#black autonomy

It’s the hallmark of stupidity and entitlement to look at an individual or group of individuals who have been dehumanized and call them infants or criminals when they “surprisingly” choose autonomy and boundaries over “maturity” and “normalcy” or defense and hostility over “legality” and “the common good”.

We as activists, as organizers, have to make ourselves and our communities ungovernable. I know you’ve heard that term before. That means what it says. We have to make it so that we create a new kind of political system of our own, whether it’s dual power or revolutionary direct democracy, whatever we want to call it in this period. We need to create that kind of movement, a mass anti-fascist movement on one hand. And on the other hand, we need to have the capacity on a mass scale to build a community-based mass economic survival tendency, based on cooperatives in the ghetto for housing the poor, rebuilding the cities, and taking care of the material needs of the poor. We need to be able to build that. I’m not opposed to some of these groups that are coming about because although not now radical, potentially they could turn into something else. But what needs to happen is that we need to be reaching the masses of urban poor people with these programs. We’re not fighting just to have a cult or a group, or some leaders. We’re fighting to put power in the hands of the people in a new society. Presumably, revolutionaries know some things in some areas of organizing that people don’t know. So we need to be training them, we need to be equipping them to be independent of this political structure. I also think the Black Panther Party was right, we need to have survival programs and we need to be going beyond just what they had. We should be trying to build the survival economy in this period right now. We should go from this period where there are some people who understand or are practicing mutual aid, but the masses do not. So we need to go beyond “just helping,” to working toward some sort of different economy, a survival economy on the way to full on anarchist communism. Maybe that’s the name we know of, as anarchists, but in some parts of the world, they call it a “solidarity economy” to help them survive capitalism. Whatever it’s called, we need to have that so we’re not totally dependent on the capitalist state. I don’t claim to know it all, but I do know some things and I know one thing that’s not going to work—is when you allow the same corrupt, racist cops to claim that they’re reformed now or you got the same politicians claiming “Well, this is not the same system, we’ve never found a way to defund the police, but we’re reorganizing it, so be patient!” George Jackson, a radical prisoner in California and member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960’s, himself, said that such police or prison reforms are nothing but the further rise of fascism. They help fascism become acceptable to the people.