Wilding for Revolution: A Brief Word on an Alleged Tactic Employed by New Afrikan Lumpen and the Importance of New Afrikan Military Theory/Practice
“Wilding” is a term that entered the American mainstream lexicon at the height of the crack/fast money era of the 1980s. Essentially, there was a fear of large groups of New Afrikan/Latino youth forming “wolf packs” of at least 5 people and beating the shit out of anything white and rich. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the bourgeois settler press was covered with accounts of supposed wilding incidents that ended up with stores being smashed and people beaten up and gang robbed. The most egregious incident was the frame-up of the Central Park 5 (in which Donald Trump played a major role), in which a 28 year old colonizer investment banker was supposedly gang raped nearly to death. The 5 were eventually exonerated and reached a $40 million dollar settlement. By and large, the “wilding” trend was a myth that arose as a result of the Central Park hysteria. Yet it still bears investigation in regards to military potential, as a tactic, and an analysis of the colonizer psyche. This shows how settler society is prone to mass hysteria and fears the military potential of New Afrikan semi-proletarians and lumpen-proletarians. Throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, colonizers feared our people coming to cut their throats as they slept, burning their houses down, and doing all sorts of other things that would be in and of themselves revolutionary because they were direct physical strikes on the system that kept us in chains. They secretly knew that we would have been right to do it, and took paranoid precautions against their chickens coming home to roost.
In the 1960s, many urban areas such as Pruitt-Igoe in my own hometown of Saint Louis, Missouri became no-go zones for the police. These were tall residential towers with busted out windows on every floor and a myriad of areas for snipers to hide, and hide they did. The police eventually gave up trying to patrol the area except with overwhelming because people would stage incidents and the pigs would show up only to be shot at from the rooftops. As New Afrikan revolutionaries, it’s important for us to take seriously and develop military theory and practice. Every uprising in which we go hand to hand and bullet for bullet with the pigs is a lesson from which our revolutionary theoreticians and tacticians must draw the necessary conclusions. Study the military tactics laid out by Robert F. Williams in the Crusader where he discusses the plausibility of a variety of scenarios (of course his idea that the US would crumble in a matter of weeks was a bit…ambitious to put it respectfully). Watch and analyze videos of protests and demonstrations in the United States, Israel, and other imperialist/settler-colonial countries and look for ways that a tight, coherent, disciplined group could take advantage of the dialectics of a situation and turn the enemy’s strengths into their weaknesses.
In regards to wilding, surprise attacks are nothing new and for colonizers to act as if they were prove their ignorance of their own lynching and burning filled history. Of course, we are revolutionaries, but it is essential to keep in mind that the main force of the New Afrikan revolution will undoubtedly be the lumpen/semi-proletariat, with the guiding force being the proletariat. Huey P. Newton taught long ago that automation and a variety of other factors tied to neoliberalism would lead to the old style proletariat being driven to the brink and pushed down into the ranks of the semi-proletariat and lumpen/proletariat. This is coming to pass all over the world, with those who formerly worked in factories now being pushed down into the ranks of the permanently unemployed or the underemployed who do semi-legal/illegal work on the side and earn a precarious living. These groups are those who would be prone to carry out these sudden strikes. They aren’t chained to any colonizer corporation’s clock, and they thus have much free time to dedicate to these types of activities. Of course, revolutionary leadership is key. Relying on and chasing after spontaneity lends itself to disaster. Revolutionaries should seek employment at youth centers and other such places where the masses of New Afrikan semi-proletarian youth hang out, befriend them, and introduce them to revolutionary theory, history, and practice. The youth are eager to learn and are also eager to be supported in their propensity to rebel against the system that strips them of decent food, shelter, and work. The youth know who the enemies are. The colonizer police that shoot and arrest them, the slumlords that bleed their parents dry, the store owner around the corner that sells Nyquil shots out the back door, the yuppies 5 blocks down the way who call the cops on them. The youth already have their weapons, their practice and their methods for evading the police. However, these methods are often insufficient. Our goal is to keep our revolutionaries out of jail and prison. Conduct group studies on mastering security culture and illegal work using writings such as “How to Master Secret Work” and the section of James Yaki Sayles’ “Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth” where he reflects on Serge’s “What Everyone Should Know About State Repression”. Youth should be recruited into mass organizations before these studies are conducted and there should be the development of a support network. Develop and build safe houses and safe spaces where people can go. Get to know parents and politicize them as well. Hold movie nights and show films such as “The Spook That Sat By The Door”, “Panther”, “The Murder of Fred Hampton”, and “Battle of Algiers”.
Surprise attacks on property, vehicles, reactionaries, etc., hypothetically, can be used to forstall/respond to attempts at gentrification, retaliate for police attacks on New Afrikan people, respond to ICE presence and activity, etc. They can also be used to hit businesses that abuse and overcharge black people, homes of fascists and killer cops, and whatever targets present themselves. They should be swift, lasting no more than 5 minutes max, and do maximum damage. There should be instruction given on which tools operators should carry to get the job done, ways of entry and escape, and concealment measures. Keep in mind that it only takes one spark and one successful action to spark a prairie fire. Revolutionary cadre went to Mobile in the 1960s and taught local youth how to make effective Molotov cocktails. Within weeks, firebombings of colonizer owned stores and other establishments were the norm. The role of the revolutionary is to sow the seeds of revolution wherever they go and guide the masses towards greater things. We have a vast reservoir of energy in youth that must be guided and turned towards revolution in a thorough, careful and organized way. This is the wellspring from which our cadre and our people’s army will develop.
