately relinquishes the role
of "vanguard" if one subscribes to Eurocentric authoritarian
hetero-patriarchal standards of gender and their corresponding roles as the
norm.
The movement for Black autonomy does not include coexistence with white
supremacist authority in its platform. We understand that the development of
a scientific, intersectional revolutionary political theory that is
applicable to our specific material conditions in the US, and our
development of a praxis that tangibly counters the power of white
supremacist institutions that control our lives, is the difference between
being victims of genocide or soldiers at war. We understand that the
striving for autonomy means provoking violent reactionary resistance to our
advances. We accept this. We understand that Black liberation means human
liberation, so we act in solidarity with the oppressed. Long live the Black
resistance. We have nothing to lose but our chains!
Black Lives Matter Schism: A Vision For Black Autonomy | PopularResis
