Everybody Wants To Rule The World: What the White Left Can Learn From The New Afrikan Revolutionary Struggle In Combating Sectarianism

When people refer to the weakness or inefficiency of the modern day US “Left”, they’re usually referring to the variety of dogmatist/revisionist/dogmato-revisionist sects that scarce have more than 50 members and spend the majority of their time lambasting other, similar sects and doubling down on their own sclerotic nature. In these times, where ICE raids are commonplace, police shootings continue, and the Amazon is on fire, only a petit-bourgeois reactionary or a willing COINTELPRO asset would continue to engage in sectarian behaviors when the order of the day should be working tactical unity and orientation not towards other sects (for good or for ill), but the masses in their millions. Such sects behave and write as if they have already given leadership to millions of people or captured state power, this is the epitome of self-delusion that can only come from the mind of a deranged colonizer caught up on their own bloated ego and arrogance. There is much to learn for those who unfortunately have fallen under the spell of such sects, particularly from the New Afrikan liberation movement.

First of all, you’re not as important as you think you are. This is the lesson that society teaches every Black child before we enter school. Humility is something that many colonizers who fancy themselves revolutionaries must learn, especially if they’re going to be trying to work in our communities. Many New Afrikan revolutionists think that colonizers have no business in our communities whatsoever, considering the negative impact that they have whenever they set foot in them. An example that I can personally attest to is the recent putting up of scurrilous and defamatory flyers accusing me and another comrade of mine of being “sons of slumlords”, “setting up a nonprofit to live off government grants/extort donations from the masses”, and a variety of other things. For one, white people who live every moment off the blood and sweat of our people have no business trying to investigate how a Black person and their family make a living (my family aren’t slumlords, by the way, I’m pretty sure that I’ve expounded on my class background at length in the past) and second of all, this bears a stark resemblance to conservative Republican accusations levied against every Black led organization. If you’re interested in the work of the CPSD-STL, you can click the link. I’ve stated before that the Left needs to investigate and develop legal structures along with extra-legal structures — the inspiration for this was the Filipino mass movement which makes handy work of both, along with Cooperation Jackson and the Black Panther Party. White people are like buffaloes in a porcelain shop, everywhere they go they blunder into things and upset systems that are in place for the well being of the communities they claim to want to revolutionize. Unaccountable colonizers have no place in New Afrikan communities. We have our theoreticians, we have our mass workers, we have our cultural workers, we have our military embryo. What do colonizer “Communists” and colonizer Communist sects have to offer us but dogmatism, the police, and stupidity? Their own people don’t follow them and most of their working class is gallivanting down the road of either social fascism or fascist fascism. So, they enter into our communities, unaccountable to any stakeholders within, and seek to set up camp there. When we reject them, they become frustrated and accuse us of everything from economism to revisionism to “identity opportunism”. It’s not our fault that you don’t have identities of your own — go find them and organize your own people under our theoretical guidance.

Second of all, stop trying to turn us against our own people, or wreck ties that we have built through struggle and are of benefit to our people. I am collaborating with several other New Afrikan revolutionary comrades from organizations as diverse as Black Hammer and the All African People’s Revolutionary Party. Kevin Rashid Johnson is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Your sect is not the be-all, end-all of revolutionary organizing. I will never claim that FTP is the only revolutionary organization in the United States because that’s the epitome of arrogance and this country has over 300,000,000 people. Again, humility. Anytime you find a sect claiming that it is the only revolutionary organization in the world, or in the country, you need to run far away. We are, of course, building the foundations for a Party that can offer leadership and guidance to millions, but until we have reached that point, all such pronouncements are arrogant and cultish. Cults believe that they are the be-all, end all, and everyone outside is a heretic and a sinner. Engagements with certain left sects are very similar, except swap out heretic and sinner for “revisionist” and “opportunist”. New Afrikans need all the unity we can get. Go into any of our communities after a shooting and the masses are not calling for more fratricidal violence and retaliatory killings, but unity of all who can be united. A Left that spends more time cannibalizing itself or beating itself over the heads with buzzwords, doxxing each other, or cancelling each other when the masses have real, life changing issues to deal with is not worthy to hold state power, and certainly not to be trusted with guns and armies to turn on and massacre each other with. Before the American Left can claim to be ready to seize power, it must come to maturity, cease childish squabbling, and root itself deeply in and be humbled by the masses. I’ve seen several instances of White organizers trying to turn Black organizers on each other, thankfully most of us have enough sense to instinctively distrust colonizers telling tales about other Black organizers without proof or evidence. Some may call this identity politics, we call it common sense. If I can work with New Afrikan comrades from varying points of view and ideological perspectives, there is no wall separating these various sects from agreeing to tactical unity on shit that matters. I’m of the opinion that many of these squabbles are similar to those between Coke and Pepsi, or Ford and GM. Since many colonizer communists come from the hardcore punk scene, you’re quick to label each other “posers” and test each other’s fidelity through bizarre and arcane cult rituals of self-flagellation in public, Roman Catholic style excommunications, and various other things that, to the masses you claim to want to unite and lead, look absolutely foolish and petty.

Finally, realize that the masses are not empty vessels to be filled up with your asinine ideas. People already have their own ideas. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good. People already have their fraternal and religious organizations that in many cases step in and provide assistance on tenant issues, food, police contradictions, etc. etc. You are not going to displace these things. Thinking that you will is the pinnacle of arrogance and will only lead to your destruction and isolation from the life of the community. If you are a colonizer, your role is organizing and doing propaganda among your own people to break them from allegiance to this country and its stolen treasure, and put them at the disposal of the global proletariat, if they are indeed part of it as you so claim. Meddling in our affairs is not to your benefit. Squabbling with each other is not to your benefit, nor to that of the revolutionary movement you claim to support. It weakens the movement, offers ins for fascists, cops and others to wreck it, and presents a weak face before the world. As reactionaries unite and carry out increasingly deadly armed actions, it would behoove the so-called colonizer left to cease all stupidness and come to hard grips with the world we live in, if it is not bent on repeating the errors of the interwar German KPD and ending its existence in mass graves or camps. Black people gon’ be alright. We have our own weapons, political organizations and structures that are ever growing and developing despite your various attempts to turn them over to your own purposes, or destroy them. Our unity was built on the plantations your ancestors stuffed us on, in the marroon colonies, in the swamps and in the heat of battle. Colonizers who play at being communists and are not under our leadership, however, are surrounded by enemies in their own families and communities who would happily destroy them. You have no unity because you’ve never suffered, your communism is in most cases a jape or something to distinguish you from the myriads of other colonizers with thick glasses and fat heads full of air. You have no bases to run to — if you think we’re going to welcome your silly asses into our hoods so you can fight with each other and fuck up our hard earned development when the knives come out, you’ve got another thing coming. Get it together, Brad.