November, 2016, was book-ended by two situations that directly impacted our work and outlook as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionaries in the United States and will continue to do so for years to come. The first was the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. This was a tremendous upset that nobody, myself included, expected. I don’t think even Trump himself expected it. Chris Hayes, Lawrence O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow, and the rest of the MSNBC crew probably racked up sizable bar tabs and hospital bills that that week. It was surreal, to say the least. Donnie actually fucking did it, and his base of neo-fascists and the other various social and political detritus that comes along with being the main imperialist base area on Earth today got bold as fuck. Hate crimes, of course, skyrocketed. The man appointed a literal, open white nationalist to his cabinet, named Steve Bannon. Of course, like clockwork, many on the “left” rushed to deliver their own hackneyed, one sided, and very wrong analyses. If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s leftists in the United States saying stupid shit and being divorced from reality with a surprising amount of confidence and a minimum amount of care. One former Workers’ World Party member (who is in the employ of both the Russian and Iranian governments) has apparently decided to swallow a big dose of Browderism and resurrect the worst of the 1930s and 1940s “Communism is the Americanism of the 20th century” filth through some shit excuse for an organization called “Students and Youth for a New America”. Their logo even has an American flag backdrop. Their mission statement tells us:

“As society enters a state of ruin, the time has come for American youth to defend the civil liberties and freedoms which have long been cherished in this society, and reject the calls for a greater police state or any new aggressive wars. As society enters a state of ruin, the time has come for American youth to take history into their own hands, and fight for a new America that is no longer ruled by senseless greed, but rather by universal human values and cooperation. SYNA is an organization that engages in service, study, and struggle. We will work to feed, house, clothe, and aid those among our generation who have been left behind. This is our obligation. We cannot allow any more lives to be destroyed by a failing economic order. We will work to learn about the forgotten revolutionary heritage of America’s working people. It is not just slave-owners, racist settlers, and cowboys who built the United States. Our veins also contain the blood of abolitionists, labor organizers, suffragists, and revolutionary warriors.”

If crackers want to lie to each other, that’s their business, but we know better. The United States was built for racist settlers, cowboys, and slave-owners. Even the liberal abolitionists, labor organizers, and suffragettes were tied in to this settler colonial project. Many abolitionists wanted to deport black people to Africa, the labor organizers participated in anti Chinese and anti-Black riots, and many of the suffragettes saw black women not as sisters, but as maids and laundresses. White leftists should study deeply their own history and stop trying to give themselves a revolutionary tradition that they do not have. White America, by and large, is settler trash, has always been settler trash, and will always be trash until it is liquidated as a “thing”. The revolution will burn and destroy “whiteness”. White people, as a caste, as a race in the United States, have never been the revolutionary vanguard in this country, and are not now. This is simple historical fact. Of course, there are strata that would benefit from a proletarian revolution and at least wouldn’t fight it, but as I have previously said, they can not be relied upon to be revolutionaries in their masses at this conjuncture. They need work.

The white working class flew the coop and gave us Trump, delivering Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin into his hands. Not the petit bourgeoisie, the ever so vaunted white working class. People that used to work in steel mills and auto plants. The jobs that are never coming back, but they want back anyways. Stop lying to yourselves. At this point, the white working class is more apt to join a militia on the Arizona border than your communist organization, and they’ve been like this for their entire history. Also, identity politicians, stop repeating the same old mistakes that solve nothing. There were material reasons for these people supporting Trump, it wasn’t just because they were white. The white working class exists. Many of them voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012, not that that necessarily means much. Trump promised to bring their jobs back, he promised to give them a fair shake. They feel left behind, that everybody else, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, etc. are getting everything and they’re getting nothing. They believe that illegal immigrants are pouring over their borders, that the Commie Chinese took all their jobs away, etc. Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous, racist, and incorrect, but they aren’t going to listen to you, and they’re not going to stop being racists because you yell at them in grad school language. Their kids play on floors covered with bills and old newspapers, and through which the draft gives them colds that they break themselves to get medicine for. They sleep on 30 year old beds. Of course, he’s not going to help them, and they’re going to realize this right soon, through their own experience and through their own struggle. Communists should carry out propaganda among them and educate them, just like any other exploited people. Your think piece written in inaccessible language is not helping anybody, it shows you’re a goddamn egghead that only other goddamn eggheads listen to. He played them, very skilfully for someone with no political experience, I might add. They’re going to get mad again. What are you going to do, from your artisan’s coffee shop in a rapidly gentrifying Portland or Detroit, talking about your critical theories and calling the working class “problematic” and engaging in other time wasting activities of the petty bourgeois academic elite? Stop people from being racists? Nah. You’re going to do what you’ve been doing before. Fuckall. You’re as useless as Caleb Maupin and his ’40s nostalgia. Actually, more so, because you’re taking up valuable space with your shitcourse that I can be using to introducing people to Maoism, while he’s just some stupid apricot that rants on the internet and has a few white kids in college in his clique. You’re in our way. You don’t know what you’re doing. The only way that you can be useful in this shit is to become Communists, to become Maoists. Sit over in the corner and cry for Hillary Clinton among yourselves. She’s had her political career, killed many many people, and made lots of money. I’m sure she’s content, even though she’s lost the Presidency both you and she thought she was entitled to, twice, to upstarts. Maybe she isn’t. I don’t really care, to be quite honest. Let her drink herself to death with her rapist husband.

After Trump was elected, naturally, protests filled the streets. The West Coast threw down, we were burning Trump signs on the steps of the Old Courthouse (we also gave old Dred Scott a red flag), and in Austin, communists led demonstrations. One comrade had his neck broken by the pigs, several others were arrested and charged with all sorts of ridiculous nonsense. There were also partisans in the streets, armed and ready to defend the people. This is a good thing. Militancy and organization on a militant, anti-fascist basis is the correct line post-Trump, and any other time. If Clinton had won, we’d do the exact same thing we’re doing now. The liberals that have taken it upon themselves to organize demonstrations under the “Love Trumps Hate” slogan need to knock it off. They’re pointing out people to be arrested by the pigs. They’re getting people injured and hurt. They’re not qualified, politically, to lead this shit. Analyze the fucking slogan. “Love Trumps Hate”. Who do you love? Do you love the people? If you love the people, why are you aiding and abetting their oppression and repression? Why are you fighting the Communists, who really do love the people and are ready to die for them? You don’t love us. You love class peace, you love fascism, you love peace with the enemy. You literally love Trump’s hate, because you do nothing to actually stand in its way. This makes you, objectively, an enemy. At this point, if you continue to push peace line, you are no friend of ours. If you stand in our way, if you seek to wreck our organizations, if you seek to oppose our antifascist work and struggle, you will be crushed, just like anybody wearing a MAGA hat. This is fact, this is line. You can heed it if you want, but my people ain’t playing. Black and brown people were buying up guns after this shit, and they aren’t for show. Get some act right. The future belongs to the Communists, not to you. You’ve gone as far as you’re going to go with your bankrupt politics and bankrupt line.

Finally, the month was closed with the death of Fidel Castro. The man was 90 years old, he had survived hundreds of assassination attempts from the imperialists and traitors, but he wasn’t immortal. He said earlier this year that he’d soon be like all the rest. What’s his legacy? Why should we remember him? He was a man from a brown and black country that told the Yankees to fuck off, and chased the mob and the Yankee imperialists off his island alongside his comrades. Cuba supported the national liberation struggles of nationally oppressed people the world over. The healthcare and education of the island under Castro was top notch. Political refugees from the US knew that they had asylum in Cuba, if they could make it there (of course, disagreeing with the archrevisionist Soviet orientation got one in quite a bit of hot water, as RF Williams could attest). But, the truth remains. As a Black Communist, a Black Maoist, Castro was good for my people, and I do not celebrate his death. My latinx comrades wouldn’t let me get away with that, for one, nor would my Black comrades who know better, like Assata Shakur. Of course, as Maoists, we recognize that Cuba was not a socialist country. There was no class struggle on the island, the proletariat and its line was not in power, the island was basically a one crop (sugar) exporter for the social-imperialist Soviet Union. No Maoist that is saddened by Fidel’s death has said otherwise. The analyses here and here are correct and should be read by those that haven’t already read them. But, a one sided, dogmatic analysis and response is not what is needed at this time, especially from white American Maoists who do not suffer from national oppression. The US oppressed and exploited Cuba. It continues to do the same to Puerto Rico. If your first response upon hearing of the death of Fidel Castro was to post AWTW articles and pieces from the RCP, however good, you are behaving, objectively, in a chauvinist fashion, as a white person that does not suffer from national oppression in the US. Nothing good to say, all bad, is not a Maoist, or a Communist response to the death of someone like Castro. I and other Maoists of color are not phony communists for daring to pay tribute to the man who stood up for us and drove the Yanquis (y’all) from his island. Yes, we’ve read the stuff. Why do you think we didn’t? Are we stupid? Furthermore, attacking us for doing so makes you, objectively, a white chauvinist, and an ultra-sectarian, divorced from and detached from the masses of nationally oppressed people. You’re basically saying that you, by virtue of reading two articles, know more and have a better analysis of things than we, people who live under national oppression, do. You don’t. If you’re a comrade, a true one, you will respect us and listen to our analyses, not call us phony communists and attack us. That is, if you truly accept our leadership and the leadership of the masses of our people on questions regarding national oppression as more than just an abstract thing that you feel that you have to do. If you attack us for supporting the good points of and mourning Castro, Touré, Nkrumah, Sankara, Bishop, and other non-communist liberators, but have nothing but good words for non-communist radicals in white countries, like Connelly and the IRA, check yourselves. The past two days have shown how white Communists in imperialist countries need strong nationally oppressed leadership that is willing to criticize them and hold them to task when they display chauvinist and racist tendencies, not allow them to hand wave it away or defend them.

Basically, until white America makes someone who is worth one of Castro’s fingernails and gives us as much support and assistance as he did, revisionist that he was, keep his name out your filthy mouth. Adios.

*blows cigar smoke*