The aff’s attempt at new radical modes of being is nothing more than a continuation of recognition politics that forecloses the possibility of genuine, material, anti-capitalist change.

Even before the publication of this article series, there was a wave of denunciations and even disaffiliations over the last few weeks regarding Black Hammer Organization in general, and Gazi Kodzo in particular (and/or the cult of personality that has been allowed to form around Gazi through social media and the other horrid means detailed here). Those developments simultaneously led to but also were made possible by the work that went into this document; but, more importantly, they need to be understood as part of a broader reckoning in the Black and Third World revolutionary struggle. That reckoning has to do with past and ongoing histories of abuse, cult-like dynamics, individualism, clout, de jure and de facto hierarchies, and the gendered labor divisions, assumptions, and violence these all tend to rely on and reinforce. This reckoning has had reverberations throughout the Left, across radical tendencies, and most significantly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as heightening climate catastrophes, and the anti-police rebellions that ensued after the murder of George Floyd. From well known political formations such as the PSL, to IWOC/IWW contradictions, to Black Rose/Rosa Negra, and even the MOVE organization, to lesser known movement spaces, radical projects, affinity groups, collectives, alliances, parties, and more. All are being shaken up by a sharpened resistance to and refusal among colonized folk especially Black ones to accept the dynamics of clout, hierarchy (both formal and informal), abuse, individualism, and gender exploitation, which often imbricate upon one another. And this reckoning has had theoretical, practical, methodological, procedural, intracommunal, interpersonal, and individual implications. That this upheaval within our movements/organizations is happening whilst the bourgeoisie continues to use cultural representation of gender/sexual issues to either push liberal or conservative agendas, is a sure sign that if we are to speak of colonialism as a primary contradiction in the class struggle, which the revolutionary Black/Third World Left is known for: then we must amend Du Bois’ poignant observation. Where the problem of the 20th century is the color line, a relation of domination between the Man and the darker peoples of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific; the problem of the 21st century is that said “color line'' is threaded at the nexus of gendered labor divisions/institutions/contradictions (and the values and practices traced back to them). Thus, all anti-capitalist liberation struggles among the colonized and oppressed, which are indeed the only true way to address the mounting economic and health and ecological issues we see building around us today, must confront them if we are to truly achieve full communism and autonomy for all peoples and sustainability for our ecosystem. Black Hammer Organization, however, and a great number of organizations claiming to be anti-colonial, have failed to meet this need. Instead there is a sort of ideological "pick me"/"tap dancing" energy very prominent, where folks like Gazi will declare that before they were "woke" they would make sexuality important to their sense of self, as if to be revolutionary then requires a type of asceticism for queer/trans people (akin to the race-first logics of cultural nationalists). Pronouncements like that are not simply about personal lifestyle choices, but a political commitment that is shaped in bourgeois/colonial logic. Yes, the cult was queer-led, and claimed to be queer affirming/inclusive. It’s not enough, though, to have queer representation in the anti-colonial Left. Gender/sexuality is not as simple as the conversations on identity we are so used to, nor the conversations on styles of dress, on pronouns and labels and names, on presentation and performance and affect, on attraction and intimacy and the like, or even on genetics/biology; although all of these phenomena are to some degree involved in the equation. Scientifically speaking, all supposedly “fixed” biological distinctions, the real phenotypical and genetic variations and diversity within our species that has been marked as “race” and “sex”: like our various skin colors, curl patterns and hair textures, nose shapes, gonad formations and other reproductive organs, hormonal levels, neurotypes, eye colors, body shapes, and more have to do with how social positions deriving from political histories and culture specific modes of organization relate to and exploit and limit our “nature.” Our brains/bodies have a certain natural potentiality for a range of expressions and experiences, though predisposed toward none; we cannot be reduced to them, because societal structures are the most significant factor in how these become shaped into identities and behavioral norms. Hence, Frantz Fanon once wrote that “beside phylogeny and ontogeny stand sociogeny,” and as we learn from Sylvia Wynter, the latter is always a question of class, so much so that we have to acknowledge two things. One, that we are a nature-culture species, not just nature, and two, that we evolve as such dialectically, which requires a materialist standpoint. The way we socially understand and live out and culturally embody and even transform our natural diversities has an economic base to it. Class struggle is key, and a failure to correctly apply it to marginalized genders in the anti-colonial context is what allowed for everything described here to unfold. As Black revolutionaries and Third Worldists, our materialism must emphasize that national liberation is the horizon within which our class consciousness develops. So, if we are to discuss the economic basis of gender ontology, that has to involve theorizing gender/sexual developments as part of a process that is endogenous to our uniquely African histories on this planet, including our histories of revolutionary participation. The term "endogenous" refers to any phenomenon, resource, any data, any object that is emerging or is discernible within the context of a given biological, social, or other kind of system, based on its dynamics and interactions and development. The Marxists historically looked past the endogenous processes within African life that influenced how Black people would eventually arrive at anti-capitalist struggle. Comrade Marcus Brown once spoke of these phenomena as an “internal dynamism” in Black Against Profit, pt. III: The African Mode of Production, speaking of them as an “innate capacity to develop progressively into freer, more democratic, and more technically advanced social configurations.” The comrade examines, using the scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop, the development of these organizational patterns in African life, and points out the racist mischaracterization on part of Marxists which deemed our consciousness as tied to a supposed “Asiatic mode of production,” and so located the seat of revolutionary class consciousness in the European proletariat because of a Eurocentric teleology regarding certain relations within African nations (such as so-called “caste” or the development of the Egyptian state). Cedric Robinson wrote Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, to offer a corrective about our history of struggle as well, displacing the dehumanizing view of African radical activity as merely “superstructural” and unable to grasp class struggle, and thereby challenged Western Marxist chauvinism. And so have other Afrikan thinkers, from Samir Amin to Kwame Nkrumah, to W.E.B Du Bois, and many others, each offering explanations of Black struggle that prioritize our role in our own unique histories and the objective challenge to the bourgeois order we continue to pose because of these endogenous social realities. But the chauvinism characteristic of the white Marxist view of endogenous African development re: the class struggle has yet to be challenged to the fullest degree. Instead, it's been carried into our movements, leaving the gender/sexual lifeways endogenous to African contexts throughout our history underexplored. Black women scholars, like Oyeronke Oyewumi (who theorized the unique "worldsense" that outlined African, especially Yoruba gender ontology) in The Invention of Women, and Ifi Amadiume (who looks at the practice of female husbandry in West African societies) in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, as well as other marginalized gender Black radicals, such as Yannenga Toure, a Black Two-Head radical and author of the "Two Head Manifesto" have taken time to analyze these legacies. Following this, we would see, as Sage Hunt, Afro-Native nonbinary transfeminine revolutionary theorist has written, that gender is clearly a “modality through which class is lived.” With that in mind, relations to the mode of production, whether that be the village and communal modes which were predominant in Africa, and even the other modes, less sedentary ones, as well as the less fluid, more somewhat feudalistic modes, all involve gender ontology as a material question. But overall, the Anti-colonial Left has neglected to transect these phenomena, and they have painted all concerns about this as "metaphysical" just like the white Left does to Black radicalisms. And so gender often remains and continues to remain somewhat undertheorized within the historical anti-colonial Left despite surface level appeals to the need for self-determination over our collective societal development. This is an undialectical bypassing of the full weight of our history as African people, and is a residue of white supremacy, and thus extremely vulnerable to opportunism and a culture of abuse and apologism History would show us that cisheteronormativity is a set of values, institutions, labor divisions, and social practices that is both European in origin, and part of the capitalist order. The prevalence of a biological reduced, binary, hierarchical kinship system and mode of self-understanding that upholds heteronormative gender/sexual codes is only a universal, global assumption now because of how racial capitalism transformed and subordinated pre-existing approaches in indigenous contexts. This fact is seldom discussed or organized against, at least not adequately, in the established anti-colonial Left. On the occasions that this is acknowledged, it is simply said that “Homophobia is unAfrican” (to challenge the neocolonial falsehood that “homosexuality is unAfrican”), which is thus a nature-culture appeal. For example, at a rally following the Queer Liberation March of 2020, Black Hammer Organization showed up and announced something along the lines of “before colonialism, all of our people loved and lived as they wanted.” While it was an acknowledgment of our more inclusive African social relations to the diversity of sexual experience in our species, it did not address the problem materially. As in, this theory of gender ontology was not attuned to the question of economic modes of production and all the structures and hierarchical organizational patterns and labor relegations that that implies, and the implications of this all for modern class struggle. It was functionally useless, because idealist (alongside being a homogenized account). And of course it was, otherwise Black Hammer Organization would have had to examine their own gender contradictions, and especially that of Gazi. The cult’s gender commentary was therefore opportunistic and self-serving, and as comrade Shupavu made clear this was a holdover from a similar opportunistic and self-serving relationship to queerness that went into why Gazi was recruited to the movement in the first place by Omali Yeshitela. In order to call these things as they are, we need a full picture of the Black radical relation to the gender/sexual struggle, and it needs to be more than just a question of cultural acceptance: it has to be materially grounded, thinking about ideology and labor and praxis.