on fielding a revolutionary offensive

The primary goal is to assemble a power base void of centralized leadership. This is not to say that there won't be leadership roles and leaders who push the agenda forward. The fundamental nature and structure of such community bodies should always reflect the basic mantra "one person can't stop the flow". This is for several reason only two of which i will explore in this communique. First and foremost recent activities within the so-called "movement", on the part of repressive agencies such as FBI and local law enforcement, have illustrated to us the danger of having identifiable leadership. We've seen fist fights lives threatened and guns drawn. All of these dysfunctional a-political acts have contributed to creating an environment in which we are all vulnerable to COINTELPRO neutralization. The confusion is what agents of repression thrive on. If we continue at this rate true revolutionary spirits will find themselves in cages or coffins. This is not only a serious threat to our success as a class engaged in class struggle but a threat to the very lives of those who engage in this struggle. The second phenomena I want to address is this celebrity-ism. There are elements within our struggle who seek to create and manipulate political celebrities. Family members who've lost lives to police violence are routinely targeted by organizations and individuals with opportunistic agendas seeking to feed their egos with fame and underhanded hate speak. Family members of historical political leaders and revolutionaries are targeted as well albeit to a lesser degree. Through theses individuals war is waged on our efforts. The puppet master is often underestimated or down right invisible to the naked eye. Confronting these forces has proved disastrous as well. This fire that's burning in our house must be suffocated. We must not fan the flames or allow it the air it needs to continue. There is a lot of personal beef and hearsay going on in the bay area concerning those involved in this struggle it must end in the most expedient fashion. The legitimacy of an organization should be based on the work they do in a specific place rather than being based one what "celebrity" is in a particular organization. Malcolm X as well as the Republic of New Afrika have outlined for us that any revolution that takes place must be based on and grounded in first and foremost the land which a particular people occupy. We most form collectives and community bodies based on the neighborhoods that we occupy rather than being based on a city or territory defined by the colonial regime. One of my teachers once taught me that to prevail in the game of chess i had to shift my focus from moving and taking the pieces to a broader perspective of controlling the squares on the board. If every piece holds down their square or their field of squares than victory becomes that much more attainable. It's time for us to hold down our squares and stop focusing so much on high profile pieces.

The Post Modern Kitchenette

Well we have officially entered the age of the Post Modern Kitchenette. For Black people migrating to the North from the South during the Great Black Migration the kitchenette came to symbolize the transition from living under the threat of lynching by peckerwoods with guns to living under the threat of murder by the police in the confinement of a single room apartment. While those poor Black folks from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas, in fact all of the Deep South, took the risk to strike out for the “Promised Land” for a chance at freedom, what the vast majority of them found was the cramped space of the kitchenette.

The kitchenette was most often a single room apartment, similar to what we might call a studio apartment today, however the kitchenette usually only had a hot plate and maybe a food cooler, thus the kitchenette and not kitchen. For the courageous Black folks that had the skill to escape to the North (I say escape because whites would arrest and lynch Blacks attempting to leave the sharecropping plantations) found themselves living sometimes 9 or 10 people to a kitchenette. The kitchenette was little more than a prison cell that people were overcharged for. Black folks in the North didn’t have white people lynching them in the public square, instead they faced a racist apparatus of Civil Society in everything from the hiring boss on the loading dock or business agent at the local union hall to the policeman on his beat. The current economic crisis is making the return to life in the kitchenette inevitable for Black folks.

We may have thought those days had passed, or at least some of us may have, but the economic downturn will do what the White Supremacist of the World have been longing for. And that is to put Niggers in their place. The poverty and oppression associated with kitchenette made it possible to contain Black folks without having to put them all behind prison wall, not that they wouldn’t, but the kitchenette made containment more cost effective.

Some of us have never believed we had made it to anything like freedom. Those of us who worked on construction sites, loading docks, or anywhere that is not part of the official state, knew that in the mind of working class peckerwoods little had changed since the sharecropping era. No matter how much skill and no matter what the law says the rules of the American game are set by the peckerwood. Now once again the peckerwood is on the rise through what Obama is calling a compromise deal on the Debt Ceiling. With this deal we will see not only the continued closing of economic opportunity for Black working class, which is the vast majority of Black folks, but a coming crisis that we never thought possible after the election of a Black President.

The kitchenette is coming for those it hasn’t captured yet. The new economic reality has made it possible to see that type of confinement reemerge. The economy that leaves at least 20% of Black folks unemployed will have most of us living in what can only be called kitchenette conditions. If we are not behind the prison wall then we are captured or waiting to be captured and brought back to a Nigger’s place in the Obama era of US politics. Hard times have been with Black folks ever since we got here, but, in an era when we have lost the collective sense of our struggle we are about to descend to a whole new level of hell.

Let’s remember that we do not have any sort of coherent radical Black movement. We may be working to get one, we may be getting the word out about our oppression and the ways this has come about, but we do not have a movement and we Black folks are not on the move. What we have is East v West funk, North v South funk, and Black people prepared to murder another Black person for the pettiest reason, so some of us, perhaps most of us, have no sense of the hell that is coming when these Tea Party peckerwoods get done beating the anemic white Left and Obama down. It’s time to plan; it’s time to understand that what is at stake is more than has ever been before. The policy that Obama signed into law will leave us in a condition akin to what Belgium did in the Congo or South Africa after Apartheid, we will be blamed for our on destruction and there will be no civilians.

Day Dreaming and I'm Thinking of US

I’ve been reading memoirs of African American men from the 1960’s and 70s, Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, Soledad Brother by George Jackson, Bad by James Carr, and thinking about the ways so much of the experiences they describe are the same today. It seems as if time is frozen on the one hand and magical on the other. I don’t me magical in the sense that suddenly out of nowhere a savior comes in the form of a benevolent creature and saves us. I mean the sinister magic that makes time repeat, the lived experience of the Black is the same today as it was yesterday, last week, last year, the last century, the last president. I’m reading and watching the ways that Black folks are dying while watching Barack Obama justify policies that will only accelerate the deaths of young and old Black folks and I feel as if I’m caught in a cognitive fog. How can it be that so much trouble is visited on the lives of Black folks and yet I’m watching a Black man sign the death warrants of poor Black folks? I feel a distortion, I feel a distortion in my thinking, my vision is confusing me, I’m focused on the wrong thing, I’m giving too much attention to the death cries of the “Truly Disadvantaged.” I’m telling myself I need to be more pragmatic, I must find a way to put my mind at work on the problem, I need to be helping the Black folks that aren’t in the position of having the education that I do… They must learn new ways. New ways, what would that look like? I must not resist the overwhelming force of a capitalist political economy and find a way to adapt, find a way to freedom in the marketplace… And then I remember that not so long ago my body stood on a block and was exchanged for so many, hogs, bales of cotton, votes, votes? I remember what a political science instructor told my class “No one ever voted themselves free.” No one is going to vote us free? The marketplace is where I’m bought, sold, exchanged for votes. Now the magic is making me repeat the questions of the Black men who came before me, "For where does one run when he's already in the Promised Land?"

Brown, Claude. 1965. Manchild in the promised land New York,: Macmillan. p.8

Quote of the Week #7

To SFPD: Fuck the police.
--black people everywhere

Quote of the Week #6

"People kill me talking about niggers is lazy. Niggers is the most hard-working people in the world. Worked three hundred years for free. And didn't take no lunch hour."
--Holloway in August Wilson's Two Trains Running

Quote of the Week #5

"There cannot be relations of power [as opposed to domination] unless subjects are free. If one were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty."
--Michel Foucault, The Final Foucault (quoted on p. 55 in Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America)

Quote of the Week #4

“They were called the Black Panthers for Self-Defense, and that word ‘self-defense’ is all I needed to hear. It’s what the elders kept telling me. Who’ll defend the black man if he won’t defend himself? The hair stood up on my neck when Bunchy read me a line from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison: ‘Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.’ Bunchy said, “Even better, be the fucking lion!’

Geronimo Pratt