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4 Jun, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Why is it so hard for some white Leftists (of every tendency) to stay in their lane?

Just because you know Black people who agree with you on some things doesn’t give you license to insert yourself into Black community dialogue.

This shouldn’t need to be stated in 2021.
We started our org in 2018 because it was just as clear then as it is now that we need our own institutions to cover our own history and make our own decisions about our own futures. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have our own public digital spaces for clear, uninterrupted dialogue.
So if you are white and claim to be a comrade, and see Black folks with similar views having a discussion about something online, and sense that there is a disagreement on matters that don’t necessarily concern you, it’s probably best for you to stay out of it.
We haven’t made an instance yet, but we are on Mastodon; it’s just really hard to get folks to come on over.

We have issues with the UI/UX design of Mastodon as well; it doesn’t depart enough from some of the toxic design elements of Twitter.

We’re hoping to have a social media architecture/component more conducive to cooperation and counter-institution-building with @DualPowerApp, so please stay posted there.

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More from @BlackSocialists

Black Socialists in America Profile picture
4 Jun
This dude just comes out and says what the red fash are thinking, it’s pretty refreshing, honestly.
Go down his timeline and peep who he retweets or is a fan of.

Tells you everything you need to know.

Also peep this interesting pic of him with some fash buds.
This is why “anti-authoritarianism” is a requirement, and especially if you’re Black.

If you’re Black and in support of top-down, paternalistic framing around “revolution” despite the fact that we are ethnic minorities in a white supremacist country, you are delusional.
Read 4 tweets
Black Socialists in America Profile picture
4 Jun
“Nation-states” are deemed “just” under hierarchical, colonizer logic, but are antithetical to the freedom of those “below,” no matter how similar those “above” in these nation-states may look to those below.

This is why we must offer political frameworks that transcend statism.
Anyone who calls themselves a “Leftist” and implicitly presumes in their analyses that things like nation-states and borders must exist, or be further explored for us to be “free,” do not have an understanding of what freedom is, or simply wish to warp its meaning to control you.
We get free by building freedom in the cracks and crevices of the crumbling system as it stands now, not by caulking these cracks with the very substance of what defines the statist mechanisms or structures of domination closing in on us already.
Read 4 tweets
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 39 tweets
Black Socialists in America Profile picture
1 Jun
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 11 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

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