The alternative is a rejection of the 1AC’s ideological neglect in favor of black radical anti-capitalist resistance. Our call to action is a necessary launching point for challenging the system of racial capitalism both within debate and on the ground.

The ideological neglect, based in chauvinism, allows movements to not question the hierarchy and rigidity and cults of personality formed around great and strong individuals or units and deference to single sites of authority in these organizations who get credit and attention and even bread from the blood, sweat, and tears of members under them. The ideological neglect and chauvinism leaves unexamined the voracious almost evangelical/fundamentalist ways each of them wants to be the agent of revolutionary change, the vanguard who has the correct line and "out-organizes" everyone else, and the grift and manipulation that often hides behind these zealous declarations. Ideological neglect and chauvinism will also not question the fact that such values and procedural or methodological infrastructures are inculcated in bourgeois institutions like the church and nuclear family. To say nothing of the fact that it puts a spotlight on figures or formations that, when wiped out by the enemy or by their own internal contradictions, means the diffusion of revolutionary consciousness and necessary movement infrastructures and comradely bonds is slowed down or brought to a halt (let’s think about the revolving door in Black Hammer membership). And, further, it allows for the elevation of individual personality flaws and horrors to the level of antagonistic contradiction (as was so commonly taken advantage of by COINTELPRO to disrupt movement last century). What does it say about the anti-colonial Left in an age of celebrity "activism" (AOC at the Met; CBS producing a show like "The Activist"; and all the Derays and Shaun Kings), a wholly bourgeois and counterinsurgent phenomenon, that a YouTuber like Gazi was catapulted to prominence, with catastrophic consequences, in part with the help of organizations in our movement? It's the residue of ruling class ideology and gendered political values that allowed people to get wrapped up in Black Hammer's antics. And that is why these formations and milieus are so vulnerable to even non-fed wreckers who come and undermine revolutionary organizations, like the one under consideration in this document. The established anti-colonial Left’s chauvinism and ideological neglect prevents them from fully grasping the value in what INCITE! meant by “misogynists make great informants.” They cannot appreciate that it is as much a question of principles and care for all our people as it is a question of operational security and militant praxis to observe how gender violence and the techniques used to shield it destroy movements and dovetail with pig work. Only an acknowledgement that the emancipation of gender/sexuality is essential to the endogenous Third World national dynamics by which we fight for class liberation could have led the organizers in INCITE! to name how the same deceitful behaviors that allow an abuser to hide their deeds or manipulate sympathy and excuses from folk proximal to them are the exact strategies used by agents of the State infiltrating our movements. And this same acknowledgement, that the problem of the color line is threaded at the nexus of gender/sexuality as a material question, is why more broadly, QTGNC and marginalized gender Africans have identified that when the negrosie needs to distract the people they are exploiting from identifying the pressures of class oppression and amelioration, they will simply whip up fervor around homosexuality through appeals to defending “sovereignty.” Here, the source of deprivation is identified as a Queer/trans problem, juxtaposed against a reactionary nationalism, which is a mystificatory narrative. Few of the most major anti-colonial Left voices, however, have admitted this when speaking on the composition and strategies of the puppet/misleadership class in this neocolonial age. Just like a good number of them could not predict the monstrosities that would come out of BHO, and did not make attempts to adequately struggle against them. And why would they, when majority of them are used to and/or benefit from the relative degrees of safety, access, ideological commitments and behavioral sanction of cisheteronormative institutions such as the nuclear family, certain religions, education systems, medical industries, the State, etc. thereby sharing adjacent subjective contradictions and even interests as the outright reactionaries? Matter precedes mind, once again, and the weight of a cisheteronormative history, a material question, has imbricated upon our movements to create a certain ideological inertia that can only be addressed through consciously synthesizing from within. Everyone, including queer, trans, gender nonconforming folk in Third World/colonized contexts need to understand these lessons. No population is inherently radical or inherently reactionary: what’s decisive is how we choose to synthesize the material conditions with the endogenous dynamics unfolding in our histories of societal development. There was a time when the national liberation struggle was not class conscious; it took conscious struggle against internal contradictions in order for anti-capitalism to more visibly become a staple of Black nationalist politics. The African Blood Brotherhood made a similar observation, back in 1922, when they announced their program: “A race without a program is like a ship at sea without a rudder. It is absolutely at the mercy of the elements. It is buffeted hither and thither and in a storm is bound to flounder. It is in such a plight as this that the Negro race has drifted for the past fifty years and more. Rarely ever did it know exactly what it was seeking and never once did it formulate any intelligent and workable plan of getting what it was seeking, even in the rare instances when it did know what it wanted.” The Black struggle had at a time demonstrated one qualitative phase of development (a non-class conscious one) that began to give way to a markedly distinct qualitative phase (a class conscious one) only because of the efforts of organizations like the ABB and many others, especially going into the civil rights movements and the mid-to-late 20th century militant decolonization movements. The white Left, however, being chauvinistic, would often dismiss Black and Third World concerns on the mere account of our self-determined interaction with the anti-capitalist movement, which did not pattern their frame of reference. So, they refused to operate in solidarity with many of our organizations, both theoretically and practically. They essentially spat on the ship and wagged their fingers at the tired seasick sailors trying to find a way to guide it home to port, causing a number of our ancestors to break away from alliance with them. When it comes to the roadblocks in class consciousness along gender/sexual lines, where the ship is still finding its way, both for cisgender/heterosexual people and for QTGNC people, a similar thing is happening. A conscious struggle is needed in order to achieve a higher unity and the next phase in ideological evolution (ie, the ship needs revolutionaries who understand what it takes to build its rudder). But, just as the chauvinists in the white Marxist (and anarchist) settings isolate and even work against Black and Third World radicals that try/tried to do so, Black/Third World women and other marginalized gender radicals have had to either wrestle with or break away from the historical left because of the chauvinistic refusal of solidarity from supposed comrades and allies who also worked against us. Claudia Jones, Frances Beal, the Combahee River Collective are examples of this from the last century; but it is still prominent now. The ship needs a coxswain or a few, yet cishet radicals and even marginalized gender radicals who unite with their chauvinism wag their fingers at those of us who are training ourselves for the task. These refusals to extend self-determination in this way are wholly connected to many of the conservative, radlib, and neoliberal tendencies the Left likes to critique. Gazi was an entire QTGNC revolutionary anti-colonialist who kept pushing Hotep-like analyses of Black cis male oppression and calling for violence against trans Black women just like these reactionary forces do, and who visited violence and abuse and labor exploitation onto several Black women and other marginalized genders with the help of white/non-Black cis comrades. Then, there are QTGNC Black Lives Matter organizers speaking of “abundance” in the way prosperity ministers do and even going on right-wing platforms like the Breakfast Club to justify their grift, and echoing support of white imperialist politicians. And there are whole Queer- run Black Leftist publications and radio shows pushing the same lines about feminist/queer movements that go into why misleadership in places like Ghana and Nigeria are legislating against QTGNC rights (the latter of which is being facilitated by white religious movements partnering with local governments). Here, then, the white left’s anti-blackness converging with white liberal/conservative reaction, is translated into a bias in our movements along gender/sexual lines that dovetails with parallel biases in bourgeois society across nations, all with the same impact. And that's why, after the 2020 rebellions, when the right-wing insists on protecting the nuclear family alongside defending the nation, ratcheting up both the police state and anti-trans/anti-abortion legislation; we have anti-colonial Left voices piling on “identity politics” and related topics more vociferously than they are actually denouncing cisheteropatriarchy and organizing against it! Self-described revolutionaries tailing the ruling class? This, by the way, is the same thing the white Left did after the election of Trump in 2016, with dismissal of “wokeness." The latter should not be surprising for us, as the divide in the working class is maintained at the color line. But, reductive anti-colonialists, whether cisgender/heterosexual or not, who dismiss or fail to fully apprehend the gender/sexual horizons of the struggle for both self-determination and class liberation, are no different theoretically or practically, from the white reductionists who have been so historically chauvinistic and antagonistic toward Black and Third World movement. Perhaps that's why the two camps worked together so closely in BHO (and in cults like APSP who BHO patterned themselves on); and why in other organizations both camps have a discursive unity with the conservatives' insistence on cisheteropatriarchy and anti-feminism in particular. Is any of this advancing our struggle? Not when certain Black people have chosen to avoid Left politics because of an overrepresentation of whiteness within the anti-capitalist movement. They feel alienated. In this way we lose potential comrades. And, similarly, some QTGNC folk in particular have avoided the Left because of an overrepresentation of cisheteropatriarchy and abuse within the same. Because of alienation. More potential comrades lost. Then the liberals exploit this, encouraging folk to stick with and try to reform the system they know intimately (capitalism and the State); hence the popularity of representation politics, rather than be “fooled” into trying to join liberatory movements that promise something better but that end up an “authoritarian” nightmare behind the scenes. We lose comrades because of these myths. Is any of this advancing a united front? It is difficult to disprove propaganda from the enemy, if we insist on chauvinism, invalidating legitimate concerns about exclusion and violence and abuse and manipulation that lend certain stories credence. Gazi is just a very extreme example of what’s being described here, and so it was with a few of those who have helped them rise to and remain in prominence. Again, that is what will happen when you refuse to ideologically deal with developments endogenous to our national and gender experiences, to see their implications for class struggle. Like the white left marginalizing Black interests, Gazi/BHO, and their acolytes and supporters across races and tendencies held to a resounding refusal to synthesize specific histories and concerns of the QTGNC struggle with anti-colonial Left ideology. They insisted on calling “intersectionality” a white supremacist project. In an atmosphere like that, of course the dynamics that enable abuse to persist can go hidden. The ideological chauvinism had practical implications. There was complete erasure and lack of political education around the origins of the modern QTGNC movement as it relates to uprisings and lumpenized labor organizations led by Third World women of trans experience such as the gorls of STAR during the 70s era anti-colonial upheavals. Certain values, praxis, theoretical concerns cannot be synthesized in a movement when you bypass endogenous developments like this in our history. And that's why a failure to name, anticipate or respond to abuse in a principled way is so common. The need to build a rudder for the ship, borrowing once more from the words of the ABB, was neither acknowledged nor consciously struggled for. Instead, the ship was allowed to verse the high seas without direction, while some claiming to be vanguards either scoffed from the shore or they climbed aboard pretending to steer it, though they lacked the tools to do so, as they knew nothing of the waves or the winds or the stars and navigation, and simply let the most vulnerable rot at the bottom of the hold, and led folk, particularly youth, including underage ones, into destruction. And what came of that? All of the horrors we went over in this document, and then some. True political education and a culture of genuine revolutionary learning and practice is the only thing that would have allowed folk to identify this stuff from jump and act against it. It is not enough for folk to call themselves “scientific” revolutionaries, Nkrumahists, Marxists/Leninists, Maoists, or whatever other persuasion, too, all while maintaining a movement atmosphere and ideological milieu built on reaction to reaction and vice versa; not dialectics. Gazi’s antics could hardly be critiqued effectively when the self-described materialists around them had only learned to theorize gender by way of cissexist idealists like Tommy Curry (who believes sexualized racism against Black cishet men absolves them of patriarchal violence), Frances Cress Welsing (who believes white supremacy is primarily motivated by fear of Black cishet male virility), Clenora Hudson Weems (who sees Black feminism as divisive and prefers a “holistic” gender politics that is cissexist/heterosexist instead) when discussing gender contradiction. Gazi’s antics could hardly be critiqued effectively when the self-described queer radicals of the Left had only learned to theorize gender struggles by misusing Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers’ critiques about the colonial basis of modern cisheteropatriarchy to idealize precolonial Africa as genderless and all Black people as essentially nonbinary. Gazi’s antics could hardly be critiqued effectively while the ship still lacks a rudder, while no synthesis toward higher unity is being advanced, while bad theoretical moves steeped in chauvinism and class interests mask horrible practices like gender violence and abuse. Even sadder is that due to all this, attempts to establish a better precedent on part of some Black/Third World radicals, particularly trans and nonbinary, especially trans woman, transfeminine, and transmisogyny-affected (TMA) ones, were being and are still being dismissed. There is still reactionary criticism upon reactionary criticism compounding, and all this shitslinging, and divisiveness, and hot takes, sensationalistic media titles (“fuck black history month” and “feminism is inherently bourgeois”), incendiary commentary (like those which denied the literal existence of a Black elder and political prisoner), intentional internet controversy campaigns (“operation storm of white tears”), and endless podcasts and breadtubes with surface level analysis akin to the revolving door of mainstream media reporting, rants that sound more like Shade Room comment sections, and exclusionary academic panel-style events led by wanna-be public intellectual types, the courting of celebrities, and overall reliance on the marketing apparatus that is social media (even to the point of mistaking mere popular education and even populism for political education and conscientization). Does any of this advance the struggle? Black Hammer Organization’s inconsistency at the theoretical level, their lack of cohesive understanding on colonialism and gender struggles, and the way that provided a smokescreen to cover the abusive and cult-like dynamics: it is made possible by a general problem on the anti-colonial Left where gender and hierarchy are seldom confronted materially. And this milieu is still driving more wedges, still keeps alienating potential comrades from the anti-colonial Left, and it shields chauvinists, and though you can scratch a chauvinist, and almost always either find an apologist for abuse or an actual abuser, like what happened with Gazi, these radicals are mystified as our movements are so rife with the people like the latter, and so they can't even effectively protect themselves or anyone else from these wreckers, just dusting their hands or looking the other way when the damage is done, or claiming that discussion of these things is a tool of the white Man. Sounds just like how abuse culture happens in the bourgeois world, right? The same stuff that led to a #MeToo movement? Interesting... . The anti-colonial Left must take this moment as indication about how necessary it is to parse embourgeoisement in our spaces. And we can only walk through the manifestations thereof by paying attention to the gendered/sexual contradictions that provide a throughline. Counterinsurgency is heavily reliant on celebrity activism and social media to water down and misrepresent radical ideas, and the problem of cults and hierarchy, which are gendered problems, is a perfect doorway to these bourgeois tendencies infecting our spaces. All Gazi did was foster a significantly horrible version of an alignment between an old problem and new realities that the rest of our movement hasn't fully grappled with yet. An organization like Black Hammer could rise to prominence without much opposition as a result of not dealing with this. To the point of being defended despite its egregious doings, and its astounding liberalism, its lack of cohesive scientific analysis or ideology or operational security, and its outright campaigns against other revolutionaries (in which BHO deemed us “opposition” or “enemies”). There is no valid reason that criticism of these issues was dismissed so readily and enthusiastically, or at least not taken seriously, save that there is unpreparedness on the anti-colonial Left to confront gender contradictions as a material/labor/praxis question. If something is not done about this immediately, at theoretical and procedural, and interpersonal and individual levels, at organizational and intracommunal levels, we will see the increased magnification of individualism, of cults of personality and of abuse and the apologism and shielding around the same, as well as grift and opportunism, to the point that there would cease to be a meaningful distinction between a “radical” space and a “radlib” or even “alt-right” space. With the gamut of tactics used by BHO to supposedly propagandize and politically educate that we have seen, the lines here are already blurred. And gender violence, especially (trans)misogynoir, will always be the tell. There is a web that must be detangled, ultimately, and it is threaded in gendered contradictions that stem from or are reaction to cisheteropatriarchy. It's this that enabled the rise of BHO/Gazi, which that formation unfortunately took to absolutely depraved extremes, but which much of the anti-colonial Left is guilty of either participating in or failing to meaningfully struggle against. One may say that correlation ain't causation, but correlation requires a look at the context that shapes a certain connection: and as regards cults, gender violence, etc, a context entrenched in organizational methodologies which value individualism and visibility and one-dimensional expressions of radical thought, that see other ideologies as competition (reminds us, competition on the Left is a residue of capitalist market logic), that regard "the masses'' as tabulae rasae who must be proselytized with the gospel of Marx or Lenin or Mao or Nkrumah or whomever, often cannot address the issue, see it coming, and they will even stand by it and make excuses or sweep narratives under the rug. And it is because their values come from the same gendered histories and institutions that already rely on abuse and manipulation. Every true revolutionary must have a commitment to extricating themselves from gendered oppression and exploitation and domination and division, and striving not to replicate them, if we want to see all power to the people. The ruling class is clear on this, that is why they are waging war on bodily autonomy through gender oppression, and on our consciousness through mystification around gender, as part of broader attempts to undermine revolutionary struggle. We want true transformation of ourselves and our movements, we need to be ready for this. We need the tools to anticipate and stamp out future abuse and cults, or at least adequately support victims and repair the damage that has already been done, and that could come in the future. This can only come when we put our faith in the magic of the hands, as Assata called it. Discovering how to practice this is the mission of this generation, and it's the gender/sexual struggle, it is a confrontation with cisheteropatriarchy as a material question, it is the courage to develop new institutions and new genres of being, it is the willingness to free the available "cultural and political maneuvers" that gender has enclosed, to liberate them from the inherited models so reliant on bourgeois hierarchies and values and labor ascriptions: this phase of struggle is what will help us both discover and fulfill that charge. We owe it to our ancestors and to all survivors and to our descendants, to see it thusly, and to move accordingly. And we owe it to our planet too, because the earth is being killed, and only a real united front of Black/Third World radical movements and networks can heal it. Shall we stagnate because we waited on “demiurges” who only want fame and to enact violence on the most vulnerable? or will we teach ourselves and our people that it's our collective strength that's gonna get us free? The choice is ours. Queer or not, we gotta do better.