Against the Hipsterized “Left”
I hate hipsters. Overwhelmingly white, petit-bourgeois, performative racists with shit music and shittier food. Hipsters are new colonizers, they gentrify our neighborhoods and then proceed to loot our cultural treasury and water it down to suit their expensive tastes. In the United States, the settler left is plagued with hipsters who, instead of working for the revolutionary transformation of society and accepting leadership from the most oppressed and exploited and therefore most revolutionary segments of society, have proceeded to fracture it into a series of hostile scenes and sects none of which will be able to accomplish the revolutionary tasks. These fractions, sects, and “collectives”, none of which seem to comprise more than a pitiful handful of people in cities of millions and who seem to ignore rural areas altogether, spend more time squabbling and arguing with other sects while the world burns around us, ever more convinced that they have the “correct line” despite we as Maoists knowing that the correct line is determined through analysis, study, and first and foremost, practice. If your organization only has a few members despite existing for years and decades and an outside observer or a person in the community can see that your presence in the area has not changed or developed struggle to a higher level, you do not have a correct line no matter how you spin it. Hipsters deal in hollow displays, wolf tickets, paper tigerism. Organizations are social cliques and clubs based on who doesn’t like whom. The purpose of a mass organization is to wage mass struggle. You should be consistently recruiting and developing new contacts and talking to people in terms they can understand about things that they care about. Food, housing, the police. What are you concretely doing to address these problems? How many black people are in your org, specifically, in leadership? In my city recently there was sharp struggle against exploitative storeowners in the Black community, the hipster white left was silent and in many instances was so bold as to dare to rail at the masses for using “foul language” and looting a store! Yet these are the same people that talk about guillotining the capitalist class and shooting people. When, where, why and how? When the black community magically decides to follow the leadership of your hipster sect that hangs out in bars where people with M.A. degrees in anthropology drink from mason jars and cares more about dead renegades or academic do nothings and tone policing than the masses of people? Where is your practice? Where, once, have you united with the most advanced segments of the black community, those who realize that this shit is a class struggle and that it will need to be resolved through discipline, organization, and violence? Do you actually think that my people, the Black working class and lumpenproletariat, actually care about your opinion unless it’s affirming our right to revolutionary violence? Do you actually think that we have some mystical, overarching love for our class enemies that we will let ourselves be chained up and held hostage by a barren political class? Despite all your pretensions about participating in a revolution sometime in the far future that may never come because we’ll all be dead, you continue to promote the same old politics under the guise of “doing something” and “getting results”. Canvassing, sticking signs in people’s yards, hangouts, drinking parties, registering people to vote! How many black people my age (24) vote? See how many of us actually turn up and vote in these silly ass electoral hamster wheels against this and that. We don’t care. We were done with that shit in the ’80s. We got our black president, he didn’t do shit. We got our black congressmen and women, they didn’t do shit. You are tailing the masses, by tailing I mean that your consciousness is far behind the masses of our people. We are ready to seize power and claim our communities, you’re focused on gossip and clique shit and when you’re not doing that, you’re trying to pull us back into the system and into your small scenes as if we won’t burn your useless ass along with the rest of this accursed system. We’re done with that.
The hipster left can’t lead any revolution because it’s too sclerotic and focused on its own propagation and existence. If the “masses” that they crow about actually entered their organizations en masse, they’d shit themselves because their little worlds and little cliques would be broken up. Callout culture, postmodern rambling about this and that, and endless sectarian back and forth does not stand up to sharp criticism from the most oppressed people. To stop people from engaging in problematic behavior requires patient explanation and struggle, not isolation and callouts. Black people ain’t taking that shit from white people in the first place, it’s too much like slave overseer behavior and we aren’t joining so-called revolutionary organizations to be policed and treated like we’re still on the plantation. We don’t want to be around white people more than we have to, nevermind when they’re condescending to us and trying to play petty office politics with us. That is petit-bourgeois behavior and is a major bane of the settler left, consistently denouncing and throwing other people in the trash based on personal antipathy, jealousy and hatred. Black people, by and large, demand unity on a principled basis and principled struggle for our liberation. The settler left, with its consistent cannibalization, squabbling, and denunciation of activists, particularly of color is as alien to our communities as Mars. We simply will not have white people telling us what to do, because they don’t know what to do in the first place. If you are allowed to work in our communities, it’s after demonstrating principled behavior, acceptance of leadership from the colonized, and aligning your interests fully with ours. Many of you are not prepared to do this for reasons of ego or out-and-out, thinly veiled racism. That is to your detriment and that of your pitiful, anemic organizations that forever are chasing us, the vanguard, trying to pull us back onto your “progressive plantations”.
I’m not going to offer advice on how to fix the hipsterization and ghettoization of the settler left because I personally have no interest in anything but its destruction. I don’t want Black people joining these “orgs” where they will be abused, emotionally through having their valuable contributions mocked and denigrated, and in the most extreme instances, physically by having the police called on them. For one, it won’t accept criticism, it’ll throw shade and holler about being “abused”. For two, I don’t have any interest in saving Europeans from their own stupidity. Go ahead with your electoralism, phoniness, whininess, uselessness, and hollowness. Crow about recruiting two more hipsters to your shitty punk band posing as a political organization. Continue to meet in bars in gentrified neighborhoods to discuss how to fix gentrification while black people burn shit down and throw bricks at anybody that tells us not to. We need a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party in this country, dedicated to its destruction. This will happen, over and above the demands of the settler left.
