If you’ve been following my blog for a minute you know that up until this post I identified with being a black prole. I looked at moments (of an accumulative process located in black movement) like the uprisings that took place over the murder of George Floyd, the Rodney King riots, and Ferguson as moments where proletarians, who are only ever meaningful in this country because of the labor they provide, came together to fight back against the white supremacist state. But it always felt funny to me then, and the meaning is crystallizing now. I realize that though there are some proletarians in the streets, they certainly weren’t any kind of catalysts or primary force of the movements and rhythms I have witnessed in my lifetime. And I realized this through a number of things I have learned.
Firstly, I’ve learned that anti-blackness precedes the white supremacist, white racial state. So an effort to end the white supremacist state does not mean that non-black proletarians in the streets and beyond want to end anti-blackness. In fact, they cannot end anti-blackness, nor can they be in solidarity with us. I’ve written before about how solidarity is a sham because it creates a closed dialectic between blackness/anti-blackness. Non-blacks cannot hope to address anti-blackness when they pay no attention to the currents of blackness they consume.
Secondly, I’ve learned that there are so many managers of the revolution. So many. These managers want the end of this world, but in the same instant want a coterminous world based on their demands. Simply put, they desire a better, more efficient state still fueled by anti-blackness, namely, the exploitation and consumption of black people to the point where we become flattened. This is why we see so many pieces being written by non-black communists today such as endnotes, the vitalists, ill-will, decrying ID politics in an ahistorical fashion, theorizing on the George Floyd rebellions through the pinhole of “multi-racial revolt.” Of course their death drive moves towards civil war.
Third, claims of anti-work from nonblack communists and anarchists must reckon with the slave or they are useless. Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism writes, “. . . the African and Afro-American agrarian workers had supplied the critical surplus value that supported the transformation of the economy into an industrialized and ultimately capital-intensive one.” This is one way it can be read in a Marxist lens, but in a lens that is more palatable to how I’m feeling these days, it makes more sense for me to think about these black “workers” as slaves. The transformation of the Amerikan economy into a “capital-intensive one”, was because of the slave (and this is not just in the USA, but the entire Americas). Thus, there is something fundamentally different about the way a so-called black labor has developed in the Americas, and it cannot be captured and flattened by the proletarian. Explorations of anti-work that do not engage with these histories and ongoing functions succumb to circular Marxist arguments. But that’s the thing: all they can do is reckon; they cannot go beyond this mode of engagement or it would mean their internal and then external destruction
Thus all black struggle in the Americas is the extension of slave revolt. That is something that cannot be resolved until every plantation burns, until every settler dies. Until then, catch me playing trumpet. We only have ourselves black fam.
Love