In moments of political upheaval and widespread popular uprising, it’s the job of a progressive organization to resist getting swept up in swelling action and continue to look steadily toward the future – to the consequences of our current moment and to the inevitable ebbing of energy and enthusiasm that activism tends to dead-end into. Over the last ten years, we’ve seen several uprisings: Occupy Wallstreet, the BLM protests in response to the murder of countless innocent people, the Women’s March, the Stoneman Douglas mobilizations, and now the resurgence of anti-racist struggles in the form of the Movement for Black Lives. Our task shouldn’t be to paint any of these uprisings with a broad brush or to reduce them to their outcomes. They each have their own source, their individual contradictions, and their present-day realities. But we can’t afford to lose more lives, to fall deeper into our domination, or to give away more of our power. We must resist the global tyranny of the capitalist class for the liberation of all people! As people calling for the transformation of society and engaged in a practice that attempts to aid in that struggle, we must look critically at these actions and reflect on the way forward.
One Struggle members have engaged in the protests and marches that have been going on since late May. As an organization, we go to any event with a perspective and an objective. In this case, we wanted to show the connection between racism, capitalism, and imperialism as well as help to organize folks independent of NGOs and political parties, based on political unity. We also took the opportunity to apply ourselves to the constant process of questioning, reviewing, and adjusting our practices and theories based on experience – this is how we struggle to construct our own path forward, something we see people genuinely craving and striving for. We see this craving when people taking to the streets acknowledge the systemic violence inherent to policing, the criminal justice system, and even the government’s response to the pandemic. We see their efforts to construct new structures in how they provided food, protection, and care for each other.
People taking to the streets and resisting state violence is positive and necessary, but it cannot be ignored that the political current of these protests is completely dominated by NGOs. These non-profit organizations get financial backing from the very people and entities they appear to call out. Their members lead chants of “eat the rich” while the organization accepts hundreds of thousands of dollars from the TIDES foundation, a donor-guided charity consultation firm that aids in tax write-offs for the rich and the dissemination of liberal capitalist agendas. Their people call for “community care” while the non-profit business works within and promotes the corporate structures they claim to reject. In these spaces, leadership looks like cults of personality and organizing looks like Insta-ready protest brands. We saw a protest leader brandish rubber bullet wounds and then shake a cop’s hand; we saw them calling for revolution and then announcing their intentions to run for office. We heard them chanting “no justice, no peace” while demanding peaceful protests. For these “organizers”, anyone in the street is a revolutionary as long as they do what they tell them to do and follow their script. Those with truly transformative energy are drawn to these big-dollar-backed performances of combativity, then bogged down with phone-banking and canvassing for an electable “revolution.” But these NGOs will never come together to construct a real revolution because these covertly corporate-run organizations will never give us the tools to understand what revolution actually is.
To be clear, anyone in the people’s camp has the potential to be a revolutionary – but that potential starts with the acknowledgement that revolution is not a “system upgrade,” but the complete destruction of how our society currently runs and the construction of new economies, ideologies, and social relationships. We are not looking to repeat the Civil Rights Movement. If anything, that struggle, fought to the death of many of its leaders, shows us how anything short of abolishing the dictatorship of the capitalist class and bringing a complete transformation of society will only re-hash oppressions of all stripes for the benefit of global exploitation and domination. This can only result in bringing further violence and death to those who stand in the face of that ruling class power. We have seen this lived out today on protestors all around the country, by the hands of the state or of reactionary soldiers of fascism. And yet NGOs would still lead us into the capitalist playing field of divestments and re-investments, hoping for the benevolent crumbs of “good” politicians and lobbyists. For us, our independence from NGOs and their bogus politics was completely confirmed through these experiences.
What One Struggle members also noticed as a dominant force in these protests was identity politics. There is a difference between fighting back against a violent and repressive capitalist ideology and believing your identity dictates your politics. We agree with the need to protest, to expose this country’s history of stoking divisions, and to weaken the historically racist gang that guards our state. We do not agree that the leadership of any given race, sexuality, gender identity, or ethnicity should trump the leadership of progressive ideas and politics. Despite what may have been progressive struggles of the past, we are not fighting for inclusion in an economy that violently exploits people all over the globe. This doesn’t mean we won’t fight to protect the vulnerable and resist our domination and exploitation, but these struggles must first have the objective of weakening our class enemies and exposing the rotten class interests at the core of our society. We can’t afford to opportunistically win people over to our side while ignoring that the core of our individual oppressions is class struggle.
Assigning roles based on skin color is at best undemocratic and at worst fascistic. It was undemocratic of POC organizers to invite police chiefs to “dialogue” with victims of police brutality at one protest. When we were asked to procure a Black speaker to represent our organization at another event, we felt it was not only undemocratic, but also went against our principles of political unity. In spite of this disagreement, we moved forward with protest organizers in what we realize now was a disorganized and opportunistic assumption of unity on our part. What we witnessed at that mobilization confirmed the fascistic tendencies of identity politics as well: one protestor was bum-rushed under the pretense that he was “undercover” simply because he was white, and the One Struggle speaker who was planned to speak was almost denied the mic at the last minute purely based on their skin color. Before OS had the opportunity to speak, our words were read without credit by someone not even affiliated with our organization. This experience showed us our need to fight for unity and resist unprincipled collaborations, as well as the reality that organizing based solely on identity will always get us stuck in the same rut. Without a clear objective to expose racism AND identity politics as a tool of the ruling class to dominate us, we’ll only continue to feed into the use of political and social clout as a new form of personal property and status forged by petit bourgeois class struggle.
At this moment, progressive politics requires resistance against imperialism. While many organizations and people claim to be anti-imperialist, further development of what that means is hard to come by. The reality is that an awareness of how we benefit from international exploitation was practically non-existent at these protests. Speakers shouted “free Palestine” and gathered outside the building that houses the offices of the Consulate to Israel, but hardly ever spoke about our own role as the consumers of goods made by workers all over the world who can’t afford to eat, or stay sheltered, or protect themselves against COVID. We certainly have our own problems, but without a thorough understanding of how every aspect of our lives is built on the subjugation of the international working class, our struggles will continue to play into the hands of imperialists everywhere, ready to throw us a bone wrenched from the bodies of dominated countries. This limitation of the popular conversation exposes the glaring problem with having a movement supported by “benevolent” rich folks’ money – liberal or conservative, capitalists benefit from the imperialist arrangement and have no intention of seeing it challenged.
In fighting for the creation of a new society, we cannot rehash or rearrange the roles we’ve been forced to play by the ruling class and call it justice. We cannot repeat history and call it progress. We cannot ignore our role in dominating and exploiting workers all over the world for our comfort and supposed freedom, then claim solidarity. Our only option is to fight for our own capacity to build progressive alternatives in the interests of the people, not capitalists and imperialists. We are still struggling to build unity around and bring a global class perspective that fights racism and other identity-based oppressions in a progressive way. We will push forward, but we also need to build out, helping to grow more organization that doesn’t funnel right back into gentrification, state violence, and imperialist expansion. We must create structures capable of actually resisting those who would capitalize on our struggle and twist it to their benefit, and call out and expose those organizations that will cosplay as radical to stifle our power. It’s not just cops who don’t serve or protect us – every cog in our government and those functioning all over the world work to keep this backwards arrangement running for the continued profit and power of the ruling class.
The path to a mass movement won’t be paved with capitalist interests! We must build independent organizations in our neighborhoods, our schools, our workplaces, and our homes that can lend solidarity and build networks strong enough to bring about a mass movement against capitalism and imperialism. We must fortify ourselves for a struggle that is one day capable of destroying the dead and rotting ideologies and structures of imperialism and capitalism – and that is also capable of conceptualizing and growing new ideologies and new structures. This starts with us banding together and fighting in our interests, and in the interests of our people all over the world. Our enemy is powerful and organized, but we have greater strength in working together.
If this resonates with you and you want to get involved, or if you have any disagreements or criticism, we welcome your struggle!
STAND UP. FIGHT BACK. ORGANIZE!
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