2021 and The Unchanging Politic of the U.S. Left
In the wake of the Capitol Hill, the treacherous pitfalls of anti-Blackness lurk even now.
Image of a screenshot Tweet from Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi). The linked Tweet reads: The left thinks the blue collar MAGA people who stormed the capitol are their political enemies. This is how we lose. Our enemies should be the political elite and the oligarchy. We should be trying to convince the people who stormed the capitol, not trying to ID them for the FBI
“We [Black radicals] are counseled that Black peoples' struggle must await conscious development of the White working class, and even further: that Black Nationalist divides the U.S. working class, movement…
The White Left does not share our sense of urgency because they do not share our reality and perceive the historical destiny of Blacks as identical to their own, instead of as related…
It should come as no surprise then, that the White left in modern western nations is inhibited by their own urge for bourgeois legitimacy, by their own cultural racism, and by the very process of western, working class cooptation. The sum of these parts add up to the revolutionary bankruptcy of the traditional White left…
The White left and white communists fall into the pits ofover-intellectualism and endless debate over who has the locks on the ultimate truth -- who retains the undistilled pure ideology of marxism.”
—R. Dhoruba Moore, Frank Khali Abney, B.L.A. (OPEN LETTER TO THE WHITE LEFT IN THE U.S.)
In the 1970s the Black Liberation Army called the self-styled radical White Left in the U.S. by its name (from here on out referred to simply as the Left). The name the Left carried was Revisionist, Chauvinist and Anti-Black. That name continues to ring true some 50 years after the active phases of the BLA. In those 50 years some things about this Empire have changed while some have remained woefully the same; they say there is nothing new under the sun but I would have liked to believe that there would at least be new iterations of White self-delusion.
In the wake of the Patriots on the Hill, I have read a range of reactions from the both the largest organizations and largest individual influencers of this new Left. Every opinion I saw brought forth some form of discomfort in spirit; some called for unity, some called for outreach to those on the Hill, some called for an appropriately disruptive reaction, some contemplated how lackluster the Left was in comparison to the fascists. All reactions from the Left alluded in some way or another to the need for all its disparate ideological arms (Anarchism, Marxism, Maoism, Communism, etc.) to combine into some ferocious proletariat force to take on the both the state and its opposing ‘agitators’. These various statements lead me ultimately to Alex Rubinstein’s opinion, a sort of proton-culmination of the very chauvinism the BLA maligned all those years ago.
As I look around social media, mainstream media, and circles of Leftists it’s as clear as ever that the ethos of the modern Left is one as entrenched in White contrivance as it was 50 years ago. To those reading this, the Left cannot be a vehicle of liberation because in its current form it cannot liberate Black people. This article is to illuminate the manner with which the Left has failed and continues to fail Black people without redress. Its purpose is to direct Black people and even non-Black people to the knowledge that true revolution can only come from a conception of resistance that centers the most marginal people, as carried out by Anarkata politics.
I am here for the liberation of Black people. Period. I am here for the insurrection of all Black people from this coordinate of the Earth to the farthest flung regions of the most disparate landmasses. Every Black person who suffers under the commodification and exploitation of racial capitalism, every Black person terrorized by the violent suppression and occupation of this U.S. Empire and all others, every Black person whose personhood and humanity were stripped from them by ontological horror, and everyone who must toil under the onus of transmisogynoir, ableism, and fatphobia; these are my people and the only ones who can self-determine their own rebellion.
I am not here for White people. I am an Anarkata; someone who moves with the ethos laid down by the Combahee River Collective, Miss Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Wynter, Kuwasi Balagoon, Hortense Spillers and other Black radicals. I am not here for the Left or even the working class, not really. My one and only goal is the liberation and subsistence of the most marginal Black people. And it is my firm belief that by achieving this, consequently, every other person on earth will be alleviated of the same violent hierarchical oppressions.
Some Leftists would have have you believe that my politic is divisive. Some Leftists would claim it distracts from larger goals, more inclusive politics, and even that it’s a dangerous extremism akin to the nationalism of the fascists on the Hill. Of course, I see all of these suppositions for what they are; anti-Black. It’s anti-Blackness I hear when Leftists tell me my politics are exclusionary, that more people would ally with me if I were less divisive about issues of self-determination, land reclamation, White supremacy and marginal politics. What they want is for me, for Black people in general, to make things more inclusive for them, to warp my politics so they are comforting and appealing for them.
The BLA named this type of chauvinist reformism decades ago. It is the height of insanity, to me, that Leftists continue for the umpteenth to dissuade Black people from investing in self-determined revolution because it ‘harms’ the movement in some way. Again and again history shows that White people seemingly cannot help themselves from co-opting and subsuming the radical energy of Black people for ends that never end up alleviating Black people of their initial oppressions. Instead these hierarchies are regurgitated all over again in ways both subtle and obvious.
How can this be if radical Left politics are so liberating? I would ask readers to consider the fact that racialized hierarchies are not dependent on capitalist hegemonies.
I cannot run with White people in believing that we (Black people/radicals and everyone else) are all in this together because I know, functionally, that it’s a lie. Class first analysis cannot enrapture the racialized hierarchies that warp and shift this world, instead so many Leftists lean on shoddy individualist conceptions of race and racial hierarchy. It’s these inadequate conceptions that allow anti-Blackness to fester in every corner of Leftist movements. As a consequence, all types of bigotries that reference and build upon anti-Blackness fester within Leftist spaces as well. What this means is that words like ‘divisiveness’ and ‘inclusivity’ are weaponized to make Black liberation an afterthought, a footnote, an accessory to be addressed by bankrupt representational politics and tokenist positions dependent on White attention. In this scheme Black energies and lives become the fodder on which the Left bloats itself.
If you are a non-Black person reading this and you’d call yourself an ally or you would say that can back the ideas Anarkatas put forth (and let’s be clear Anarkata is a politic for Black by Black people only) then you need to be the ones reaching out to the fascists on the Hill, if it so behooves you. Do not frame fascist outreach as some holistic exercise that even Black radicals should be beholden too. Those are your uncles and pastors and homeboys.
Black people have tried too long to appeal, placate, cooperate, and compromise with White people. I personally have tried too long to moderate my words, to look and act harmless, to curb my accent, to play into White logic and White insecurity, to push for the littlest of indulgences. In the end it never serves the wellness of Black people. Sure this brand of tokenism can be benefited off of by individual opportunists to enrich themselves on the backs of Black people as a whole but it’s not a manner by Black people can liberate themselves.
The earnestness of White people is not enough to combat the historic pattern of exploitation between White and Black radicals; Lucy Parsons was lesson enough for that. So I renounce this deformed unity and all its historical precedents. The only way for Black people to address our oppression is for Black people to be a self-determined force all their own.
History has shown that even the most ‘radical’ Left movements cannot interact with Black people without exploiting us, without speaking over us, without assuming they know better than Black people themselves do, without in some way believing that Black people are lying or fabricating the oppressions we face.
Black people, we cannot wait an eternity for the White Left to get their perceptions of race the fuck together. We cannot put off our liberation running after White people for some fantastical unity that goes against every benefit the status quo grants them. Instead, I beseech Black to seek out community and radical forms of insurrection that are crafted for the liberation of marginal people.
Now is the time the action, even if it’s not the kind the certain parties on the Left would like to see of Black people. Fuck them. You and I need not live trying to drag the Left along onto the path of our liberation. No, that is for us Black people to carve out on our own.