There was an article published by a South Asian academic that said the following:
“Let it be said clearly: the George Floyd Rebellion is the new criterion to which all theories and politics must be held to account. Not to tenure demands, not to academic journals, not to a community of so-called scholars, but the fire and heat of the proletarian struggle. They must answer to the demands of riots, strikes, occupations, blockades, insurrections, war, and revolution. And in this regard, it must be admitted that the results have so far been a disaster. Black Marxism, Afro-pessimism, Black Anarchism, and Black Feminism have all been put to the test in this uprising, and all have failed. These theories have had little to no meaningful impact on the Black proletariat. ” A man who has flattened black life to shit he’s read in a CLR James book
I find this quote reprehensible, vile, disgusting. It reveals the dirty trappings of non-black people (especially academics) who are obsessed with black struggle, or rather, the idea of black people struggling. For this lost writer, one gets the sense that black struggle can only be valid in revolutionary terms by being the Haitian revolution. People like this who are enamored by the idea of black struggle as disharmonious with black life (notice how all of this language pushes towards nothing but the revolution, nothing but the black proletariat; but not black life now and after the revolution, not black people) tire me greatly. It is because this writer does not understand black life and blackness beyond struggle that they conflate the so-called disasters of the black isms they list with the fact that, to think with Kamau Brathwaite and Christina Sharpe, everything that has happened after slavery and the Middle Passage is part of an ongoing catastrophe. So the claim that these isms have failed to provide the black proletariat with anything meaningful, when we are already at the center of catastrophe at every waking moment, is insulting in its confused flattening for the sake of sounding like they know anything about what black proletarians are engaging with. Black feminism for instance has not failed because it does not exist as a fucking teleology. And this is the problem when you try to fit black life into your narrow revolutionary aims. It all has to be teleological, ending with revolution. Which, coming from the author of this quote, speaking for myself as a black proletarian, I want absolutely nothing to do with. As Ashanti Alston writes: “Every time I hear someone talk about my people as if we are just some “working class” or “proletariat” I wanna get as far away from that person or group as possible, anarchist, Marxist, whatever.”