Re: the white (and/or male) communist

"But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on." - Vladimir Lenin

“Battle of San Domingo,” January Suchodolski

I’m willing to bet that you read the title of this article and at least a tiny part of you went “uh-oh”. You’re probably experiencing anticipation in regards to what exactly a Black queer American has to say about white (and/or male) communists. Depending on your assigned identity, this anticipation may be manifesting as excitement for a potential takedown, fear of being reprimanded, or eagerness to dismiss this entire argument as the woefully misinterpreted “identity politics.”

These thoughts have been brewing within me for quite some time, and I’m at the point in my life where if something needs to be said, I will no longer hold my tongue. The fate of the world depends on us calling out damaging tendencies whenever and wherever we see them, otherwise there will be no chance for survival. Over the past six months or so, I’ve come to realize that the public cares about what I have to say and that my words have repeatedly inspired others to change their behavior. Some would call this a talent, but I personally see it as power. Consider this piece my wielding of that power to advance the masses in the struggle of toppling the imperialist empire.

In June of this year, I was put on to the fact that there are indeed communists in America, and they’re in the process of getting organized. As a liberation-focused individual, I jumped at the opportunity to meet with likeminded people who have the drive and social/political understanding to free the masses of their chains. I wasn’t too daunted by the fact that the space I was entering was almost entirely white and mostly male, as this was a routine experience for me throughout my advanced courses within capitalist academia.

“These are communists!” I assured myself. “The overthrow of the empire will require those with the most privilege to leverage it on behalf of those who have none, so surely these men and white people have at least begun to deconstruct their capitalist imposed superiority complexes, right?”

Wrong, baby. Wrong as hell.

Let’s just rip the bandaid off: if you’re a white man, you fundamentally lack the ability to understand what true liberation looks like because people who look like you have never been enslaved. You can read about it in books all day, but you lack the specific lived experience of what it means to be persecuted strictly on the basis of your identity, and what it means to fight to the death for your freedom as all of your ancestors have done before you.

The struggle based on the fact that you have to clock into a job you dislike so someone else can profit off of your labor is the only struggle you know. The class struggle is commonly referred to as the foundation on which all oppression is based, which is true, but it’s been severely misinterpreted by white male communists as the only struggle that should have space in the liberation of oppressed people, which is fundamentally untrue.

I was a girl scout when I was a child, and I was always eager to engage in as many activities as possible to receive the accompanying patch for my vest. I remember looking up to the older girls who had rows and rows of patches that I had never seen before. There were even a few event specific patches that could not be replicated or given to anyone else, because the patch was only awarded to those who were there to experience the activity. Therein lies the basis for the commonly used reply to someone who cannot properly grasp the context of a situation due to not experiencing the material reality of said situation: “You just had to be there.”

Most people have to clock in to work five days a week, and will be there for least half of their waking hours on those days. These people make up the working class, and if we are staying within the realm of girl scouts, every single one of them would have a “capitalism” patch. All of these people can and should be aware of the presence of this patch, because they all have lived experience that justifies their possession of it.

Even so, many people within the working class have additional patches to represent further oppression they have experienced as a material reality. If I were to list mine, I’d also have “misogyny,” “structural racism,” which therefore inevitably spawns “anti-black racism” and “homophobia.” The fact that I have physically experienced oppression in multiple systematic ways is objectively traumatizing, but it also means I’m more primed for the fight ahead because I have a stronger and more diverse understanding of how exactly this evil works.

The problem arises when someone who only has the “capitalism” and “finished Das Kapital” patches thinks they understand oppression better than I do. As in, they are (subconsciously or not) basing their ability to fight through hardship on how many books they’ve read and are deeming it to be more adept than my ability, as a person who has actually fought through years of multi-layered and structurally enforced hardship.

None of us can control the situations we are born into or the body that we end up inhabiting. Human consciousness is the most serendipitous miraculous experience, if you ask me. Because literally like…what even is this? The only things we’ve been able to know for sure are that the way we experience consciousness depends on what is happening around us, and further, how the people in our immediate vicinity perceive us. Capitalism seeks to categorize these perceptions into socially-assigned “identities,” which is meant to dictate which conditions are or are not tolerable for people of the varies “identities.” This categorization of our perceptions explicitly only serves the oppressor. We’re all just bags of blood and bone, but the acknowledgement of this reality has been driven into oblescence by the current conditions.

The only reality we can acknowledge is that some people have to be conscious about what they wear in public to avoid harassment by other specific people. Certain folks have consistently had their land stolen by other certain folks. There are only some of us who have to bear the crushing weight of the fact that the state could rip us limb from limb on live television, just because they have the power to, and nothing would fundamentally change afterward. The identities of these people dictates the way the material world treats them.

But what is the world, if it is not us? What are these systems, if not our oppressors making our chains invisible so it’s harder to see when they are strangling us? And that our oppressors revel in our thrashing amongst these invisible chains, because when we thrash, we strangle each other? Hierarchal structures have been imbued into our society, and we’re now at the point that they have become innate and we uphold them without a second thought.

But it’s the second thought that changes everything. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the most revolutionary thing that you can do is something different. It is only through changing ourselves that the world changes, because we are the world. It’s not about what we are idealistically intending to do, but rather the things we materially do that affect our reality.

Stafford Beer, a British theorist and academic, said that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” This led to the coining of the heuristic POSIWID, which stands for “The purpose of a system is what it does.” It doesn’t matter if you are not intending to uphold the systems that cause harm, it only matters if your actions are indeed systematically harmful to others. In short: impact over intent, every time.

I don’t care if it’s not the intention; if men and white people are taking up the majority of a space, and they are not actively clearing room for viewpoints that don’t come from men and white people, then this is a manifestation of patriarchy and white supremacy. There is no room for debate on this.

Equity is about understanding the ways in which the scales have been tilted and then intentionally seeking to rebalance them. One cannot just say “we’re all equal here” while doing no work to make that a material reality. The reason that the Bolsheviks (the party who installed the first worker’s government in Russia around 100 years ago) were able to adopt the “equality” mindset without too much fuss is because there were significantly less perceivable differences in identities amongst comrades.

In other words, it’s very easy to focus exclusively on the class struggle when most of your comrades are men and all of them are caucasian, in a country made up almost entirely of non-melanated individuals. The basis for the race-based oppression we have today did not exist in Russia back then, therefore the learnings from the Bolshevik revolution will always critically lack battle-tested methodology on how to fight it. It must be supplemented with knowledge from other movements to get the full picture of how to tackle this oppressive beast, otherwise our efforts are dead on arrival.

Contrary to what you may believe, oppressed people were breaking free of their chains decades before the Bolsheviks even came to be. Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks contributed priceless knowledge and thought to how we understand the revolutionary labor struggle, but to posit these contributions as the only ones that deserve significant study is, once again, white supremacy manifesting.

And no, there’s still no room for debate on this. I’d like to once again remind you of POSIWID. Even if this is not what you are specifically setting out to do, if that is what you are doing anyway, the harm caused remains the same.

Now if you’re a white and/or male communist, what you’ve read so far may be causing you to experience a level of distress. This is your ego instinctively resisting new information that challenges your current worldview, because if this new information is true, it means you’ve participated in oppressing others without even knowing it. What’s more, this has all happened during a period of time during which you believed it to be impossible for you to contribute to the oppression of others because “you know better.”

Unfortunately comrade, you don’t.

This is the one place I got y’all. This is the one time that you actually can’t check me on anything. And y’all are not used to that. It’s a foreign experience that your body instinctively rejects because you have been socialized in an environmental that is inherently anti-black and misogynistic. Whether you realize it our not, the discomfort you may be experiencing is your white supremacist and patriarchal conditioning pushing you to reject the idea that a Black woman could be better equipped to do something than you are.

I’m sorry that everything you’ve come to believe about who you are was built on an oppressive lie. It’s a horrific reality. I personally uncover a new way this lie has manifested every day and it drains my soul, but as communists know, it is through the conflict that we advance. Everything turns into it’s opposite, because it must.

When Jesus said “for the first shall be last and the last shall be first”, what did he state if not a perfectly dialectical materialist argument (as reinforced by Alan Woods, 38:55)? We are creating a reality and conditions that have never existed in this world before. It will require us to relinquish our long held beliefs and tendencies so that we can effectively change our surroundings. We will not succeed in this immense struggle if our methods categorically stay the same.

The perspectives that prioritize the ego and unrelinquishing control are the ones that brought us capitalist hell, so they will have no place on our journey to reach the promised land. None of this is about what makes you personally feel the best, but rather what will inspire the masses to free themselves of their chains and fight for the life they deserve.

I’m saying all of this because I want to make it clear that I’m not going anywhere. I will do this work until I die, so that means I’m going to be running in the same circles as men and white people who also identify as communists. Y’all literally could not get rid of me if you tried. So, I’m trying to make it easier for us in the future, so that this isn’t a conversation we need to keep having because y’all keep hurting people due to not deconstructing your ability to wield the power of oppressive systems.

When we’re talking about liberation, you either need to come correct or not come at all. This shit truly is not for everyone. If you cannot understand your ability to cause harm to others regardless of your intention, you frankly have no business being in this space, and I absolutely will tell you about your behavior.

So, if you really want to stand on business about your liberation work, you will take all of this on the chin, think about it, internalize it, and then ask me whatever questions you have. It is imperative that we are crystal clear on this. The fate of the world hinges on your ability to reject the influence that these archaic systems have over you so that we can truly unite.

Because it is only once we are in sync, once we have unraveled the invisible restraints from around our throats and can finally breathe around one another again, that we will finally possess the power to break our chains, once and for all.

With love,

Your G.F. x