Next will be the firing of Robert Muller and hacking the elections so they win. It does not seem we can stop this. I do not see movements that are capable of bringing millions into the street that is necessary in order to stop this machine. Twitter and hashtags are not movement(s); in fact these tools have given us a false sensibility that we are victorious. Amilcar Cabral wrote:
“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.”
The left is whimpering, hobbled by civility, and thinking voting is the only way. As Michelle Alexander said, the “resistance” has been a reactive state of mind and actions, as opposed to grassroots mass organizing not just mobilizing. Too many have forgotten that true movements require a full-frontal attack against capitalism. Movements require sacrifice.
Too many believe there is a way to use capitalism to our benefit when capitalism does not value anything related to humanity. See all that hype about Nike and Kaepernick, where too many “leaders” and social justice organizations were praising Nike? Meanwhile, Nike is one of the biggest donors to Republican candidates. Now Nike is Black and Brown people(s) favorite multi-national corporation? What the fuck has happened to us and our want for liberation? We have freedom fighters in jail for close to 50 years, meanwhile social media has created leaders for us that don’t know how to lead and think, discoursing with the enemy is part of the work? Visibility has got us neo-colonized in ways I never thought were possible. Our ancestors are not happy with us.
Some of us have willingly become part of the nightmare Malcolm X talked about. People around the world will suffer even more because we live in the belly of the beast and we have a collective inability to practice revolutionary liberating politics. Voting Democrats into office in mass won’t change much. Because Democrats still believe in the American project. We must acknowledge that the American project has been an utter failure. America begins with the genocide of our indigenous brothers and sisters. The enslavement of African people. The exploration of laborers and the denial of equity and human rights to women.
The Democratic party will temporarily hold at bay the furious nature of the fascism being imposed, but it won’t stop it. The weakness of the Democratic party even when they were in “power” kept open the doors that let these monsters waltz right into the judicial, executive and legislative branches of this soon to be totalitarian government. The Democrats have been weak and ineffective forever. The Democrats still call these people their colleagues and friends. The Democrats ask us to be civil and patient at the expense of our very lives.
Too much ego has created a false sense of what winning is, and we have claimed “victories” that were not victories but capitulation. Why do we continue to see ourselves through the white gaze? I don’t know where we go from here. Like many I feel broken/lost, but I am also enraged and will stay in this place not just for my daughter but for future generations. I do know herstory will set the record straight. I say this so that I may also consistently check my ego and that I don’t waste time on things that no longer serve us, or try to have common ground with those whose politics are the politics of death and destruction. There is no common ground with megalomaniacs.
At this time, I take solace in the words and actions of Frederick Douglass:
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this, or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
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Rosa Clemente is a 2008 United States Vice-Presidential candidate, journalist, political commentator, and scholar-activist. She tweets from @rosaclemente.
