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What is "Mutual Aid" from nonblacks if not slavery persevering?
🕑 Added 2021-10-10 01:48:58 +0000 UTCSummer 2020 came with the largest slave revolt in years in the United States. It also came with calls for “solidarity” and “mutual aid” from nonblack people. We were told this “mutual aid” was different from charity. Maybe we should revisit this distinction and see just how well it tracks onto whatever it is that nonblacks are attempting to accomplish here.
Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas defines mutual aid as “a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for the mutual benefit of everyone.” This is distinguished from charity in that it “does not imply moral superiority of the giver over the receiver.” Further, “Mutual Aid is based on the principle of investing in our communities now, for a return later. Under capitalism, the person who offers aid today may be the person who needs Aid tomorrow.” This “voluntary reciprocal exchange” is distinct from a transaction in the sense that it is not a case of two individuals who find themselves temporarily finding their interests aligned by having something the other wants, but rather it is defined by fostering a connection that is carried well into the future because they both find themselves lacking for something under a system and structures that rob and plunder them in service of others. Therefore, I would like to briefly interject and place this exchange under a microscope within a culture of anti-Blackness.
Mutual aid from nonblacks in conjunction with Black people is impossible without the former undergoing class suicide. What does this mean? In its original conception as a theory developed by Bissau-Guinean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, class suicide referers to the necessity for the petite-bourgeois within periphery countries to engage in revolution with the ultimate goal to eliminate their own class entirely, rather than aspiring to become members of the national brougeoisie, and therefore forge alliance with the proletariat, peasantry, and those shut out of the “legal” economic forces, i.e. the lumpen. I as well as other Black transmisogyny-affected (TMA) people have extended this concept of class suicide to refer to the necessity of those white (nonblack) and transmisogyny-exempt (TME) people to become revolutionary accomplices to materially go against their class interests and to wage struggle that would abolish their very class positionalities respectively.
Therefore, mutual aid is not in and of itself class suicide. It is true that capitalism can leave those nonblack in “lacking”, but it is precisely within this “lacking” that they find meaning through an attempt to “conquer” said lacking. In response to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting slave revolt, of course nonblacks would choose a “mutual aid” that eschews class suicide. Some of us noted that an example of true mutual aid occurred in the very city Floyd was murdered in—“looting” occurred and from that looting, resources were exchanged and redistributed to communities. In response, what did the nonblack left do? They did what they do best, they engaged in mere tailism and an “abolitionist” agenda that was firmly to the right of those Black and representing the deepest, true masses of this country who wanted to burn shit down and take everything that they were owed.
It is in that word, everything, that we find the source for the deep-rooted anxieties of the nonblack Left. As the anonymous slave that was captured by French military forces during the Haitian Revolution stated, "we have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour”. What are, therefore, the implications for this when what Black people have cultivated, both through our physical labor and also through the enjoyment of our bodies, this very World, this very plantationocene which has stretched the slave plantation to infest every facet of society, from the structural and institutional, to the interpersonal. What does it mean, therefore, for us to recognize that for nonblack leftists, including those deemed “people of color”, whose background includes wealth built from the labor of Black slaves compelled under the whip, that said wealth is included within “everything” that is to be burned?
I’ve noted before that the utter lack of existing revolutionary infrastructure that could propel a “spontaneous” slave revolt into a full-scale revolution is a fundamental problem endemic within the US left’s desire to engage in tailism, and at this point, it would appear that this is, at least to some degree, intentional. See, the only form of “violence” nonblack leftists seem to be interested in is adventurism that’s completely divorced from the Black masses they proclaim to “represent”, or facilitating endless marches and protests that result in a few of them getting arrested—something they will actively revel in with pride. But this form of violence doesn’t liberate Black people— and it does not liberate Black people precisely because this is a part of a broader desire to control, direct, and usually mitigate Black violence.
“Mutual aid” from nonblack people without class suicide is a logical conclusion of the broader left’s obsession with non-profits which replicate the State’s inherent desire for self-preservation through channeling ostensibly radical/revolutionary energy into ventures that do not materially address the very structures, institutions, systems and interpersonal relationships that engender violence against marginalized Black people because non-profits and the State require all of them to exist. Nonblack people therefore, in a cruel irony, engage in “mutual aid” with Black people without class suicide as a means to not only preserve anti-Blackness, but to also further the project of perfecting slavery. Fearful of the full, violent reckoning with slavery that America has tried to pave over since its inception, nonblack people do not engage in mutual aid with Black people with the goal that perhaps we will offer aid at a later time. How could we, considering that their very livelihood is constructed upon our endless and perpetual abjection?
This is the violence endemic within the trap of Time, the mythos of Progress, and the consequent reassurances from nonblack people that freedom is “just around the corner”. In the meantime, we are meant to serve nonblack leftists, feed them the fruits of our labor and then beg them for scraps later while they their lives able to laugh and fraternize with their family knowing damn well that they mutter anti-Black slurs under the breath and chase proximity to whiteness as closely as possible through distancing themselves from Blackness. They seek out their own personal Black knights who will personally shield them from claims of anti-Blackness out of desperate pursuit to chase white(non-Black)ness. They point out to their mutual aid efforts to implicitly, if not explicitly, deride poor Black trans people who dare challenge them as being “greedy”, “needy”, and “ungrateful.”
Boiling just under the surface is their almost unquenchable thirst to channel the imagery of anti-Black Coon Caricature. Black people implicitly know we’re being fucked over by everyone, including the nonblack left. Nonblacks engage with us with the expectation from jump that we carry everything upon our backs and any failure to do so is supposed evidence that Black people are the “stumbling block” that “prevents [P]rogress”. This sentiment infects both organizing more broadly and interpersonal relationships within these spaces. Nonblack people can therefore steal from, abuse, and discard Black (esp those most marginalized) people with impunity. This never truly disrupts “the Work”, because this is “the Work”. “The Work” as justification for the perpetual kicking-the-can-down-the-road that requires the stifling of Black rage and excuse for nonblack leftists complicity in this process is precisely a crucial aspect of the engine that fuels what Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin conceptualizes as the Progressive Plantation. Fuck “the Work” from nonblacks, “people of color” included. Steal from your parents and redistribute shit to Black people. Fight your fellow nonblack POCs who express the slightest hint of anti-Blackness. Do everything in your power to take the load off of Black people’s backs so the fires of Haiti can be rekindled once more and burn the global plantation to the ground for good.
