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Title: Let Empire collapse
Author: Mohamed Abdou
Date: November 2, 2020
Language: en
Topics: Empire, decolonization, revolution, liberation, land struggles, USA
Source: Retrieved on 4th November 2020 from https://roarmag.org/essays/let-empire-collapse-why-we-need-a-decolonial-revolution/

Mohamed Abdou

Let Empire collapse

I am part of a We that says: “Let Empire collapse.” A We that says to

build alternatives to Empire, we must expose the illegitimacy of the

dreadful dream we are in. Instead of trying to shore or salvage the

world as it is, we need to recognize with Audre Lorde that “the master’s

tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

I am part of a We that says: “We love and respect you, Angela Davis and

your behemoth ongoing legacy of indispensable teachings that are

fundamental to the centuries-old struggle we confront,” but we will not

be castigated into voting or fall into the trap of “lesser of two evil”

arguments that have been critiqued time and time again.

We do not buy the story that we are at a crossroads and have the

opportunity to finally fulfill America’s promise by ushering in a new

era of Dwight D. Eisenhower-inspired eco-friendly dominance. We are not

fooled by the repackaged, false, liberal-progressive hope of a Joe

Biden-Kamala Harris-Bernie Sanders coalition that normalizes — rather

than contends with — America’s imperialist settler-colonial existence.

And which by design cannot allow life-saving reforms such as universal

healthcare, student debt cancellations, housing and immigrant rights,

racial and environmental justice, abolitionist defunding and

dismantlement initiatives and worker protections.

We anticipated Donald J. Trump’s ascendance and expected Bernie Sanders’

demise when few did. We tell you, here, now, as a cautionary tale that

it will be no surprise if Trump wins a second term. In fact, the seeds

for his potential victory were laid the day of his inauguration because

of how resistance and liberation came to be defined — as resistance to

Trump rather than liberation from settler-colonial oppression.

Who “We” are

Who is this “We”? We are Black, brown, Indigenous, Muslim and Jewish

people who are radical “newest social movement” organizers and knowledge

keepers. We are not just anti-fascist writers and movement participants,

but also, outrightly anti-statist and anti-capitalist and have

contributed to, and argued for, self-determination and mutual aid

networks for decades.

The ethos of our principles, offered in a 2016 reading list, is guided

by the premise that we reject competitions between intersecting

struggles. We believe that “progressive” alliances exemplified in “Green

New Deal” and “democratic socialist” trajectories — as opposed to

radical Red Deal actions — obscure more revolutionary trajectories and

strategically undermine the mission of BIPOC liberation. We warned then,

as we do now, of the dire consequences of band-aid (in)actions ingrained

in the flawed logic and ploy that “voting reduces harm.”

We are among those who belong to, and take inspiration from Indigenous

land defenders of the Wet’suwet’en nation and NoDAPL, who never caught,

as Lower Brule Sioux Tribe historian Nick Estes puts it, “as much

attention and support as the blond-haired Swedish teenager did just

months earlier, when she made near-identical arguments about climate

justice as her Indigenous counterparts.”

We are founders of intentional communities and queer-feminist abolition

groups. We have been active in anti-globalization movements since

Seattle 1999 and are inspired by movements such as La Vía Campesina and

the Zapatistas that center a horizontalist — non-electoral — politics

anchored in what scholar-activists like Richard JF Day refer to as

“non-universalizing, non-hierarchical, non-coercive relationships” as

well as “mutual aid and shared ethical commitments.”

We hold the radical teachings of anti-Americans like Malcolm X,

anti-colonial and anti-imperialists like Martin Luther King, as well as

Red and Black Power movements close to our hearts. We understand

full-well that in fighting for global social justice, these

revolutionaries never hungered, thirsted or coveted becoming

professional career politicians. Instead, they chose to serve their

people without reifying pre-existing hierarchies, being sensitively

aware of how the hallways of state and institutional prestige, celebrity

and material power risk corrupting even the best intentions for social

change.

We are influenced by Indigenous and Black studies historians, like Nick

Estes as well as Palestinian political scientists like Joseph Massad and

Steven Salaita who have exposed the myth that Bernie is a “fighter” for

Palestine despite being both pro-Zionist and pro-Imperialist.

The False Assumptions of the “Progressive” Left

Sun Tzu wrote, if you fail to recognize the scope and nature of the

enemy, “you will succumb in every battle.”

From its origins, the trajectory of voting and liberal, progressive, and

even some leftist movements are based on several deeply flawed

assumptions in this war on Black, Indigenous and People of color

communities (BIPOC).

1. That the American Dream and Democracy Exist

Need history remind us, the US was founded on the violent Euro-Christian

crusading doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery. As

Patrick Wolfe notes, 1492 is “not an event.” Rather, it established a

structure with a religious character known as “conquistador

settler-colonialism” as Tiffany Lethabo-King argues and many other

Indigenous scholar-activists like Eve Tuck and Sandy Grande have noted.

What is conquistador settler-colonialism? First, it is premised on the

“Original Sin,” on the ongoing genocide of Indigenous nations and

peoples and on the theft of their lands, which form the wealth that

Empire uses for plunder, pillaging and exploitation.

Once the assumed “Terra Nullius,” or empty land, was cleared of its

purported “heathen savage” original inhabitants, conquistador

settler-colonialism relied on plantation — slave — economies.

Irrespective of 13^(th) and Right to Vote amendments, this enslavement

is enshrined to this day through what Saidiya Hartman refers to as

“afterlife slavery.” Slavery is constantly (re)birthed through

stand-your-ground laws, police brutality and premeditated extrajudicial

killings, routine “stop and frisk” policies, “Broken Window Policing,”

voter disenfranchisement, school-to-prison pipelines, impoverishment and

premature deaths, as well as 1994 crime bills which Hillary Clinton and

Bernie Sanders voted for and that superfluously target and incarcerate

Black youth who are referred to as “super-predators” and “thugs” within

a shattered criminal justice system.

Indigenous and Black feminist scholars like Tiffany Lethabo King, Zainab

Amadahy, Bonita Lawrence, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, and numerous others

have addressed how white conquistador settler-colonialism’s divide and

conquer strategies pit Native against Native and Black against Black.

They note how Black Cherokees in Oklahoma and Black Mi’kmaq peoples in

Nova Scotia are a living embodiment of the intertwining of Indigenous

and Black peoples’ fates and futurities.

Nowadays, much like the way Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality is

toothlessly deployed by “woke” activists as an “add-on,” progressives

ritually conduct empty land acknowledgments. They pay lip service to the

fact that they are on stolen land, without addressing the implications

of this given their complicity in land theft and Indigenous demands for

land’s rematriation. Why? Because it is easier for settlers to trade on

the questionable myth of a “secular American Dream” and its

hyphenated-melting pot of identities — that are indignantly detached

from land-based histories and practices and an immeasurable, continuing,

violence against Indigenous and Black peoples defining its landscape.

An example of this is Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib’s hypocrisy when they

acknowledge that America is founded on Indigenous genocide and yet,

simultaneously hail themselves as products of the American Dream,

erasing their complicity, despite being women of color, in the

reification of settler-colonialism. Omar went so far as proclaiming the

mother of neoliberalism, Margret Thatcher, as an “inspiration” and war

monger Madeleine Albright as an exemplary model refugee who made

“enormous contributions” to America.

2. That the State Can be an Instrument of Social Justice

The second mistake progressives commit because they learned little from

the Egyptian “Arab Spring” Uprisings of 2011, is their assumption that

in the struggle for social justice nation-states can be disentangled

from capitalism. Historians like Fernand Braudel, May’68 scholars like

Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as radical

social movement activists have long argued that it is a historical fact

that the European paradigms of capitalism and the nation-state evolved

symbiotically. Although they can become disjointed over the short-term,

creating ruptures with local and even regional implications, the

relationship between capitalism and nation-states is rooted in their

long-term mutual interests.

Neoliberalism is deeply anchored in the idea that the relationship

between nation-states and (racial)capitalism is irreversible, and both

are dependent on the dissemination of repressive anti-intersectional

racializing, gendering, sexualizing, classist, debilitating and ableist

logics that we have all internalized and replicate at the horizontal

level. Capitalist states are not just administrative structures; they

shape our understanding of the world, including our own identities and

thoughts and fine-tune our behavioral patterns, feelings and emotions.

Nation-states are a central component of the problem because they are

assumed to be a neutral entity that can be instrumentally mobilized as a

tool to usher in revolutionary social-change. This ignores that they are

founded upon structural inequities and enable subjects that reproduce

the violent inequalities of institutions given that subjectivities are

also formed, defined and regulated by these structures.

3. That Fascism is the Same as Totalitarianism

When progressive movements claim that they fear Trump has ushered-in

fascism, they are naively mistaking fascism for totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism seeks to concentrate and crystallize power at the top of

the state-pyramid in the hands of a single individual or political party

to fully impose draconian order from above. This process takes places

through force, be it via police repression, legislative and judicial

power, or even national emergencies, imposed curfews and military

regimes.

Fascism goes a step further. As well as concentrating state power, it

promulgates itself at the horizontal levels of the family,

neighborhoods, schools, factories and hospitals among others. Its goal

is to transform us all into egoistic little Mussolini’s and mini-gods in

our public and private behaviors. Fascism is facilitated through the

dissemination of cultural and spiritual stereotypes that we all reenact.

What makes fascism more dangerous than totalitarianism is its

insidiousness: fascism is mobilized on a molecular-mass and local scale

that operates in all vectors and directions. Fascism is a cancer encoded

within and reinforced by the capitalist-states. We express our

internalized micro-fascisms through the symbolic and structural

privileges that we each enjoy and reproduce in our social encounters.

As I have written elsewhere, struggling against fascism means struggling

against our egomaniacal authoritarian and materialist selves. We have

all been weaned on capitalist and state practices that have taught us

how to covet power, to categorize and discipline others and ourselves.

We have all been taught to commoditize, individualize, commercialize and

materialize not only space and time, but also love, friendships,

solidarity, allyship and land.

In order to reassert control over our own lives and achieve more

egalitarian horizons, we must acknowledge the reality of conquistador

settler-colonialism and the fact that we all participate in the

replication of micro-fascistic oppressions that colonial “cultures of

whiteness” produce and relentlessly disseminate through capitalist-state

frameworks. We cannot eradicate power differentials in our daily

encounters, but we can delineate them by combating our micro-fascisms

and taking responsibility as individuals and communities to decolonize

our hearts, spirits and actions.

We must acknowledge that representative democracy is not much of a

democracy when its laden with racialized district remapping, voter

dis-enfranchisement and suppression; partisan gerrymandering; dark money

ads; electoral college systems that are often pegged against a popular

vote; 2010 Citizen’s United verdicts that give special interests groups

unlimited spending; as well as bills like 501 4C, that permit designated

“social welfare” organizations to engage in electoral politics in

unregulated ways.

Instead, we ought vie for direct-lateral participatory democracy since

power is inherently decentralized and everywhere. This requires that

individuals and communities learn to live according to a self-determined

politics of collective responsibility relative to ourselves and all

(non)human life.

The Solution? Revolutionary Liberation, Not Reform

Liberation struggles do not occur in a vacuum. They evolve in historical

(neo)colonial contexts in which nations and their constituents have

defined false and idealized myths of their pasts and themselves. While

white supremacist ideologies and assumptions inform conservative

right-wing parties and positions, the greater danger is how they

disguise themselves within (neo)liberal progressive and even leftist

positions. Some perceive Heineken and Johnnie Walker-sponsored pride

parades and Women’s Marches as resistance, despite the fact that these

movements are often premised on bleached notions of non-violence, gay

marriage, coming-out narratives, pride and shame.

What decolonization is and what it entails is a fiery politics of

non-statist horizontalist action and responsibility, allyship and

solidarity, animated by a genuine radical ethics of care. It is a

subject complexly addressed by many elsewhere. It involves understanding

how states and capitalism percolate into our everyday relations, and

that, as Richard F. Day puts it in Gramsci is Dead, “we are not governed

by ‘institutions’ apart from ourselves, by a ‘state’ set over against

‘civil society’ [but] rather we all govern each other via a complex web

of capillary relations.”

The progressive hope of expanding the Squad by investing “positive

energy [in]to existing structures and processes in the hope of their

amelioration” only serves to re-entrench conquistador

settler-colonialism and expands investments in settler-futurities.

Instead, the decolonial goal ought be to reduce the efficacy and reach

of state and capitalist structures “by withdrawing energy from them and

rendering them redundant,” as Day writes.

Decolonization is also transnational and migrational. Meaning, it

demands that we understand the entwined relationship between

conquistador settler-colonial — US and Canada — and franchise colonial

societies — like Egypt — that are symbolically, spiritually,

historically and materially interrelated. Settler-colonialism,

homonationalism, pinkwashing and cisheteropatriarchy in the US and

Canada fuel imperialism and the upholding of military and religious

dictatorships abroad.

This results in the subjugation of entire peoples in “post-colonial”

nations. Conquistador settler-colonialism can be, if not in fact is, the

circulatory agent of another colonialism. For example,

settler-colonialism in the US and Canada upholds Zionist

settler-colonialism in Palestine and Palestinian dispossession as Steven

Salaita, Dana Olwan and many scholar-activists have argued.

Decolonization means recognizing that struggles from “Jerusalem to the

Grand River are one.” That there is no freeing Palestine without freeing

Indigenous and Black peoples in the heart of US Empire because all our

fires are interconnected.

As an antidote, decolonization necessitates building non-statist,

anti-authoritarian, land-based spiritual alternatives and being able to

defend them tactically, with arms if need be. Decolonization means

abolishing the punitive prison-judicial and imperialist-military

industrial complexes and replacing them with transformative and not just

restorative justice. Only the former addresses the underlying state

structure of settler-colonialism that frames abolition and Indigenous

sovereignty while the latter does not.

Decolonization demands a consistent spiritual and practice-based

relationship with land, as well as attunement to harvesting and

replenishment cycles, food-based sovereignty and security. It entails

relearning how to walk the land, radical eco-psychological permaculture,

bioregionalism, herb and horticultural techniques, towards cultivating

more homeostatic equilibriums and regenerative agricultures without

seeking a return to a romanticized bygone past.

Decolonization involves substituting multinational agrochemical and

agricultural bio-technologic companies like Monsanto with harvesting

practices that are mindful of land and replenishment cycles as an

alternative to colonial perspectives based on civilizational domination

and ecological devastation.

Decolonization is learning how to grow our own food, sharing and

expanding access to land, withdrawing our dependency and reliance on

capitalism, building sufficiency. Our medical and pharmaceutical

complexes must be replaced with modern and traditional holistic healing

practices.

Liberation means rematriating Indigenous land given hundreds of broken

treaties. It implies conceiving non-statist and non-capitalist

frameworks of Black reparations that neither denies Indigenous

dispossession or subscribes to a capitalist insurance tabulate of

dollar-cent figures in the devalued redressing of human misery,

shackling and death, which no price-tag can be assigned to. Nothing

short of freedom for all BIPOC who are born orchestrated to die,

suffices.