“You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come.”– Ella Baker
One of the most important things that the Black Panther Party left us was the survival program. As a roadmap showing how to sustain “survival pending revolution,” the ideological position that is revolutionary intercommunalism is a badge on the legacy of Huey P. Newton. Yet, Huey didn’t make survival programs happen or theorize intercommunalism all by himself. It was the often overlooked and underappreciated labor of Black women who regularly go unnamed in history books that truly made these programs work. This helps us understand the lessons of the past with regard to the old fashioned cocktail that is charismatic leadership, Black nationalism, and patriarchy. As Joy James noted, “Female Panthers displayed an agency that (re)shaped American politics, although their stories recede in popular culture before the narratives of elites or icons.” When we devalue others and their contributions, things can go horribly wrong. This sort of negligence has to be explored and discussed at length because repeating these dangerous patterns can easily hold us back and sabotage our movements.
The role of the organizer is among the many important roles in struggle. Admiration and respect is important for those who visibly wage prolonged and protracted fights in service of liberation. However, the same goes for people doing different things in their respective places. The organizer themself is not the sole person who makes organizing happen. Organizing is made possible when people come together to make it work. There is no hierarchy between the organizer and those less visible: an organizer is not better than the people who are not organizers, nor does it diminish the importance of organization. Furthermore, not everyone is supposed to be an organizer, and overemphasizing one role at the expense of others leads some to lose sight of their specific priorities in relation to a larger movement. It requires a revolutionary view of labor and contribution to hold an understanding of organizing’s symbiotic relationships. After all, even the most revolutionary formations have violated women, queer people, trans people, and disabled people. Despite what they may have said on paper, there are always stories of abuse, mismanagement, and erasure. It indicates that our conflicts are deeper than economic arrangements and/or who controls the state.
As Audre Lorde once wrote in Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface, “In no socialist country that I have visited have I found an absence of racism or of sexism, so the eradication of both of these diseases seems to involve more than the abolition of capitalism as an institution.” Pair that with what Selma James wrote in 1985, in Strangers and Sisters, “Neither feminist separatism nor nationalism, by country or by race, has noticed the women who have provided the backbone of every struggle.” James notes that militant antisexists, anticapitalists, and antiracists consistently fail to recognize the importance of women’s unwaged domestic labor. She also wrote, “Such caring and supporting behind the scenes, since it is just women doing just physical and emotional housework, remains largely uncounted, unhonored and unsung by every movement.” Many of the men that traditionally held (and still hold) the highest positions in radical spaces would have us believe that capitalism is the institution that contains all of the problems we face. This isn’t the case. Many of our problems precede it and will follow its dissolution. The elder Guyanese revolutionary Eusi Kwayana once plainly stated it this way, “Exploitation of man by man does not disappear with capitalism, just as it did not start with capitalism.” Capitalism has to be destroyed, but so do the hierarchical arrangements that enable men to dominate others and dictate who is and isn’t most valuable in our movements. For too long we’ve seen capitalism exploit women in the workplace just for “revolutionary” men to exploit women and children’s unwaged labor at home and in our movement spaces. “The human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism,” writes Silvia Federici. Certain bodies are associated with particular forms of labor. So when we deemphasize the importance of historically gendered forms of labor (social reproduction, childcare, cooking, education), this replicates capitalist relations in what are supposed to be anti-capitalist spaces. We don’t have to keep repeating this dynamic in our practices of liberation.
Everyone is not a soldier in some leader’s army, everyone has a different role to play. We don’t need any aspiring despot who declares what everyone should or shouldn’t be doing from the throne of a central apparatus. What we need is liberation, and that will certainly look different for everyone. After all, everyone has the right to happiness and safety according to their needs when they’re not harming anyone else. It’s telling what kind of movements, nations, and states people aspire to build if they’re already declaring how others should and shouldn’t be organizing their lives before they’ve even actualized their “new” society. Be wary of those that are assigning people jobs and dictating ideological preferences, social relations, and community structure before they’ve realized their goals. This is what leads to the reform of old structures with new names and new administrators, but the same old problems. Cultish dynamics and fetishizing authority can make these issues pop up in any space. This problem will manifest in many ways and it won’t just come from the mouths of men, though its history reeks of misogyny.
In her classic book, Woman at Point Zero, the late Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi describes a former sex worker making the distinction between the revolutionary activist man and men with money writing, “Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money.” For these men, revolution is “something to be abused” and “something to be sold.” We shouldn’t hope to turn movements into personal projects and contests where personalities treat people as territory and expendable material to prove their effectiveness. The repeated appearance of this problem deserves to see a much needed expiration date, though we have to accelerate its demise. The answer is to reject vanguardism and messianic and charismatic leadership models that reproduce the dynamics I write of here. Everyone is important and realizing as much allows us to reject claims that people need a certain kind of discipline, or that spontaneity and self-organization are ineffective.
As revolutionary Black Power theorist Kimathi Mohammed once wrote, “The mistake most Black political leaders make is to view the Black masses as backward, unorganized and undisciplined. That is the attitude which has driven them into the pit of the vanguard party theory. It is also the attitude which literally destroyed the momentum of the ‘Black Power’ movement.” Mohammed draws from C.L.R. James who warned us, “A vanguard is a vanguard only in special circumstances and in relation to certain very special purposes. It has no advantage in itself. There is not, and cannot be, any permanent selection of a group of individuals able to direct the working class.”
Revolution must involve playwrights like Lorraine Hansberry, secretaries like Ella Baker, teachers like Septima Poinsette Clark, grocery store workers like Gloria Richardson, farmers like Fannie Lou Hamer, sex workers like Marsha P. Johnson, and much more. Mothers, sons, undocumented immigrants, domestic workers, the poor, young, elders, and those who are houseless are all vital. People will use their skills to support the movement or contribute in their own ways. Not everyone will be an organizer, but the possibilities of what people can organize through their contributions extend limitlessly beyond the classification. Movements past have been filled with terrors that have been overlooked because of the glorification prearranged narratives offer. Unless we want to repeat their mistakes, we have to admit that all of our heroes weren’t completely heroic: and heroism and leadership as we know them may be part of the problem in the first place. We can find our place and our purpose whether we are educators, planners, writers, caretakers, cooks, janitors, farmers, dancers, or artists. Everyone is not meant to be one person’s vision of the world, they’re meant to be what they choose to be for their life. When we coalesce around the intention of putting our purposes and talents towards a common liberatory goal, that’s revolutionary organization.
Let us thank the educators of all sorts, from preschool to academia who raise up generations and push radical thought in the classroom. Let us thank the writers whose words have the potential to radicalize and spark uprising. Let us thank the cooks and the servers who bring us the food that nourishes our bodies. Let us thank the sanitation workers who remove the trash from our paths every day. Let us thank caretakers and healthcare workers who help our bodies keep going day to day. Let us thank all the people whose labor contributes to making our world move enough so that we can have a movement.