In the last weeks, there have been more and more building conversations around the potential of the 45th president of the US, Donald Trump, staging a coup to stay in office after the November 3rd general elections. The uncertainty of citizens’ (in)ability to vote by mail during a pandemic, and an open supreme court seat coupled with Trump’s rather outright statements suggesting he may not leave, has led to a cartoonish- like panic around how we are discussing the upcoming elections. The same groups are also having the conversations around these alleged possibilities and scenarios on the left that have . . .
Opinion Pieces
Dear 2020, Fuck you for COVID-19
Dear 2020 fuck you for COVID-19. But Because of you people are waking up no longer a dream. A dream of conformity provided by our working distractions, black mirrors and tv screens. People stuck at home on lockdown in quarantine. They have no choice but to bare witness to the realities of a people who demand equality that’s unseen. Hatred and bigotry provoked by this commander in chief. Our lives have been stolen by this demander and thief. If he’ll answer for those crimes next year remains to be seen. Black Lives Matter fightin for change.Fightin for our people still . . .
Marx was a colonizer, not a communist
Karl Marx did not invent socialism. Marx stated himself that he got the idea of an equal society without economic oppression from studying pre-colonial Africans and pre-colonial indigenous people of Turtle Island, the ‘Americas.’ . . .
On the Anti-Racist Economy & It’s Failures
The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. . . .
The hood leads the revolution
Speech by Gazi Kodzo, Commander in Chief of the Black Hammer Organization. Delivered at Rally #14 on August 25, 2020. Those of us in the hood are the true proletariat. We the Colonized poor and working class people who the whole system depends on, which means we can do anything. On the other hand, there are “leftists” who read things like Settlers and Marx think that because they can speak fancy about the experiences of colonialism, and it means something. But they can speak until their tongue falls off and it won’t move the struggle forward a single inch. The . . .
Why Misogynists Make Great Informants
This piece on gender violence in social justice movements was originally published in make/shift magazine’s Spring/Summer 2010 issue and written by Courtney Desiree Morris. In January 2009, activists in Austin, Texas, learned that one of their own, a white activist named Brandon Darby, had infiltrated groups protesting the Republican National Convention (RNC) as an FBI informant. Darby later admitted to wearing recording devices at planning meetings and during the convention. He testified on behalf of the government in the February 2009 trial of two Texas activists who were arrested at the RNC on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails, . . .
Freedom Rider: Losers, Suckers and War
Article originally posted on Black Agenda Report Democrats are up in arms over Trump’s latest mouth-burst, but the truth is that both corporate parties have made the people suckers for endless, “bipartisan” wars. Americans certainly love war. Most will deny having those feelings, they will instead talk about warfare as a means of protecting freedom, spreading democracy or fighting tyrants. The end result of course is mass death, mostly of people in far away and non-white lands, but also of significant numbers of Americans. The carnage is usually downplayed in favor of worshipping those who go to kill and perhaps . . .
Community Control of Police v Defunding Police: Addressing the Patriarchal Roots of Policing
Community Control for who? We still have too many hierarchies and contradictions within the Black community to ensure a subset of people with police power would not replicate the same violent institution power. The problem with policing is not who controls it or who can enforce its protocols. The problem with policing is that policing is inherently violent and always patriarchal. Campaigns like #sayhername (though co-opted/erased/reduced to now include #sayhisname) was a recognition that non-cishet men experience police violence. The violence may not be out in the open or in the streets, recording on a cell phone, or public in . . .