Calling Cards: Revolution means building towards a national movement of uncompromising politics

Today, the ruling class and their millions of shock troops maintain their power with what must be a really enjoyable racism. Stream-lined fascist accomplice-ing, in mass, perpetually starves the resistance of having people who would actually populate resistance.

Corporate-hired artists scribble sunshine on cop tires. The U.S. publicly and privately contracts construction of new concentration camps for asylum seekers. The neo-colony of Flint, Michigan poisons Black residents on a scale that should be a biological-weapon war crime. There are as many people cleaning rich people’s houses as there are people in prison. And we have a revolution with a serious lack of revolutionaries. 

RELATED: The Complexities of Revolution We Can Learn from Fidel Castro

The police state will never un-loom. So we are going to have to decide what sacred means. We are going to have to defang and de/altar-cloth our individualism in order to shift our movement potential toward one of domestic-colony-wide, internationalist scope and practice. 

The current epoch of resistance seems to be oriented around immediate demands instead of mass politicization of people, which keeps us ever-isolatable and structurally absorbable. Instead of raising confidence in the people that no empire is permanent and no oppression is infinite (no matter how long or deeply suffered); we march to gain new demarcations of whiteness, we save our tempers for dancefloors. We sip television-based firewater and work for the perfection of counterrevolutionary slang.

I sort of went back to school today. Found bullets in the squalor. Found the modern two-ness of ahistorical/non-white self-actualization and what better my great grandmother knew. What my great grandmother knew is that it’s not enough to have the effect of a concept, you need the function of a concept; or never mind organizing our way into the concession of an equitable(?) social atmosphere, we need instruments of people-power and revolution. We need a mass of people who find oppression unacceptable.

All laws end before they begin. 

I was recently a guest of the Ivy League (again… and again); my tear ducts full of Calibri font wondering if all the way from a south Texas refrigerator, incarcerated children could make out our faces. Wondering if I was now officially a historical tangent. Wondering what kind of customer I would make as a white man. What kind of Augusts I would be avoiding. Wondering if it’s in the endowments that the devil takes his bedrest. Tomorrow’s rulers and rulers’ extra special cogs wore t-shirts that I subtitled “Universe Last/Country First”. Along with other fashion advances dancing (in circles) in a sweatshop workers blood stream. I saw the quest for an alternative biosphere.

Whiteness is the only thing in this society that is not obsolete. 

In a service economy, everything, especially organizing feels like being a part of a temporary history. Instead of single issues, we have to expose all conditions of oppressed people. Advance a political program that exposes the entire institutional reality of oppression. What reformism leaves us with is the need for consciousness to be overwhelmed by spontaneity; and to sacrifice revolutionary consciousness for a commitment to action. 

Spontaneous uprising is not the inauguration of a revolutionary stage of society. Admittedly, action-oriented organizing is understandable given that one of the greatest organizational challenges is keeping people from feeling like they are not doing significant enough work. And also, more importantly, single issue struggle interrupts a few of our people’s despair. But our performance art cannot keep up with such an extroverted empire. And we cannot give into the despair of a total loss of belief in a people’s revolutionary potential.

Revolution is a conscious mass seizing all agencies of power, service, production, and institutions of socialization. From the cobalt-tropics of San Francisco to Mars and back, oppressor and oppressed exist in permanent contradiction. We therefore have to analyze the structure of our efforts with how reconcilable our structures are with the system.

How policeable is our movement/how policeable are our people? How international are our potentials? It’s tempting, even therapeutic, to subscribe to a soup of theories; but when we subscribe to the soup, we actually do not get one theory or another. Rather, we get the absence of all theory which leads to people making up some kind of esoteric, eclectic view that justifies whatever activity they are engaged in. A resulting ideology/non-ideology that is not revolutionary, but still dangerously strong because it is more developed, codified, rationalized, and lived with.

We have been meeting people’s needs, meeting people where they are at; while the ruling class and its state apparatus are marching us all into oblivion. 

As a result of this commitment to single-issue action, organizers don’t raise the consciousness of those participating in the single-issue struggle. Single issue struggles do not require them to. And in some cases, actually requires organizers to tell lies and claim easy victories. 

RELATED: Comic: Revolution means nothing if it doesn’t include Black women and Black queer folks

We are out here fighting with our eyes tied behind our backs. Or fighting while doing spiritualized drugs. Happy to have just one less liquor store washing up to shore. Happy with the fear we put into the person working at a front desk. Happy with our 80s babies ballot savvy and white worker-owned cooperative cooperation. Some part of us is always attempting to keep our master alive. 

Our guiding objective has to be to build towards a national movement of uncompromising politics, internationalist solidarity and continuity of principled struggle. Revolutionary movement does not exist without a revolutionary theory. Revolutionary movement does not exist without bringing masses of people to a revolutionary process. We have to come to terms with this reality if we ever plan on getting Pangea off of this white settler colonial merry-go-round.