Red Guards Austin is committed to the interests of the oppressed and exploited people. We believe the masses of people deserve a fighting organization that stands with the people and clearly identifies who our friends are and who our enemies are. We do not stand for unprincipled peace with pigs, or any other reactionary force that wishes to stifle the rebellion and might of the people, and it is because of these principles that we do NOT work with organizations such as Austin Justice Coalition (AJC) and other pig apologists that have found themselves in the forefront of the recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Last Friday at 7pm, AJC and a few other liberals and liberal organizations held a “Black Lives Matter” demonstration at the Capitol. Pigs were stationed all over down town due to a cry for more security from chief pig Art Acevedo and for Austin Police Department to militarize over a vague Facebook threat against the pigs which has never been produced or substantiated. APD were crawling all over and in the surrounding areas of the capitol stationed with AR-15s as well as police snipers on downtown rooftops, a reminder that they are ready to end your life at any moment. Nevertheless the liberals did what they do best by hopping on the mic positioned above the crowd on the capitol steps with the pigs right behind them. It was the typical NGO speech we’ve all heard far too often: we need to “love each other” “respect one another” “buy from black businesses” and “vote for Hillary.” These are the words of traitors to the people. Not even an inkling of revolutionary spirit could be found in these sellouts or their tired ass speeches.

From poems, to singing songs, to coercing the people into a group prayer, the organizers of the event pulled out all the stops for a typical grab at money, profiting off of people’s murders while begging for peace and love from their murderers. And it is no speculation or assumption that these organizers (and in particular Chas Moore) were making an effort to use this mockery of a rally to make money. Chas himself urged to crowd to donate to the organizations. But what he didn’t mention is how AJC—an organization founded by him and Fatima Mann—works directly with the APD. They basically work as a buffer between the rage of the people and the unchecked brutality and repression of the police. Their whole organization rests on being in bed with the pigs and they even admit that to be apart of their Citizen’s Panel Review (CRP), you have to be trained by none other than the murdering pigs themselves.

This effectively makes AJC the token mouthpieces of the pigs and is a blatant stab in the back to the ever-shrinking population of black people in Austin, who have to brave the hostile Austin cracker paradise that values tech companies, condos, and margaritas over the lives of black people. If Chas told the people to donate to the pigs to end the police killing of Black people, people would rightfully jack his ass up, but the reality is that that is exactly what he is calling on folks to do. AJC is the epitome of traitors to the people!

Chas Moore once said, “Some people call me the new Malcolm X,” but this clearly lacks a historical analysis—as Malcolm X himself said, “Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing ‘We shall overcome … Suum Day…’ while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and ‘I have a dream’ speeches? And the black masses in America were—and still are—having a nightmare.” This sort of black performance art decorates the activist resume of Chas Moore. It would be far better fitting to call Chas the new Al Sharpton.

He stands in front of crowds of people who are desperate for revolution, trading advocating Black militancy for Black complacency. Trying to convince the masses of black people that we’re getting murdered, thrown in prison, living in wage labor servitude to white-supremacist capitalism merely out of a lack of communication and sympathy from our oppressors. There is nothing revolutionary about Stockholm syndrome. Trying to identify with our oppressors is a tired, fruitless effort that only serves to strengthen our enemies and weaken the people. But Chas Moore is only one-half of the fucked-up leadership of AJC. Fatima Mann is also a repeat offender of selling out people in Austin. Apart from being a co-founder AJC, she was the star of Thursday night’s Blue Lives Matter fiasco (a memorial event for the dead pigs in Dallas), where she gave a performance deserving of an Oscar as she seemed gripped with emotion and proceeded to hug the head pig Acevedo while holding a glow stick, for a photo op.

It seems her “activism” is a far cry from the person Austin activists got to know in the days when the now-defunct ISO front group People’s Task Force was leading demos during the first wave of BLM. The Fatima we knew back then seemed to be opposed to the liberal organizing methods of PTF and always argued that they were not in service of the black community in Austin. She expressed a frustration with the PTF organizers at their open meetings and argued for more Black involvement. Some activists were led astray and fell in line behind this woman who on the surface appeared to be to the left of the Trotskyite-led organization, but once she accumulated a group of folks who trusted her leadership, she took a sharp turn to the right, with the founding of AJC and dived head-first into police apologism and collaboration.

It usually takes years or even decades of beating their heads against the wall of liberal activism before we see the demoralization and assimilation of what were once radicals into the mire that is electoral politics—vying for seats on the city council and endorsing fine-tuned war machines like the Hillary Clinton. But luckily AJC has spared us this illusion and busted out the gate showing their true colors and showing themselves for the aspiring politicians and badge-lickers they are. From their inception they have maintained a hostile relationship with the militants among the masses, by ignoring and even outright silencing members of the community that don’t wanna stand around, read poems, sing songs, and cry. They’ve pulled such maneuvers as hosting a silent march about 1 year ago where they enforced segregating the crowd by race and strictly enforced adherence to rules laid down by APD of where we were “allowed” to walk and “shushing” people who dared talk to their friends, family, and comrades during the march. After the murder of David Joseph, AJC pulled the plug on an anti-police activist for being critical of their apparent collaboration. The AJC recently hosted a vigil where black folks who wanted to express their anger and break into a march were discouraged, leaving a small section of the crowd to break off from the vigil anyway and march to the precinct, while AJC and other organizers of the vigil degenerated into arguing amongst themselves and completely neglecting the masses of people and the initiatives the people wanted to take. This is the modus operandi of NGO organizations like AJC. Chas himself openly talks of how he will not always be an activist and will one day be in office, so eager to boast about his promised seat at the master’s table.

Black leadership or Radical black leadership?

As happens with many rebellious movements, an NGO arose from the BLM mass initiative. Black Lives Matter is a national organization that arose out of the real necessity for black leadership. But with the popularity of postmodernism in our current political climate, identity-reductionist politics pushed certain black women to the forefront of this movement who, though they may have had great intentions and a genuine desire to see change, have not provided a clear revolutionary strategy for dismantling the racist capitalist system. They do not have a consolidated ideology that can guide them to victory. They have found themselves being bought up by the ruling class in the form of social status and funding from companies like Google. Make no mistake, this money is meant to neutralize radical forces. These rich crackers won’t bat an eyelash if a younger version of the NAACP arises from a movement that started as a rebellion. In fact, that is most excellent for the ruling class, who rule more through consent than coercion. Since organizations like the NAACP have become antiquated and stamped with the past of the most tamed elements of the civil rights movement, young people are finding themselves more and more disenfranchised with the rich blacks in suits who sit comfortably in their city office jobs leaving behind the masses of black people who are hungry, angry, and dying; so they turn to taking matters into their own hands by taking to the streets and fucking things up for the police, the landowners, and the bosses. They would rather pretend they don’t notice the dire condition of our people. So it serves the capitalist class’s interest quite well to invest in an organization arising from such a movement that is so thoroughly toothless, liberal, and easily molded that the ruling class can fund it and transform it into a more “relateable” NAACP. And just like that, they recycle the group of black folks they are forced to keep comfortable in the soft shackles of blood money in order for their leadership to be used as a weapon against the people. Because now they have built something..now they have something material to lose. The ruling class is not stupid, and history has proven to them over and over again that with money comes power, control, and the ability to manipulate movements through those whom they can buy up. This is the local equivalent of America’s foreign policy with countries in Africa that have the potential of rebelling; to keep sending them “aid” is to keep them reliant on and enslaved to a system that doesn’t give a fuck about the people and is out for their natural resources. Make no mistake: black people in this country are used to their fullest extent by the capitalist class. We constitute an oppressed nation of cheap labor for the capitalist class, a class that will mow us down the second they can’t get whatever it is that they want out of us. It is this exploitation and the black nation’s need for liberation that fuels our fighting spirit.

Radical black leadership MUST BE thoroughly anti-capitalist. Our desire for revolution is our guard against bribes. Our goals must be fundamentally revolutionary, and with that in mind we have to remind ourselves that no revolution can be fought or won without the masses of people. Ain’t no small group of committed black activist gunna sing their way into power. We have to arm the masses with revolutionary theory and critical, material analysis that can embody lessons derived from the history of class struggle and revolution. The masses need the leadership of a revolutionary party capable of representing and serving the interest of the masses of people. It is through this historical analysis that Red Guards Austin was formed as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective guided by the universally applicable philosophy and science of revolutionary communism. Revolutionary communists must be engaged in work among the masses. We cannot simply ride the wave of movements and wait for the “right conditions” for revolution. Our work must be that of creating the forces capable of leading revolution, meaning exploiting and exposing the contradictions of this system, not trying to mask and flatten them the way organizations like Austin Justice Coalition are set up to do. RGA has initiated and led such efforts and organizations that exist among the people and in service of the people, operating outside of the system to provide advanced revolutionary theory to all of our class.

AJC is an organization whose existence is dependent on the police and police murders. They operate like leeches, sucking the energy right out of a movement that was in its inception far more radical than AJC would like to acknowledge. They profit off of a movement that they are strangling with their incessant refusal to become anything more than a voter registration sign-up at best and at worst black foot soldiers of the pigs. These sorts of organizations will always arise from movements. Movements are not revolutions, and it is the job of revolutionaries to understand the limitations of movements and pull the angry masses of people who show up and show out into organizations that are capable of providing revolutionary leadership, and a scientific strategy for success.

Movements come and go, alone they are capable of only the most meager reforms—reforms that can only amount to table scraps cast casually to the hungry masses from the master’s table. We do not wait for such scraps. Instead we must build our forces and contend with the fundamental question of liberation. Liberation means nothing less than self-determination for black people, socialist revolution, and a continuation of struggle that prevents the rise of bosses or their racist police forces. We fight for this world in our daily practice, and unlike AJC we have nothing to lose but our chains.

I am a working-class black woman. I am a revolutionary communist. I am a Red Guard, and I don’t fuck with NGOs or wannabe politicians.