Over the past year, I have felt on edge by the feeling that something bad is about to happen. It is a similar sensation to that in which my mother described to me the morning of 9/11. A feeling that something is not right, and the normal that we know as normal is soon going to collapse. Despite the covid 19 pandemic and all of the economic fallout that has come with it, there are still people pretending as though we are living “business” as usual. But I can see, with clear warnings, that we are on the verge of something historical, something momentous, something revolutionary. Life is unpredictable, the indigenous people of Hispaniola did not expect to stumble across Europeans, the morning of Columbus’s arrival. Life just happens.
It is quite easy to see that we are currently living through an economic crisis. I just recently read an article describing how 21 provinces throughout China have experienced complete blackouts due to coal shortages. Or how in the United Kingdoms there are massive supply chain shortages causing stores to not have enough items and petrol available at the gas station. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that it will be this way until Christmas.
What many don’t understand is that all it takes is a few days of people not being able to feed their children, or medication to stop being delivered on time, or a massive power outage that renders essential items useless, that creates the situation in which people revolt.
The 2020 George Floyd uprisings were clear examples of this. Instinctually the masses of the people rose up, not simply throughout the United States, but the entire world to protest the brutalization of the African masses at the hands of the police, everywhere. A rage against the machine, as white suburbanites who have been sold a failed promise of prosperity. And African masses, who have been casted into being nothing more besides a reserve army of labor, raged against a system that oppresses them.
Fanon describes the process of revolution to be a violent one, but many of the preconditions to revolution described in his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth, states:
A world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip. That is the colonial world. The colonial subject is a man penned in; apartheid is but one method of compartmentalizing the colonial world. The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, and climbing. I dream J burst out laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning. The colonized subject will first train this aggressiveness sedimented in his muscles against his own people. This is the period when black turns on black, and police officers and magistrates don't know which way to turn when faced with the surprising surge of North African criminality. We shall see later what should be made of this phenomenon. Confronted with the colonial order the colonized subject is in a permanent state of tension. The colonist's world is a hostile world, a world which excludes yet at the same time incites envy. Vie have seen how the colonized always dream of taking the colonist's place. Not of becoming a colonist, but of replacing him. This hostile, oppressive and aggressive world, bulldozing the colonized masses, represents not only the hell they like to escape as quickly as possible but a paradise within arm's reach guarded by ferocious watchdogs.
What we see here is what we experienced in this country last summer. The people, angry and discontent subconsciously attacked the means of their oppression head on. They attacked news agencies like CNN, which lie to them and keep them propagated on bourgeoisie lies. They burnt down police precincts, which terrorize communities into work with the consequences of not, being in prison or death. They attacked stores like Target, which sells consumerist products that are destroying the planet. The people understand their oppression, despite failures to articulate it. A famous quote by Kwame Ture is “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can never fool all of the people all of the time.”
It is important to understand that the consciousness of the people has been rising. As economic and political conditions descend into disaster for your average worker, the nations of the world seem to be in a tense stare down, each waiting for one to make the sudden move. All coupled with the impending climate crisis. This is just a brief summary of the conditions in which we are seeing. As crime rates bolster and lives deteriorate, we must understand that the conditions are ripe for revolution now more than ever. Everyday we watch as monopolists devour every public institution and more Americans are thrusted into poverty.
But understanding that conditions are ripe for revolution, does not mean one should not focus on taking part and enhancing the ongoing struggle to push our society away from capitalist greed and into that which values lives, labor and love. You must get organized because a revolution is a war over ideals. What will the world look like on the other side? The only option for the people is to reject capitalism, a system that will sell your mother like cattle. And embrace socialism.
One cannot be confused, socialism is what we the people make it to be, it must remain at the behest of humanity alone. A revolution undoes everything that held it back. A revolution must tackle climate, capitalism, classism, racism, patriarchy, imperialism, colorism, sexism and intolerance everywhere. You must become organized for the ensuing revolution because the question remains; where will you be when the revolution happens? Will you be beheaded or will you be doing the beheading?
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