By Chief Turey
In Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon workers voted against forming a union this past Friday, April 9th, voting “no” at more than twice the rate as in favor of unionizing. As expected, activist circles howled with impotent fury. The factory workers—some 6,000 of them—are estimated to be 85% African, which is not uncommon for Amazon, where a vast majority of workers are African and other Colonized people.
The question for us then is, why is it that 2/3 of the population in the united snakes are supposedly pro-union, but only 6% are unionized? Perhaps a better question: why is it that these activists lost their vote so badly that they are abandoning the strategy of organizing Colonized people in such factories altogether?
The answer is obvious: activism is a failed strategy.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AFP/Getty Images
A Culture of Burn Out
Activism acts as a hamster wheel, burning out all your energy even though you don’t find yourself moving anywhere. An “activist” chases individual wants, yet they never end up with permanent solutions; they tackle individual, seemingly disconnected fights, yet never seem to achieve a lasting victory because they allow the root of their problems, Colonialism, to keep functioning.
Amazon, at heart, is a blood-sucking institution, not because of the individuals who own it, not because it is anti-labor, or even because it is a capitalist corporation. Yes, it is all of those things, but that’s not what’s at its heart. Like every other institution built under this system, Amazon thrives off of the Colonized land, labor, and resources that it is built on top of. Jeff Bezos, even before he was a capitalist, was born a colonizer.
And what about the white people who work under Bezos? They can’t be called capitalists, but at their core, they are still colonizers—the food on their table comes from assimilating into this massive pipeline of plunder. It is only beneficial for them to assimilate further into that pipeline, to make it more efficient, to grab more of the loot by “unionizing” it.
Colonized people, on the other hand, produce everything in society. The means of producing things in an Amazon warehouse—or a factory, or on a farm, anywhere—is not by controlling machines but by whipping poor and working-class Colonized people. We are the means of production. Unions organized under white power colonialism have never been equitable or democratic towards Colonized people. Colonizers in unions were often the first to cry for lynchings against us. Why? Because of how this system works, we are not meant to have a share of the loot; we are the loot to be distributed.
A Colonized activist has nothing to gain from reforming bits and pieces of the colonial pipeline because the fundamental nature of the system is still parasitic to them. And so they get demoralized, they give up, or they simply get burned out. Poor and working-class Colonized people don’t need reforms; we need dictatorship over our lands, lives, labor, and resources!
Beyond the Hamster Wheel
As Revolutionaries, we need to look to history to study the tactics and strategies of those who came before us, study their wins and losses, and decide if these tactics are worth repeating or if they will only lead us down a dead end. Fortunately, we have a recent example of poor and working-class Colonized people trying to unionize within a mega-corporation: Walmart.
Twenty years ago, the same fight was being waged in individual Walmart stores all over the country. Activist organizations sank millions of dollars into countless failed attempts to unionize these stores and wound up with nothing to show for it. These struggles failed back then like they did recently because activism does not attack the core of the problem: the parasitic colonial system. Without attacking the core, activism will always fail to organize the masses of the population because it will not win them fully to the struggle. Why would millions of people put their lives on the line for the plantation, let alone for the lie that the plantation could be made more humane? At the end of the day, we would still be Colonized.
That’s why the colony loves roping us away from the core of that fight. It knows that Colonized people are weak if we stay in our isolated hamster wheels of activism. The most effective anti-union propaganda is watching unions get beaten down repeatedly by the thousands within the colony, which corporations like Amazon and Walmart are willing to pay for. Colonialism will spend any amount of money to propagandize their scorched earth policies around unions because the cruelty is the whole point. Their cruelty serves as a warning to Colonized people everywhere: we will let you die under the conditions we have forced on you.
There is no negotiating with the parasite. Another world is possible without it, and Black Hammer is building towards that world every single day.
Towards A Collective Dictatorship
When we say poor and working-class Colonized people need dictatorship, we’re saying that we need to take back full control of our labor to build our own institutions, our own economy, which is based 100% on control of the land. Dictatorship means we, the Colonized masses of the world, run our land and the institutions we build without any outside influence.
We cannot keep the current means of production—the way everything is made to be used and abused for society—because whipping Colonized people IS the means of production under Colonialism. Unions won’t eliminate the whip; they can only make the whip more organized. And colonized people should be struggling to abandon and destroy the colony, not organize it! Only an anticolonial revolution can sweep away all the violence of colonialism.
To fundamentally transform our entire being—to do away with the plantation which forces us to work to death just to keep a roof over our head, to convince the masses that another world is possible, where no one lives at the expense of another—we must show the masses the true power they hold and who the enemy really is.
No amount of burnout in the world could stop us once we convince the masses of that real fight, not for crumbs, but for full control over our lands, lives, labor, and resources.
Black Hammer’s propaganda campaigns are popular despite the online attacks, the shadow bans, the slander, the relentless campaigns to shut us down like colonialism tried to do in these factories. We are popular because we have a 100% bias towards poor and working-class Colonized people. And we aren’t satisfied with isolation. We are building worldwide. Our recent Brazil panel was the first time Black Hammer has ever held an event in another country, hosted completely by our Brazilian Comrades. Over 23 THOUSAND people tuned in to this historic discussion. We have won the hearts and minds of the masses because we say screw the colonizer; we’re taking back what belongs to us. No reforms, no respectability, no debate, just our dictatorship. It’s the message our people need to hear, and it’s the message our people want to hear.
Yes, we can build our own system of healthcare. Yes, we can build our own education system. Yes, we can build a city under the absolute control of the Indigenous people of this land. We can, and we must. Because revolution is the only way to overturn the root of all our problems once and for all.
Join Black Hammer today! Stop the hamster wheel of activism and be the revolutionary that will build a world where no one lives at the expense of another.
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