Black + Red = Most advanced formation in US history.

Identitarian approaches towards the project of dismantling the American Empire usually fall short in practice, because identity alone is not what makes one revolutionary. Identity and the experiences that derive from being a queer person, or a Black person, or a Latinx person of course play a major role in how we see the world, but there are reactionary queer, Black and Latinx people. See: Sheriff Clarke of stolen valor fame, Caitlyn Jenner, and George Zimmerman. One’s class partisanship + identity as an oppressed person and the experiences that accumulate by virtue of being an oppressed nationality/gender individual, along with ability to grasp and apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in our political work and relationships with other human beings are what make us revolutionary. Identitarianism without a firm class analysis has one thinking that revolution is whatever certain individuals with a high social media presence and links to other individuals with the same think it is, this is objectively incorrect.

Not a threat. A neocolonialist.

There is a scientific method to revolution, this has been confirmed through practice by the Filipino people, the Chinese people, the Tanzanian people, the Angolan people, the Cuban people, the Indian people, and countless others under the leadership of parties that are either explicitly Communist or who have been influenced heavily by Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology, theory and practice. Jose Maria Sison, Azad, Ganapathy, Avanti, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Huey Newton, Kevin Rashid Johnson, Angela Davis, Josef Stalin, and Kwame Nkrumah were not and are not white. To throw out Marxism because you think it’s white is to disregard centuries of what we have learned through class struggles both armed and unarmed. Nowadays the majority of the people who are applying Marxism to make revolution and transform reality are not white. This applies for the US as well. The most advanced Marxist formation (with more than its fair share of eclecticism) was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which was firmly assertive in its analysis determined by the concrete conditions of the New Afrikan nation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Fred Hampton upheld the role of the party as vanguard and as “Marxist-Leninist cussing niggers”. As a result, this got the pig J. Edgar Hoover to get something right for once and declare it to be the “most dangerous internal security threat to the United States”. Why? Because it was a material threat, armed with the knowledge of where political power comes from (the gun) and revolutionary theory (Marxism-Leninism) and mass links. Internal struggles and deviations would eventually destroy these mass links and result in the isolation of the party but in the late 1960s it could accurately be described as a vanguard, if we define vanguard as being a leading group of a nation’s people that is accepted as such.

Throughout history, Afrikan descended, Indigenous, and other oppressed nations people have been at the firm vanguard of all Marxist and non-Marxist revolutionary movements in the United States if not the Western Hemisphere in general. The working class/petit bourgeois radical descendants of European settlers have either tailed behind us or been bought out and fallen into right opportunism (CPUSA) or gotten burnt out by the slow and treacherous pace of class struggle and the patience required to make revolution in an imperialist country and have deviated into left opportunism (Weather Underground, etal). The most oppressed and exploited are the theoretical and practical vanguard, this is confirmed in theory and practice. To this end, the revolution is ours to make. To make it, we must realize that it is a violent struggle for power, not a peaceful affair where we are allowed to discuss how to carve up the imperialist pie or get a few of us into some powerless city hall, Congress, or statehouse seat. Nor is it a matter of staying “woke” or being the snarkiest on Facebook or Twitter (although I’m damn good at both). Revolution is a matter of developing a solid, extremely disciplined, and well-rounded body of cadres developed through mass struggles against police brutality, mass incarceration, imperialism, exploitation, and all of the other abuses that capitalism-imperialism foists upon us. These cadres, or professional revolutionaries, are to be members of a disciplined and correctly guided political party that has mastered both legal and illegal work. The BPP taught that a political party that claims for itself the role of vanguard should be accepted by the people and should thus be seen by the people. It must serve the people, it must recruit and engage with the people, it must educate and learn from the people. This is mass work. Mass work among black people involves working with churches, small businesses, existing community organizations. Mass work among black people is arms/self defense training, provision of free food, community gardens, political education, tutoring, ESL classes, cop-watching. Not simply dropped into the community without input, but the result of listening to the demands of the masses, constant study of news with appropriate data and figures, and subsequently developing programs and institutions alongside the community to help them solve their problems.

BPP Free Food (Service to the People) program

This is not done for its own sake, of course, this is done with the purpose of slowly but steadily pushing bourgeois institutions (the police, etc.) out of neighborhoods and replacing them with our own, red structures and institutions, AKA setting up a base area. Through this mass work and consistent application of the mass line we get new cadres and we develop firmer our links with the people. Maoists of the black school should have a presence and a liaison with all community organizations, mass organizers, at all protests and actions whether they are organized by you or not. This is how the foundations for building red political power in an urban area are laid. This is how trust among the people is built and the Party/mass organizational structures and activities become part of people’s everyday lives. The masses must come to us because we are the only people to which they feel they can turn, because we represent their interests and we actively defend them. They come to us and join us because we go to them, see what they need, see what they think can best fix their many problems, and actively seek them out and listen to them. Every meeting of the masses needs our representation and our active participation. We should be able to walk down the street and know everyone’s name, and everyone knows our name and that we are Communists. If they ask what Communism and Maoism is, we explain it to them in thorough but understandable detail. This is how the foundations of red political power are built. Finally, we must remember what happens if we fail to remember that we are Red as well as Black. Failure to maintain consistently a firm anti-revisionist, anti-police, pro-people line that has as its maximum program the armed destruction of the US as a political entity will earn us the same fate as the Black Panther Party. Programs co-opted, leadership isolated and on drugs, and seen as a sad and fallen joke. Learn from our history, be black and red.