By Chief Taliba
Imagine you’re walking down the sidewalk when all of a sudden you’re SNATCHED up, blindfolded, bound, and thrown in the backseat of a vehicle and driven to an unknown location. As you struggle to free yourself, you hear the driver and their partner speaking about a monthly fight, bets, and needing to replace worn-out chains; needless to say. You feel uneasy.
Suddenly you all come to a stop. You’re then grabbed from the backseat and shoved along by the kidnappers. A metal door opens, and you begin blindly walking forward. As you go, you hear groaning from people who sound hurt and sick. They keep directing you forward until they stop you and put something in your hand; it feels heavy.
You are then brought somewhere where it sounds like a small crowd is jeering. Your blindfold is removed. You’re in a musty, dark room, in the center of a bloody, sweat-stained mat. You look around the dimly lit room, and there’s nothing but faces hiding in the shadows watching in unfiltered excitement for what’s about to go down.
You look in your hand, and you see you’re armed with a weapon, a club. You hear the noise of someone struggling, and wouldn’t you know. Another person has been dragged into the room from the opposite direction, their eyes bound, similar to you, unable to see where or how they’ve arrived. They’re placed in front of you, their blindfold removed, and you notice a similar-sized blunt object equipped in their hand as well.
You stand face to face.
The mildly giddy audience crowded and huddled around the room begin to come alive.
Roaring,
“Fight… FIGHT, FIGHT!!”
You look at this person as they, in confusion, look back.
The reality of the situation is that you both need to free yourself of this dark arena surrounded by bloodlust faces for you to fight to the death, but there are a few questions that could arise.
‘Would I have a better chance of freedom by fighting the person my kidnapper now places in front of me and calls my opponent, my enemy, and hoping my oppressor frees me once I’ve won.”
“Do I beat the person in the same struggle as me just wanting to survive just as much as I do AND then turn my violence to fighting my way out of the crowd of kidnappers?”
Or
“Would I have a better chance by uniting with this fellow victim and us fighting our way through this hell, together!” ‘What about solidarity, won’t that do me any good?’
‘Does it matter?’
YES, it MATTERS.
With this person’s solidarity, they could feel for you and even hand you their branch but would STILL be forced to attack and possibly kill you.
With their unity, you could live for each other’s freedom. Each other’s liberation because they are one and the same. To fight and leave this hostage situation together through unity is the only way to succeed.
Let’s say you both decide to unite, and they take that as a challenge and bring in their version of “Security,” a 6’8″ 300lbs colonizer with a knife and a chain.
Would you not have a better chance unified than with one or the other just being in “solidarity” with your fight?
Unity equates organization, determination, commitment, discipline, loyalty and is based on the material situation at hand.
Solidarity is individualist, they can help you, or you can help them on personal time or on a whim. It signifies and necessitates inequality, for one can only be in solidarity from a heightened position within the circumstances present. It’s idealist in that it can’t solve the root contradiction we as poor and working colonized (non-white) people face.
But what if this wasn’t a basement brawl but the reality of life for colonized people.
What if the brawl was the colonized masses being forced to constantly fight ourselves, each other, and colonialism all at once.
The writhing crowd of bloodthirsty observers the colonizer?
Imagine the guards of the brawl as slave catchers the colonial state turned into kkkops to maintain our oppression?
The same principle, and questions, apply.
Solidarity or unity?
Solidarity necessitates inequality. Unity implies equality. Unity means Land Back for all Colonized and Indigenous people.
The only ones that can claim to be in solidarity are colonizers because their theft of our lands, labor, lives, and resources put them in a state of power over us.
Only through colonized unity can that be changed once and for all!
Solidarity = Charity
You might wonder what’s wrong with Charity, and think to yourself; it helps people, it makes people’s lives “better?”
But does it?
How can you truly live a better life when the problem you face is rooted in a system that constantly denies you the self-determination to fully care for your community and often yourself and those you love?
To truly end and mend those issues, you would need to remove the root of the problem, which would be the system that facilitates that abuse in the first place—white power colonialism.
Charity will never attack that system because it is implemented to keep that system afloat when certain folks fall through the cracks, to keep those without power silent about colonialism. It hasn’t, and it will not work. Charity is not a long-term solution for colonized people, nor should it be considered such. Charity will not bring an end to the problems we face or the injustice we are forced to endure every day.
You can’t have liberation without Colonized unity, and you can’t have Colonized unity without anti-colonial politics PERIOD.
Colonizers can return the resources and help restore Colonized people’s power, but that’s not solidarity. That’s reparations, in the form of trying to attain unity with the leadership of the colonized poor and working people. There is a place for colonizers in the revolution, and that place is under the leadership of the Colonized proletariat.
All of which leaves solidarity out of the equation.
So there you have it.
You can either be in unity as PoC A.K.A Poor and Working Colonized People, one way by joining an anti-colonial international organization like us!!
OR
If you’re the colonizer, you can pay reparations and work under the TRUE proletariat’s leadership by joining Black Hammer’s Reparations Corps!
Either way, we must be strategic and focus on the core contradiction if we truly wish to live in a world where no one lives at the expense of another.
Since the only solution to division is to unite, building a better world REQUIRES colonized unity.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Now all that’s left is to unite, build, and win; so we can see the sun again.
Land Back!
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