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1 Jun, 11 tweets, 5 min read
Period.
We’ll be damned if we let anyone talk down on people who not only risked their lives for our liberation in a way 99% of y’all ain’t even built for today, but also spent years tryna pass on knowledge and teach us lessons so we don’t make the same mistakes.

This shit is real life.
Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is a BPP and BLA veteran who got sentenced to life for allegedly trying to kill a KKK leader before hijacking a plane to Cuba to evade prosecution and being captured and tortured in Europe.

And yes, he is an anti-authoritarian.

Read “Anarchist Versus Marxist-Leninist Thought on Organization of Society” from Chapter 3 of Ervin’s “Anarchism and the Black Revolution,” please:

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lorenz…
Russell Maroon Shoatz is a BPP and BLA veteran currently sitting in prison after being convicted of murdering a cop in Pennsylvania, getting a life sentence for it, and then being held in solitary confinement for over 22 consecutive years.

And yes, he is an anti-authoritarian.
Read the opening statements of “The Dragon and the Hydra” by Shoatz, please:

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/russel…
Donald Cox was a core BPP leader given the title “Field Marshal” due to his experience with weapons, and he was exiled to Algeria and France after being accused of conspiracy to murder an informant under COINTELPRO.

And yes, he was an anti-authoritarian.

Read the thread below and Cox’s autobiography (which the contents of the thread below are from), please.

And you know what’s crazy?

There are even more BPP and BLA veterans who are anti-authoritarian and who have tried warning us about the dangers of reproducing the authoritarian methods of the 20th century for decades now.

And some of y’all legitimately don’t care to listen.
Maybe if some of y’all shut up and listened to some elders for a second instead of trying to score internet points in service to your egos, you’d see how outdated, archaic, chauvinistic, and reactionary your approaches have been, and how ineffective they are for building freedom.
We are in this to get free...

Not to be a part of some exclusive club, or for some cult of personality or hero-worship.

And it is for this reason that we cannot afford to look at Black radical history with an uncritical eye.

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More from @BlackSocialists

Black Socialists in America Profile picture
1 Jun
This clip is a huge mess, not only because we have over a century’s worth of history illustrating how fascists court and work with certain tendencies amongst the so-called “Left,” but because almost the entire discourse in the clip below is in the scope of electoral politics too.
Red-Brownism seems to be reduced by this crowd to a nonsense idea of “left-wingers” working with “right-wingers” because they’re knowingly “right-wingers in disguise,” and their idea of “Left” includes left-Liberal forces (Social Democrats) in and around the Democratic Party too?
Point 1:

When we say “Left,” we refer to the revolutionary Left.

This “Left” is concerned primarily with labor and land, and supplanting the capitalist system with other systems.

The revolutionary “Left” is mostly made up of Anarchists, or authoritarians of various tendencies.
Read 38 tweets
Black Socialists in America Profile picture
27 May
Just like our problem isn’t just one particular “thing,” our solution can’t be one particular “thing” either; anyone serious about systems change must have a holistic, “every-tool-in-the-toolkit” approach that utilizes various institutions to produce a better, superseding system.
There is no need to create false dichotomies around institutional vehicles (ex: “unions vs. co-ops”).

Our #DualPower method leaves strategical room open around worker co-ops, unions, electoral politics, and more.

But we know what we want and, thus, pinpoint limits of each area.
Unions can bring workers together in various ways and at different scales/levels, but may not necessarily lead to something more than mere agitation for more (in wages or rights) within the capitalist logic, or abandonment of unnecessary and ecologically unsustainable industries.
Read 10 tweets
Black Socialists in America Profile picture
25 May
Pushing “abolition” without specifying what we’re supplanting existing systems with (or mapping out ways of supplanting) is not “revolutionary.”

And we can’t compartmentalize institutions of oppression; they are interconnected.

Thus, we need holistic approaches involving labor.
There were people critiquing “abolition” as a buzzword in the 1800s, and they were right.

Essential to them was not only an anti-capitalist position, but also an anti-authoritarian position recognizing that our battle goes beyond mere class exploitation.

Essential to some of these critics was also a study of what worked, and practical suggestions around ways of building a new system:

marxists.org/reference/arch…

As incomplete as some of these suggestions may have been, they gestured toward values and frameworks relevant for today...
Read 4 tweets
Black Socialists in America Profile picture
16 May
No states are democracies.
States are the most violent, destructive, anti-democratic structures ever produced by humankind.

They are weapons of class rule and the ultimate expression of domination.

The idea that there could ever be a “democratic state” is oxymoronic.
And just so we’re clear:

The U.S. is also an apartheid state, so for anyone to imply that the U.S. or any other nation-states of the “West” are somehow bastions of democracy in contrast to what we’re seeing with the State of Israel is to hold on to a “dream” built on nightmares.
Read 5 tweets
Black Socialists in America Profile picture
14 May
We’re not going to stop imperialism by making appeals to the imperialists and their forces of domination and destruction.

We’ll stop imperialism when we do the hard(est) work of building parallel social, economic, and political infrastructure able to undergird a defensive force.
This “parallel social, economic, and political infrastructure” can’t be grounded in the same social relations and organization that define the oppressive system we’re in.

It has to be grounded in cooperation, communalism, and direct democracy.

It has to feel worth fighting for.
It’s not just about striking, unionizing, or doing work around organized labor for individual (reactive) actions. It’s about a holistic approach centered on “world-building” that can generate not only a new, liberatory social logic, but resources for defensive infrastructure too.
Read 4 tweets
Black Socialists in America Profile picture
8 May
The State of Israel is a settler-colonialist nation-state just like the USA, so recent IOF attacks on Palestinians at their place of worship in East Jerusalem come as no surprise.

The solution, however, doesn’t lie in more bourgeois nationalism and statism, let alone Capitalism. Israeli soldiers stand in front of al-Aqsa mosque in East JeIsraeli soldiers blast through the doors at al-Aqsa mosque i
Various forces – political, religious, etc. – exploit the violent, reactionary acts of the Israeli nation-state against the Palestinian people to push their own agendas.

These agendas almost never have anything to do with freedom, but rather more forms or flavors of domination.
The solution lies in transcending the nation-state model, theocracy, and the capitalist system altogether.

The solution lies in a global, confederal system that does away with colonial borders, and is defined by *directly* democratic social, economic, and political organization.
Read 10 tweets

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