Black Proletarian Feminism vs. Colonizer Feminism
It is common sense that the New Afrikan woman is the most oppressed person within our community, particularly if she is trans. Not only does she have to deal with the regular fuckery of colonizer society but she also has to deal with a deluge of misogynistic, transphobic, and downright soul-killing bullshit from within our own community courtesy of the backwards strata New Afrikan men. We have to look at this from a historical materialist standpoint — the New Afrikan woman is exploited as a result of this exploitation being profitable for the class that enslaved us — the settler bourgeoisie and settler society as a whole since all settlers who have not actively engaging in destroying this order of things and actively committing class treason are complicit in the crimes against our people regardless of political orientation. Bernie Sanders is as much a criminal as Donald Trump. Solving the internal contradiction within the New Afrikan community will require organization of working class New Afrikan women, especially trans women, along lines like those established by the Black Women’s Self Defense League. The internal cult of patriarchy that has not only resulted in the brutal abuse of generations of our New Afrikan women but has also led many New Afrikan men to early graves by trying to play hard and die young and fast engaging in self-destructive, community destroying behavior must also be ceased as well. This patriarchal orientation which has become manifest in online “hotep” (aka conscious) spaces and is reinforced in our churches, families, schools and other spaces is robbing our community of revolutionary women’s leadership, isolating the most oppressed and exploited of us, and contributing directly to violence against our own people. This ultimately is the result of the havoc wrought by settler-colonialism and the forced creation of the New Afrikan nation by violence and will only be destroyed for good by revolutionary violence of our own — a war for national liberation, socialism and communism.
Many within our community are critical of a series of ideological and political tendencies that they incorrectly tar with the same brush — “feminism”. Anuradha Ghandy does an excellent job of critiquing bourgeois/anti-revolutionary schools of feminism in her piece “Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement”, and I recommend it highly. Feminism is not a united force or front because women are not an indivisible group and in settler-colonial countries, settler women are united mainly around upholding the edifice of supremacy. This is an economics game — bourgeois and petit-bourgeois settler women voted for Trump even after he was exposed as a serial abuser of women because he was good for their wallets. Settler women in the slavery era condoned and even encouraged the abuse of enslaved African women because it was good for their wallets and they knew full well that their luxurious lifestyle was purchased by the blood, sweat and toil of African women and the forced separation of African families. They didn’t care. The rise of the mainstream American feminist movement that was dominated by settler women was met with skepticism and even opposition by New Afrikan revolutionary women because their experience in the Civil Rights Movement of the early-mid 1960s saw white liberal volunteers going into Southern communities and engaging in various forms of manipulation (usually around money), trying to isolate revolutionary members of organizations such as SNCC , and generally engaging in all sorts of wreckerish, colonizer-type behavior. Black women carried the Civil Rights movement, literally, and their work was trampled over at various points to the benefit of settlers who had more access to resources and were thus able to create havoc to drag the line and the practice back towards trends that were amenable to the existing order. Nevermind the predominance of New Afrikan centrist and rightist preachers in the movement who believed that the place of a woman was in the kitchen or on her back. Furthermore, these Black revolutionary women who critiqued the rise of settler feminism conducted serious and thorough class analysis and were able to correctly point out that the guiding line of this “movement” was reactionary in that it simply sought to put more women, usually settlers, in positions where they could exploit Black and Brown women while double-facedly calling for unity across class lines on the basis of gender. Essentially, the settlers wanted to not only have their cake and eat it too, but they wanted to continue to snatch away crumbs from the people who were really entitled to the whole cake.
Maoists are guided by the principle that class is the determinant. When we discuss anything, we have to start from the standpoint of class. As colonized people, we have to start with the knowledge that we must struggle for national liberation, socialism and communism and this may require rupturing with various strands of colonizers who call themselves “leftists” or “revolutionaries” because they have no interest in serving the revolution, rather, they seek to serve themselves in the currently existing class order. They want more positions, titles, money, and prestige for colonizers yet the basic needs and aspirations of the masses of colonized women at home and abroad is an afterthought, if it’s even a thought at all. It is essential to study Marxist-Leninist-Maoist works to sharpen and steel our class analysis and apply it to our own conditions. It is important to study the work, theory and lives of Black women revolutionaries such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown (yes, I know she was a rightist in the Black Panther Party but her autobiography is a good read — get it), and Claudia Jones and uphold and take leadership from correctly guided revolutionaries and reject manifestations of settler-colonial “feminism” that is really imperialism. That which serves the class interests of the majority of the world’s women who are Black and Brown and most importantly, proletarian and semi-proletarian is that which we should seek. You don’t need a college education to understand this common revolutionary sense.
