Guerrilla History - Laundering Black Rage - From the Archives

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

This From the Archives episode is a crossover between Guerrilla History and the Black Myths Podcast, originally released on our patreon back in early November. Cohost Henry sits down with Too Black to talk about his fantastic essay Laundering Black Rage which is available in two parts (Part 1: https://www.blackagendareport.com/laundering-black-rage, Part 2: https://www.blackagendareport.com/laundering-black-rage-part-2) from the fabulous Black Agenda Report.  This really great conversation touches on a lot of tangential topics to the essay as well, so be sure to both read the essay AND listen to the episode! Too Black is a poet, host of the Black Myths Podcast , member of Black Alliance For Peace , and communications coordinator for the Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2 .  You can find him on twitter @too_black_ Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is Adnan Hussein, one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history. Every month, as you know, we record a reconnaissance report, a major episode with a guest about their historical work, as well as an intelligence briefing, a shorter discussion, usually among the three of us. Occasionally, we also post a dispatch from the field of contemporary left history, often with a guest about a breaking story or a recent set of events or issues, and provide some historical analysis. We also typically record a second intelligence briefing as an exclusive episode for patrons, subscribers at patreon.com slash gorilla history.

We have decided to unlock an intelligence briefing each month after a year has passed as special from the archive episodes for you to enjoy. We hope you'll find these a useful resource. Of course, if you'd like to subscribe and have early access to intelligence, and all the other additional content like readings and discussions of classic texts, primary sources, reviews and discussions, do become a patron at patreon.com slash gorilla history with our gratitude. We do this because we love to make history a resource in our political education as an activist global left and in our struggles for justice. So we're happy to share

these older episodes with you in this series from the archive. As ever, Solidarity. You wouldn't remember Dinn-Banthamu? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hi, welcome to the Black Miss podcast crossover episode.

This is a collaboration with myself primarily in Black Myths overall and guerrilla history podcast. So I am the host to Black, one of the co-hosts of the Black Miss podcast, and I'm going to pass it over to Henry so he can introduce his side. And then we'll talk more so about the ideas and what we're going to be discussing on this collaborative episode. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Henry Huckimacki. I'm one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history. Unfortunately, the timing didn't make it possible for my other two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein and Brett O'Shea of Revolutionary Left Radio and the Red Menace to be able to make it. But I'll do my best to hold down the fort myself here. And I'm really looking forward to the conversation with Two Black. And just for the listeners of Gorilla History, if you don't already listen to the Black Myths podcast, I highly recommend that you do. I've checked it out for quite some time. And I really appreciate Two Black's work on Black Myths, as well as the work that he did as the producer of Last Open Intellectual, which long-time guerrilla history listeners will have heard me highly recommend to you several times while that show was in existence.

And it's sad for us that it is no longer in existence. But yeah, that's me. Yeah, it's sad for me too. But, you know, things at the move all. But yeah, definitely. And even for Black Miss listeners, I don't know. You know, we don't, as we always say on our episodes, we're always learning. So we're not a, we listen to other people's podcasts when we have the time to,

particularly if there's a issue that we're interested in. And sometimes just looking for myths that we may not be aware of. Because again, we don't have a book of myths that we've already debunked in our heads that sit somewhere. And then we just record episodes. That's not how it works. We're learning as we go. So podcasts like, you know, guerrilla history. are really helpful in doing a deep dive, which is something that we obviously, if you're

a listener for Black Mips, you respect, because they'll crack open the book, they'll read the quotes, they'll find the historians, they'll go back to some obscure time period that nobody remembers and remind you that something important really happened there. So we definitely appreciate Gorilla Pod, Rev. Left, for their breakdown of history and theory is just really helpful, and we've even listened to their episodes. to prepare so we're not just saying this just to encourage everybody to listen like there's genuine respect here um so i just want everybody to know that so we can jump into the conversation yeah and i guess the first thing that i'll ask you uh to black this is for the gorilla history

listeners who don't yet listen to black moths can you just briefly tell them what black miths is all about and i'll do the same for guerrilla history for your listeners right definitely definitely so Black Myths podcast has evolved, but the foundational concept was to take a myth that was of a social political nature that was popular amongst black culture or that was popularly stated about black people, whether internal or external or external, and debunk that, but not just through kind of a jeopardy sense of, you know, this person that was white is actually. black or this happened in this history or you know this date at this time but to do like a real material analysis of that myth and to situate it um in a in a way to help us understand how that misinterpretation actually pushes us in the wrong direction and trying to solve our actual problems so we care about the material basis of myths we're not interested in just facts for the sake of facts.

So we'll take something like the Willie Lynch letter. I'm just using examples here. That was a letter was written for those who don't know. Well, it's not a real letter. But it was a letter that was supposedly written by a slave owner that claimed a few tactics. And then this letter was used to explain the entirety of why black people have any problems today by the name of a man or the name of a man named Willie Lynch, who never existed. So we'll just show you that.

this letter is not real, but also why even the arguments made in that letter don't make sense. Here recently, we just did Marxism as Eurocentric, that being the myth. And we look at some of the foundational concepts of Marxism in and of itself, but also the history of Marxism beyond just Karl Marx and angles. Looking at the history that African people have participated in Marxism as well as, you know, other colonized people, we did one of crack babies. that's not a thing either in demonstrating that

that was something that was propagated by the state and media to push a certain narrative ties to the war on drugs and really even going back to anti-communism as far as this idea of identifying threats and so on and so forth

but yeah we'll take those myths debunk them but we do them in a more conversational way so we'll get the scholarship but we also have people on our show who are just again everyday people so we're not trying to push any strong ideological bent

It's pretty obvious where we're coming from, but it's more so just to bring people into a conversation and a deep dive. So I'll let Henry take over as far as, like, you know, what Gorilla Pod is about. I think there are some similarities there. Oh, yeah, totally. And I really do like the format of Black Myths. I think it's a really, really neat concept for the show. And I'm pretty sure I've told you that before, but I really do like it. Guerrilla history for those that are listeners to Black Myths and haven't checked out guerrilla history yet.

We are a fairly, as you said, I mean, somewhat deep dive. Like our episodes sometimes do get up to like three hours long. And sometimes we do have subsequent episodes that build on previous, like two hour long episodes. So sometimes we do get pretty deep. But we come at it from a very explicit anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, revolutionary left perspective to look at different historical events that are happening, you know, in proletarian global history. We look at everything from, you know, things that are happening.

The Counter Revolution of 1776 with Gerald Horn. I just mentioned that because we're going to be talking with him again in less than two weeks. He's one of our, of course, favorite guests to have on the show as I'm sure I'm sure everybody understands why. He's just a great interview and really a great comrade in general. But we have interviews with people like Jose Maria Sisson, Comrade Joma, the founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines. we have interviews with communists from India to talk about the farmer's strikes that were taking place there. We have, you know, revolutionaries that were active within Nepal.

We have Red Army faction members from Germany. We have scholars to talk about, you know, more large history, let's say. Like we had Alex Avina, who listeners of Rev. Left, probably know who he is. We've had him on a few times. And one of our episodes was talking about the total. of Latin American Cold War politics, what was happening in Latin America during the Cold War,

which is, I mean, the conversation, the scope of that was far too big to cover in that one conversation, but Alex is an amazing scholar and did what he could to fit it into a two-hour conversation. So, you know, we really go everywhere, all time periods. We talk about, you know,

the English peasants revolt, like going back many centuries. I have things planned for primitive communism, which is, you know, before recorded history like we really are going everywhere at any time and trying to get people who come at it from a revolutionary left perspective kind of an ecumenical left revolutionary left perspective in terms of you know i'm a marxist leninist uh brett my co-host is somewhere in between a marxist leninist and a marxist leninist and adnan i don't think has ever like

explicitly stated his political ideology but he's also like on the far fringes of the far left but we'll have people that are social Democrats on. We'll have Trotskyists on. One of our most popular episodes was Trotskyists. We had the electoral theory and tactics of Marx and Lenin with August Nymphs, who's the very acclaimed Trotskyist himself. It was a great conversation, one of our favorites. We can learn things from people of different ideological tendencies.

So even though we do have, as you said, on Black Myths, You're not necessarily like pushing people into one ideological framing, even though we understand the framing that you are personally coming from. We also have like very strongly committed ideological underpinnings, but it's very important for us that we learn from various different sources. I know Brett, this is not on something that he said on a podcast, just something he told me personally when we were chatting. Brett is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio for people who don't know. And one of our co-hosts, one of his favorite things to read is from far right-wing religious leaders because he finds very interesting things about their worldview and how they analyze the world. And it helps him, you know, go through those theoretical arguments that he would have with them

in order to further his own ideology to strengthen his arguments against the kind of rhetoric that you see from far. our right religious figures from various different denominations. So I think that that's something that we think is very important to talk with people of different ideological underpinnings, but from a revolutionary left perspective. Like we're not taking on right wingers for, you know, to have a debate with them. That's not what our show is about.

We are for education, not for like, hey, let's have a debate and see who comes out on top because that generates clicks. But yeah, sorry, that was a bit too long anyway. No,

it's fine. And I think both shows, I think what I appreciate about, your entire collective of podcasts, but particularly guerrilla history, it's just like, it's the emphasis on how you frame a subject. Like even the one I think that I just listened to, it was a sanctions as siege warfare. Oh, good one.

Yeah, with Manu Kurouka. Yeah. And it's like thinking about sanctions of siege warfare, you know, that's something I was like, I need to return back to this episode and listen to it even more intently than I think I did the first time. but like I think framing for us as well and black miss is really important like how do you frame something like what's the kind of ideological understanding

and what are the conditions that that underpin a given myth that's why it's not enough to just say in the kind of idealistic sense that something is true or false you have to see like how do we get to a point where this is even accepted as as an explanation of reality like what how does this explain the material world why is this in a position to do so like those are important questions to ask and I think that that's helped people who listens to our show who who don't even know about all of the different like ideological underpinnings of the people you named of the people we talk to but if you can just make something makes sense through that framework then it it kind of demystifies even the ideology for people because often I know these things can be sound intimidating when you start talking about all these different time periods. or we start talking about, you know, these different other ways of framing and understanding an issue.

But when you just go in and you dive into a given moment and you just explain like this is what happens and we are explaining it with this kind of framework, then it helps people get outside that kind of individualistic, idealistic notion of how they understand the world, which I think is one of the major problems that we're facing, is that even when the material is there,

Our interpretation of it, our framing of it is we've been taught ideologically to see it in such a narrow way that we miss opportunities to move towards more revolutionary positions because it's like, you know, we're looking for the more reactionary thing because that's how we've been conditioned. So I just think it's important to really like push the framing of things and like challenge people on that. Even if you don't agree with our framing, at least we challenge you on that. And then we can have a debate from there if we want, but those framing is like how we understand, what's the principles, what's the philosophy that frames this, because everything comes with that. Nothing is solely objective in that sense, you know. Yeah. I think that this is why it's critical that we have, and I know that I'm basically putting on my Marxist-Leninist hat for this statement, but it's why it's critical that we have dialectical and historical materialist's understandings of the world and framings of, the world because you know as you mentioned the black myths has an episode on crack babies or you know the lack thereof things like this are very easy because they're just i mean not easy in terms of turning people's consciousness against them you do have to get that message out to people and

that's what you're doing but it's easy in terms of like there it's true there is false it is false therefore you know there you go it just have to change that framing is like it is a lie that it's just it's there's a dichotomy there true false with other things it's much more important to have you know historical and dialectical materialist analysis analysis of things or another example sorry before i get into materialism and dialectics is uh you know like the gulf of tonkin incident like you know it was the justification for the united states getting involved in vietnam it was a lie like there's no you don't really have to have an argument about like are you framing it the right way or the wrong way? It was a lie. The United States government lied to

the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. And that's why the United States got, you know, I say that's why the United States got involved in Vietnam. The United States got involved in Vietnam because they wanted to get involved in Vietnam. But that was the justification that they gave for getting involved. The thing that's interesting is like the, it's also a question. This is someone in the, I try to deal with this somewhere in my piece as far as like there's the, the, reason that people believe bullshit is almost more interesting than the whether the bullshit

is true or false, right? Like, oh, totally. What underpins the fact that that can make sense to people that that is an acceptable lie or an acceptable myth? Like, I think that kind of helps me, like what you just say kind of helps me explain our show. Like, we're in many ways more interested in that

and we use just the true or false nature as a kind of an opening to investigate into like, how do we arrive at that position where, you know, you can, you can use this and then invade somewhere, right? Like, what if that gets us there? Or even with the crack baby, it's like, yeah, we can show you the science that easily demonstrates that that's not a thing that you can't really isolate cocaine in the system of a mother or of a child and explain that that's why this

child behaves that way. There's all other environmental factors and all kinds of other issues that contribute to whether a child does well and simply doing. drugs while you're pregnant is not a determinant. It doesn't mean you should do it. It's just to say that there's more to it than that. But how do we arrive at a point where a media apparatus can push that that gets taken up? That becomes an epidemic. It justifies policies to lock people up and to push the war on drugs. Like, how do we get there? Like, that's the where I think our podcasts are really interested. It's like, what's the history behind that? And that's where the dialectics are important because you really can't understand.

did without that kind of materialism because otherwise it's just oh they just lied but that doesn't always teach us the right things like oh they just lied right like there's something else that we're conditioned with that allows for that lie to move forward because if we weren't they because there's some things even to this day they can't come out they as in the state capital cannot come out and just tell us this and we're like we all know it's BS so they can't do it so they have to concoct something that at least passes through on some level that serves at some kind of front to what they ultimately want to say, right? And it's like, how do these things get taken up? Like, that's more interesting to me than just whether or not this one thing is true or false. Like that's, you know.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you have to, and that opens up far more lines of investigation, which you do, you know, it opens up more lines of investigation than, is it true? Is it false? Because with these examples that we just gave, you know, they're false. It's, it's much more about examining the priors of an individual, the priors of a society, what the media is pushing for, like, who benefits, what capital in a specific society thinks about it, what the ideological apparatus of that country thinks about that situation and how framing it in one way or another would influence that, like much, much more interesting, as you said. But the reason I brought up historical and dialectical materialism, just briefly, so I don't get too sidetracked.

is I have a specific example and it's a great example of what people in international relations that are allergic to Marxism called a security dilemma but like really what it is is it's just looking at you know dialectical materialism from different perspectives which of course dialectical materialism you do the security dilemma would be like you have to look at a given event from multiple perspectives I know real revelatory here you can't just look at it from But you have to look at it from multiple perspectives to understand is something offensive or defensive. And the, like most, the easy example to understand this is the North Korean nuclear weapons program. So, you know, if you look at it only from the perspective of the United States or the United States military, especially the United States military stationed in the military outposts known as South Korea, if you only look at it from that perspective, the, you know, deep.

The DPRK, developing a nuclear weapons program, seems like a very aggressive, very offensive action. Right, right. If you take even a second thought of what it is like from the perspective of not only the governing apparatus of the DPRK, but also the populace of the DPRK, let's not forget the absolute devastation that was wrought on the DPRK during the Korean War. and the absolute devastation that's occurred since then via sanctions, which we will have an episode of guerrilla history on very soon about the sanctions on North Korea. If you think about it for a second, developing nuclear weapons for a country that's this small that doesn't have that extra manpower to, you know, they have to maintain a huge standing army because of all of the United States military bases that are all around it.

Right. And they don't have, they don't have that many people in the country. If you have to maintain a huge military, you don't have manpower for developing, you know, whatever, medium industry, light industry. Of course, they had a very developed heavy industry in the 1950s and 1960s, but that only got them so far. And then sanctions really hurt them after that. You know, if you were able to have a nuclear weapon as a deterrent, not only would you

have to not worry about having your country absolutely devastated again in a war, but it would also free up a substantial portion of your armed forces to work within the economy of your country. You know, like there's many perspectives to this. And you have to think about that. And that's dialectical materialism or as, you know, international security scholars who are allergic to Marxism would say the security dilemma. You know, you have to think about it. What would you think if you were North Korea being surrounded by all of these military bases

and what is the most cost effective method as well as, you know, manpower effective method, which are kind of related of dealing with? this. And the solution is pretty obvious, especially when you see the results of countries that have gotten rid of nuclear weapons once they already had them, you know, or they were developing nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction programs. You know, what happened when Iraq said that they were dismantling their weapons of mass destruction programs? Like, Saddam was out very soon. Libya. Right. Like, this is what happens. So if you're, if you're DPRK, you understand this. Americans have to think about that other perspective.

They've studied that themselves, right? Like, they see how this works. There's no peaceful coexistence here. So, yeah, all I was trying is that, you know, you've got to think of these things from multiple perspectives. And when you're done thinking about the issue from multiple perspectives, especially because within the West, we're given one perspective. It is the dominant ideological perspective of the West, which is the logic of capital. right what you have to think of it from other perspectives and then consciously make a framing decision to put that framing in contravention to the framing that is done by the dominant ideological apparatus

of the hegemonic force of the west right now so i mean that's something that we try to do on guerrilla history is think through these from multiple perspectives and then try to frame it in a way that is both accurate but also in direct contradiction to the dominant ideological framing of a specific event or a specific movement. Yeah, one more example, and then we can get into it that I'm thinking of even on our show. Last year, we did an episode on Cuba, and it was whether, I don't remember the name of that myth. I don't remember the specific wording of the myth, but I remember the general point of

it was whether the protests on, what was it, June 11th of that year? year. Oh, sure. We're, you know, we're against, we're astroturfed. Yeah. Or whether they were astroturfed. Right. The question, sometimes we'll pose a myth as the question, was it about racism, right? Like, because that was kind of used as this whole anti-black racism was used

as a front, again, as a means to just further sanction and, and even overthrow Cuba. And it failed. But initially, before we did that, I think because before those protests broke out, we were just thinking through just different myths in general. And I think whether Cuba was

colorblind, I think, came up. And that would be okay to talk about in like a post-revolutionary world where that kind of episode couldn't be used as cover to criticize Cuba in a way that isn't really, even if we did it in a principled way, that kind of episode,

If we had done it, that myth about the colorblindness, that can be used as a way to say, oh, yeah, Cuba has all this racism. And this is why socialism sucks. Like, it can become that kind of conversation. So we chose not to do that. And more so, and once those protests came up, it was definitely a no, because we didn't want to offer any cover. Because I saw, it was, I'm glad we made that choice because I remember seeing, like, when that, when those protests broke out, all of a sudden, everybody was a, was an anti-racist expert. on Cuba's race relations. Everybody had an opinion about,

oh, you can have, you can talk about class, but you've got to make sure you talk about race. Like, that's some kind of astounding point to make. You know, like, you know, many of us haven't been thinking about that. And, you know, the revolution didn't eliminate racism in the country. And, like, all of a sudden, you just

had, I mean, NPR, Washington Post, Slate, all the mainstream liberal peace, just bombarding us with conversations. All of a sudden, people cared about Afro, Cubans, had never seen a debate on Afro-Cubans. I don't even think many people knew there were Afro-Cubans based on their terrible understanding of Cuba, and then all of a sudden, that was used as a conversation.

It's not to say, as with many, like, color revolutions, that there aren't real issues in a given situation, but the United States will use these legitimate issues as it means to just further, you know, sanction, bomb, or just destroy or undermine this place all the time. We see this today with Iran, you know, we see this with Haiti. It doesn't mean that they don't have legitimate problem. It doesn't mean that, you know, women should die in custody or anything like that. But we see this as a means to just say, this is a terrible place because to your point, we don't ever look at it from the perspective of that place.

It's simply, oh, racism is happening over there. And there's no, like, historical implications about what it might mean there versus here. There's no material implications or material analysis of what it means here. it's just the same we can just we can just export it anywhere and it's the same exact understanding like that that kind of logic just drives me nuts it's the lack of historical materialism like you just you just mentioned like people need to understand and I know I'm preaching to the choir to the audience of these two shows so you know forgive me audience I'm telling you things that you already know surprise surprise we have smart audiences like you know this is going to happen but

without historical materialism, you flatten the entirety of the globe and history into a level footing without any analysis of where a society was immediately preceding a specific event happening. So, you know, people don't think about what was Cuba like before the revolution. They only look and see like, hey, the position of Afro-Cubans is not as as high as it is of white Cubans. Like, yeah, that's true. And that's something that should be addressed. That being said, the position of Afro-Cubans is like unbelievably better now than it was prior to the revolution. This is why, and I know that you love quotes. You know, I do listen to your show. I know that you love quotes. This is in the groundings with my brothers, Walter Rodney, and he was, he was

quoting Kwame Ture at the time, Stokely Carmichael, saying Fidel Castro, let me see if I can remember the exact quote. It's something along the lines of Fidel Castro is the blackest white man in the Americas for what he did for the Afro-Cuban population during and immediately succeeding the revolution that took place there in 59. So is there legitimate criticisms to be had of the race relations within Cuba? Of course, there isn't literally every country of the world. Like, if you find a place that has absolutely egalitarianism between every race within the country, I'd like to know about it because I am unaware of it.

There are places that are better, these places that are worse. I'd love to follow that model if that was actually a thing, which it's not, right? Sure, it's not. So, you know, you have to analyze what were conditions like before that event and what have the conditions been like after that event. And are they making strides in the right direction, continued strides in the right direction? You know, this is what historical materialism does for you. Let's turn towards the conversation at hand because listeners, I'm afraid to let you know,

but this was all just a preamble to the actual conversation. which is a two blacks excellent i mean really really excellent piece that came out uh i read it in two parts on the black agenda report and the title is laundering black rage uh really really terrific uh work and you can tell that two black is a poet when you read it because it it flows so so well but with very important topics so i really do commend you both on the analysis and the content but also the style i mean just great so you know kudos kudos to you But I want to make sure that I know that listeners of black myths will have already heard you talk about this piece. And if they follow you on social media, they'll have seen interviews that you've done on other shows,

including a friend of a guerrly history, his friends with millennials are killing capitalism. And you were recently on their show. And it was a great interview. But for those who have not read your piece yet, which I will, on our side, I will link to both parts in our show notes. So if you're interested in reading it, you'll be able to. to do that below. Can you tell us the central thesis of, of this piece? Like, what is black rage?

What does laundering mean? You know, most people think of money laundering when they hear the word laundering. So, you know, what is black rage in your conception? Where does it spring up from? This is something addressed in your piece. And how does one launder black rage? And then we'll pick through the other parts of it as we go through it. Yeah, so typically the way I've been breaking this down is we can separate laundering and black

rage momentarily. try to bring them back to you or we'll bring them back together later so um laundering is laundering like you said money laundering people usually understand is some kind of nefarious thing that happens why a so-called criminal outside of the the legitimate like world whatever that means right so um you know there's there's various definitions of it um but essentially you're trying to make uh this is this is a definition i use from the Department of Treasury as well as James Chin, who works at Chase Bank currently, you're trying to make something that was obtained illegally appear clean. So that's when you hear like

people cling their money or something. You're trying to take something that, again, this is the initial definition. We'll get to other parts of it later. But so if I, for example, if, you know, I've been using the example of robbing prosperity gospel churches. I'd just like to play with some fun ideas here. So prosperity gospel churches, we can debate on the merits of that. But if we were to rob churches and to take that money and that money would be considered illegal or illegitimate. And then we need to figure out a way to enter that money into the sanctioned, legitimate space of where money operates otherwise we'll get flagged for it right so we need to

set up some kind of front to do so so let's say we start our own church and we start a church and then we just start saying that donations are coming through the church and we assign that money we stole from other churches to those donations and then that money is cleaned so that that's what we would call it but the money is again made to appear cling so the money does not actually the blood is not erased from the money like that's an important thing to emphasize the blood stays with the money maybe you paint over the blood but the blood's there the whole time right so there's three different processes to do that um you know there's there's placement layering integration and um placement you know to just to the church analogy is you know when we take the money we

stole and we place it into the church the church becomes our front and again that's what we would say are the donations, and then we would take that money that's placed into the church through those things we claim to be donations, and we would invest that money in other things, maybe within the church, maybe we get a better, maybe we upgrade the building, maybe we buy instruments, you know, maybe we buy a church van, maybe we invest it in the community around us, but we move that money around, and that's a form of trying to legitimize it. You know, as more money comes into the church, then that money becomes ours, and we can spend that money anywhere we want and that money is then therefore integrated and that's how you get

those three processes like those three steps in the process i should say so that's the formal way of understanding money laundering um but so if if that's the definition that's pretty much accepted by the united states it's accepted by the u.n when you look at their definition it's accepted by finance experts so i'm going to say this is pretty much this is the definition of laundering most people think of laundering in some version of criminals, terrorists, something like that. And then they have to go into something and try to legitimize their activity. But if you think about that definition just on his face, taking something that was dirty and trying to make it appear clean,

that definition doesn't end with these kind of like outside examples of criminals, so-called criminals or anything like that. Like what defines crime in and of itself, what makes something? legitimate like how do i justify what's inside and outside you know because laws change the united states itself uh go ahead no i actually i just want to make sure that we spend enough time on this exact point i don't mean to interrupt your flow or anything like that it's just yeah yeah i wanted to dwell a little bit on the definition of criminality or the lack thereof because you know you touch on this in the piece but i think that this is you know something that might be worth having a conversation

about in that, you know, who determines what is criminal, who determines what is not. Obviously, criminality is determined by the, you know, the ruling apparatus of a specific society and they're going to determine what is a danger to their ruling, the ruling status to be criminal. So, yeah, I just want to make sure that, you know, I'm prompting you to make sure that we talk enough about the concept of criminality in general and how that reestablishes and reaffirms the ruling the ruling you know control of a particular state and that that's even without getting into the conversation of the state which is something else that I'd be interested in talking to but you did a great job on millennials or killing capitalism

if you want to hear about that conversation check out that but but yeah it was extended and it was really really interesting I really like that part but criminality actually uh if we can talk about that a little bit yeah you know I appreciate that because there's some these are the things that I could not, because I was initially going, that's another conversation, I was initially going to turn this into an academic place. So a lot of places, 6,000 words is a cutoff. So some things I touch on because I just can't get to 12,000 words. So I have to say something quickly. So I appreciate that. Because I had a, I had something that early on, like really early on, where I was trying to more so think about this idea of criminality in a more drawn out way.

and how even the idea of catching the mob or catching the whatever the criminal that gets you know the really the point is the state is like we're not going to let anything get outside of our boundaries so it's not really about that you're doing something that's bad quote unquote whatever again that these are all nebless terms depending on where you stand but it's not that you're doing something that may even be harmful any more than what we're doing it's that this is money we cannot tax this is a threat to our hegemony and to our power so the mob cannot be allowed. Even if the mob helped us build this shit up, now it's time to nationalize the mob, basically, and bring them into the fold, right? You know, so we can't allow criminal activity to happen too much, again, things that we define as criminal because that threatens our class position, you know.

But we will allow it to some extent because we need dirty money sometimes because that's how we got started, you know? So we know. need we need we need the sometimes you need the black market quote unquote stuff to be happening but it's a tolerated level it has to be reduced and pushed to a black market it can never become the black market whenever the black market becomes competitive with a sanction market that's when you'll always see the state intervene because now it's threatening the our our power it doesn't

matter if the black market is quote unquote good or moral or not it really doesn't matter for from their perspective it does not matter it might matter for us because the black market really might be causing us real problems some of us is just everyday citizens in a given situation but the state isn't going to regulate it because it's bad it's going to regulate it because it's threatening you know a corporation that's selling drugs and now this these people are getting out cheaper you know so that's so that that's how i was thinking about that but again i couldn't get into all of that and then just criminality to itself to your point as far as how like we're not going to allow or we're going to make certain we're going to deem certain things criminal because again it threatens our position you know and so even with the explosion in the united states of uh of the prison population you know there's a there's many different sociological reasons for that i don't think stuff like the new jim crow solely explains it as simply just kind of a racial like control system i think that's part of it but i think you can think about it's counter it so

urgency you can think about it as we really literally don't have anything for these people to do because we don't have jobs for them our economy has moved on so we need to have somewhere to house them so they don't mess up our markets so we need to send people elsewhere you think about on the international scale as far as when we think about the war on drugs often doesn't get talked about enough as an international war is often just truncated to what happened in black communities in the united states which is a good conversation but the international war on drugs was trying to track money laundering. That's why when you go back to the 1986 anti-drug abuse act, that was also that in the United States that also prompted the UK and

other Western powers to try to, you know, crack down, quote unquote, money laundering. And I didn't, it's not cited in this piece, but I had something in one of my older drafts that actually demonstrates that United States and UK had to reform the laws that they had passed, Because they had one thing, once they had more stringent banking laws, they found that they could not get as much money put into their own banks. So they had to reform those laws because it was like, oh, we actually can't crack down our own people. So then money laundering started to focus, like crack it down on money laundering, start to focus on these, these prior colonized islands or currently neo-colonized islands that were like tax havens and stuff where people can avoid, like rich folks can avoid. void paying taxes and trying to crack down on the quote unquote criminals in that area like the drug dealers who might send their money somewhere and trying to crack down on that and being like a a a island for for criminals elsewhere to store their money right that so there's a whole like conversation just even when you're talking about money laundering not even within my kind of like trying to flip it on his head but even within the way that they have going to box gone about their own business.

It's really interesting to see how capital has moved and trying to, and trying to, like, shut that down and things become criminal in that sense or even when you look at, like, I did cite the anti-communist war in Nicaragua. And that was its own version of laundering because we're selling guns to Iran

that we just said were terrorists. We're selling guns or terrorists. What are they? They tolerate terrorism. There's a term, I cannot remember the word. Death squads. The death squads. Yeah. We didn't care that they were death squads. Right. So we're selling guns to that even though our own government just outlawed it. And I think there was an amendment that I'd outlawed that. But we're going to do that under the table. And then we're going to use that money to fund the war, Nicaragua and not just Nicaragua El Salvador and all throughout the, you know, throughout Latin America to kill any spread of communism in these areas. right and and and what happened with the people that were in that you know like look at all over north for example yeah one of the architects of iran contra you know when it's something in support of

the hegemony of the state yeah he was slapped on the risk briefly he ran for congress he almost won you know like after after this and then became the head of the nRA like he was the president of the nora like you know what a career trajectory for a guy that is so blatantly guilty of criminality, but this is what happens when your criminality is in defense of the hegemony and not in contravention to it. Or another thing, I hate, you know, I'm going to quote you to you. Another example that you used in this piece that I thought was great, you're talking about George Floyd, as Nancy Pelosi said, George Floyd sacrificing his life for justice. You said the sacrifice also proved beneficial to the white rage party as

Republican-controlled states exploited the fear of black rage by passing repressive anti-protest laws that criminalized protesters for assembling in the streets while granting immunity to the drivers who ran them over. This is another example of creating a legal precedent of criminalizing behavior that would be contrary to the ideological and material underpinnings of the state. you know these these protesters that are in the streets are protesting against the police which is part of the ruling apparatus of the state so of course what do you do you make it illegal and then you have something that i mean any sane person would think would be illegal like driving over people in the middle of the street yeah yeah up to death there's not much more clear cut of something that should be illegal than that yeah well of course that is in defense of the hegemony that is in

defense of the ruling apparatus of the state so what do they do they say hey it's all good you can do it so i thought that was another great example from your piece just wanted to you know let the listeners have a little bit of that before we continue yeah yeah definitely i think again we we see how again and i think i said it like the state i'm going to read my own quote here um one second well i mean that's fair enough if i can quote you to you you can quote you to me has Yeah, these definitions fail to acknowledge how the state socially constructs the rigid categories are good and bad and the subsequent laws that govern them to the point that you just named, right? Right. So they'll, the definitions that people offer of money laundered to kind of come back to that, it's not, they don't fail, I think I said this as well, they don't, they don't fail in the kind of description of the process, but in the categories that are, that they ascribe the process to.

So they create these neat categories of good and bad, of criminal, non-criminal citizen, you know, like, they create those categories and then, so the definition only gets applied to a certain type of actor and, you know, in a given moment and not to any other kind of actor. But when we really, if we strip away the categories and we try to look at this just in a material sense of, of the process happening in and of itself and not who's doing it or what place is doing it. just look at the process itself and then then a bunch of options open up that goes beyond just a drug dealer or one country going for national liberation or whomever or you know all of a sudden like you look at okay most people who launder money within their definitions don't have the ability to actually create the law that's why they have to try to legitimize their ship by integrating it into the already existing agreed upon sanctioned structure because they don't have the ability to make the law to say, okay, I sold drugs. Now drugs are just legal. They

can't do it. So that's why they have to clean, wash it, all of that, because they can't say that. They don't have the power to literally do it. But when you look at capital, they do have the power to do that. They literally have the power to go out and enslave people, take land from folks, you know, colonize conquest, conquer. They have the, they have the power to do that and then set up a state as a as a as a as a as a as a as a as a as a as a entire apparatus of institutions that legitimize the activity so they legitimize their own work they don't need an outside body to stamp it they stamp it themselves through the conquest so it's like that's the actual laundering that's the initial point of it is like you've conquered and then you legitimize it by

setting up institutions to then force these people to work you can see this with african people you can see this even with people who are now racialized as white in England when you look at the enclosure movements and such we're going to kick you off your land and now we're going to make you work for us right like Marx talks about that primitive accumulation as well as in the in the colonial sectors slavery all of these things but we're going to do things that like you said even with the running people over these things even more so are clearly things that probably should be considered quote unquote illegal these are clearly things that harm the general society of people but we get to do it and then we legitimize it and then we're saying now you can get a wage now you can make stuff for us and we're going to use that labor to just continue funding it so then the state becomes its own front the institutions that come within under the state become fronts and then we're just going to keep running this through just because again laundering is a cycle it's not like i just do it one time and then i'm done if i cling my money i'm still if we go back all the way back to the robbing prosperity gospel churches if i cling my money i'm still going to rob i'm still going to

rob. And even if I stop robbing in that capacity and I put enough money into my church, now my church is legitimate enough where I can rob some in some other form, but my church still sets as a front that if I want to rob someone else, I can still bring the money through my church. And I can just keep doing it. So when capital sets up the state in the initial periods that it does, it's not one moment. And a lot of these are competing front. So it doesn't mean capital all agrees and it's just kind of some Illuminati thing. It's not one moment. This is happening throughout time.

And in many ways, it's still happening. So Black Rage, it's just a logical response to conquest, right? Like, it's just, if you do these things and then you try to legitimize them, on some level, it's not going to work because you had to, you had to plunder, you had to steal, you had to kill, you had to do terrible things of people, so they're probably not going to buy into it. So now the question becomes, how do we, since we turn everything else into a commodity, How do we turn the actual rage of the people who are responding to our conquest? How do we turn that into a commodity as well?

How do we take that labor and dispossess it and turn into something that works in our benefits? So that's what I ultimately was trying to figure out. Yeah. Before we get to that point, though, because I do want to spend some time on that commodification of Black Rage. I think it's one of the more important parts of this piece, in all honesty, because it's something that we see very explicitly and it's very disgusting. Yeah. I mean, really, really disgusting. Yeah. But before we hit that, I just want to throw something out there and feel free to disagree with me. But this is something that, you know, as you're speaking, I'm just thinking about in terms of legitimating things in the moment in order to uphold that, you know, that ruling apparatus. One of the things that always comes to mind is when you see some cop shooting, you know, cop kills a person, unarmed person. person or for example we have that teenage yahoo going and killing protesters with his with his ar-15 what happens almost inevitably immediately after the shooting takes place which you know guy shot someone it there's always extenuating circumstances and sometimes these extenuating

circumstances are not even known to the actors within that situation so it's not to say like you know they changed the law in the moment like oh yesterday we was illegal to shoot somebody that's on arm now it's now it's legal because we did it like that's not what's happening right but we see instances where somebody that again is acting either you know directly under the state like within the ruling apparatus or in defense of the ruling apparatus right when they take an action there is an immediate leap and the media plays along with it every time where you see you know this person was convicted of you know smoking marijuana two years ago. This person had a domestic abuse felony three years ago. Well, yeah,

but the cop or this teenager didn't know that when they shot them and killed them. So I don't see how that comes into the situation. What it is, I mean, and it's very explicit. It's implicit, but it should be explicit for anybody that has, you know, functioning brain cells is that this narrative is being spun in a way to make you think like, well, okay, yeah, he did shoot somebody that was unarmed but you know it was a bad person right okay you know like did he know that this person had a conviction four years ago do we know the circumstances of that conviction even today like going through the records after the fact no and it definitely wasn't known by the person who shot him in that moment that oh yeah three years ago this person was accused and convicted of i don't know

kicking his neighbor's dog like it doesn't matter they always dig up something right and and in this way it is to lessen the the the what should be you know criminal act of killing these people that are uh filled with righteous rage and uh in order to legitimate the the system because the person who undertook this pretty blatantly criminal act is working in subservience and fealty to the ruling apparatus of the state so anyway that's just my thoughts on it i don't know if you would agree with that thought or not agree with it as far as is that part of the process of what i'm described yeah yeah yeah i think that i think i say it in the essay all things go back all things go back to conquest like all black rage turns back to conquest what laundering does is stand in the way

and try to explain and use other reasons to explain why it's not about conquest so if you conquer the people then you have the ability to do everything you just described because you've conquered them so then you have the freedom to say yeah i mean they they they they peed on somebody's lawn three years ago and the people who you say this about have no power you know within the apparatus to to push back on that beyond their rage like they don't there's nothing they can do you know because because you've conquered you've you've taken over the means of production you've already seized the things that people would need as legitimate ways of having any real grievances right so like rage in many ways similar to labor becomes

the kind of like only thing that we have even though we don't even own that it becomes like the only way you can kind of exercise any pushback um because at the end of the day you were you've been conquered and i think sometimes like it's hard to remember that this late in this process but like that's still here right so it's like black people african people have been conquered so yeah we can make up whatever we want because you're whatever we say you are you were you were a slave you or a Negro, you're whatever we want you to be. And for the most part, you're going to go along with it because what else are you going to do?

Right. So it's like, it's easy to do that. And then also, like those labels, like you had said unarmed, for instance, even that, even saying that someone is unarmed implies that armed means that the person should be. Right. You know. Exactly. And that was one of the cases with that, you know, again, the teenage Yahoo who crossed state

lines to kill people. One of the people was armed. It did not make him a legitimate target for that. shooting you're absolutely right yeah so it's like i can i can almost because we just went over this on on black myths where we we just went through the how many murders or how many killings happen with police per year how many people do they kill how many of those people are black and then how many those people are considered armed versus unarmed and there's stats like mapping police violence is a good job of getting some of these stats so you end up in this situation where um i was like

how many of us can name five names out of the 300 black people to get killed by the police a year or the 1,200 people in general that are killed by the police. I mean, it's going to name five people per year. Right. Even in a highly publicized year, like, 2020, I don't think people could get to the five. I really don't. So, like, I think most people probably can get to three because there's like maybe three,

because Amad Arbery was one of the main ones, but that wasn't the police. That was were vigilantes, right? Yeah. I mean, that's a, there's a distinction there. But it's like, most people probably can't name five. It's not an indictment of individuals. It's just to say, like, most of the time, this is not really in our peer view. And then when it, when rage brings it to the service, then we hear about that or there's a, there's a recording or something of that matter.

But most of the time when it's unarmed or when it's armed, we just assume it doesn't matter. And there's a good, it's a legitimate. It's a legitimate shooting if the person has any arm on them, which is, it's funny. And I'm sorry to interrupt you. This will be very quick, I promise. Like where I come from, I know your listeners probably aren't to where I currently live in Russia, but I'm originally from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is like as rural of places you can possibly imagine. The entire region has 300,000 people. You know, I walk around when I'm, you know,

there visiting my parents. I walk around with a bell, a sheath knife hanging off my hip because that's, you know, I'm in the middle of the woods 90% of the time. I go to the grocery store, which is, you know, a 20 minute drive away from wherever like i don't take it off it's legal there nobody cares everybody else has a sheath knife on their hip as well but you know if i was a a target of the police for whatever reason i'm automatically considered armed because i have this knife on me right you know like does that legitimate the the action that was taken against me the fact that i have this knife on me of course not there's nothing inherently different about them shooting me if i'm i have this thing dangling on my hip versus i'm here in russia

and it's not really, you know, socially acceptable to have, like, giant knives hanging off of you. But, you know, like, this is, this is, uh, as you've mentioned, this is sort of the narrative that they use to legitimate what, what's happening. Anyway, yeah, sorry. No, no, that's a good point because that's the, there's a book on, um, that just deals with the language of the police. I was one of my favorite books. I'm just really bad remembering.

Is it police a field guide by chance? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah. Good book. Very good. Yeah. And they literally just go through the language is one of the books. it really helped me get to something like this because we don't think often enough just

about the language they go through literally just small little excerpts like it's just little vignettes it's like a dictionary almost right and they go through all so they go through violence they go through police involved murder or police involved shooting you know or um like just the stuff that the police say um you know officer involved shooting or uh you know like just just the way that they they kind of just decontextualize what happens just by naming it something. So even the unarmed, they have something in there

about unarmed. And I think that was one of the first times I'd really, I'd been always on the edge of that, but they really put it into just, I was like, wow, that's yeah, like, because unarmed, what does that even mean? You know, because the police automatically can be armed no matter what.

It's now, we don't ever question. Oh, they're assumed to be. It's never mentioned. Yeah, it's just, and it's okay. for them to be armed. So to your point earlier as far as like how criminality legitimizes one thing or even an earlier point about how looking from things from different perspectives and the dialectics of that and not simply just seeing everything through the eyes of the police,

we are conditioned to see everything through the eyes of the police through the eyes of the state. So if someone gets killed, the questions and the things that are assumed are always like, well, they had to have been doing this or blah, blah, blah. like there's no legitimate see even when people are defending the person who was killed there's still a sense of looking at it through the eyes of the police but it's like i said this multiple times like if if you and i are just on the street and you're chasing me and you have a gun and i have a gun and i'm running what is wrong with me turning around and pointing my gun at you

you're chasing yeah right right but what it's a policeman is like oh they should have like why you got a gun and you're chasing me i should have you're chasing me i should They should have de-escalated the situation, right? Like, you know, sure, that's what the police are supposed to be for, de-escalating situations, but it's our fault for not having de-escalated it ourselves. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. So it's like, it's maddening when I hear that I was just saying, like, to kind of move on, but like, I was thinking about doing a myth on this unarmed thing

because it's just like it doesn't hold up. Like, that automatically just moves people out of a category of being defended. even if you initially thought that the person was unarmed, then if they can even just insinuate that there was a gun within 500 yards of you, then they can say that, you know, you're guilty just because there was a gun somewhere around you at the time after you're dead, right? And then automatically people start being like, well, I mean, you know, but the police's actions, there's never questions.

And that just shows you the way that they've legitimized, coming back to laundering, they've legitimized certain actions, and deemed other things as illegitimate and the power to legitimize and not legitimate or to the power to legitimize things and to illegitimize things like that in and of itself is a bigger problem than whether we can prove this is legit or not because we're always trying to prove it to them i don't need to prove to myself that me carrying a gun is legitimate nobody needs to prove that to me there's a lot of things individually or within our own cultures we don't need anyone to prove it to but we have to go get a law passed by these people who are always looking to

protect their interests and they'll tell you it's not legitimate for you know whatever reasons that don't protect their interest so that's why i'm saying like black rage is that's why i don't try to define it in a really hard like it is simply this because as much as i like to give things i still think i've given a material base but because black rage can almost be transported to be whatever the state wants to call it it's hard to say it's just this one thing like i say ultimately like it's your collective response to oppression, you know, it's the, it's the labor that people take up to fight back against, you know, the oppression. And that labor can be both violent, nonviolent, you know, direct action, protests. It can be, it's whatever people ultimately take up, you know, when they have just simply reached a breaking point and they're tired of it, it can be a riot, it can be a rebellion, it could be flat out revolution.

it's a broader conception of it because if I try to say it's just this one thing then it becomes this kind of conversation of legitimizing even what that is and what that's not. And now I don't think it's the same as when people say joy or simply just living is resistance.

I'm not really in that camp. I think you have to really do something against the powers that be. I think you have to at least fit within that. But ultimately, like it's just an inescapable outcome as I say, of conflict. was like you can't do this to people and expect nobody to respond right they just yeah yeah well and I think that the last thing that I'll say on this before I pitch you the next question is that all of us

and you know this is something that I of course also have to do everybody has to do it because of the situation in which we were brought up the context in which we you know have spent our entire lives basically at most people in most countries including the media narratives that have been fed to us during our lives, the education that was provided to us during our lives, we have the tendency to view things from the perspective of the oppressor and not from the perspective of the oppressed. And that is regardless of whether you are an oppressed person or an oppressor. Very few people that are listening to either one of our podcasts are going to be in the oppressor category. Yeah? You know, like, of course, like, you know, maybe some, I know,

at least at guerrilla history we have quite a few professors that listen to the show you know they're not as oppressed as some of our other listeners or maybe many of your listeners are but most of our listeners i can't think of too many people that would be like explicitly oppressors we don't have government officials listening to our show you know we don't have police officers listening to your show if they do like what are you still doing in the police like get out now and re-evaluate your life choices like seriously stop uh well like we don't have these people that listen to our shows but despite that because of the way that we were brought up because of the narratives that were fed to us throughout our lives we have the tendency maybe not always but at least sometimes to have that

viewpoint of viewing a situation from the perspective of the oppressor whether it's you know the the the hegemonic state within international relations you think of it from the american perspective as opposed to the north korean perspective whether you think of you know an officer involved shooting using their lingo you think of it from the perspective of you know oh the cop must have been very scared why are you thinking of it from the cop's perspective the other person is just as much of a human i would argue much more of a human than the cop but you know i'll be nice and say that they're just as much of a human as the cop uh okay i'll leave it there but you get my point uh we we have a problem i mean societally we have a problem of always wanting to view things

from the oppressor and I have this hypothesis and I may I might be completely wrong and I'd be more than happy to concede that I'm wrong but most people have an inherent feeling that they should be part of an oppressor category you know even when people are you know explicitly stating that they're against any sort of hierarchy or they're against any sort of oppression generally I mean most people would say that they're against oppression in all forms even like liberals and Congress would say I'm against oppression in all forms but we we have because of the way that we were brought up we have these inklings deep within us even if we don't want to admit them to ourselves and this is the hardest thing is that we have to understand that some of these things

we will not even admit them to ourselves and those are the hardest things to fight against you know talking as a white man to other white men that are listening to the show right now like we have inherent racism if you deny that you are are a racist, at least a little bit inside, you are not actively addressing the problem that is inherent within you because of the situation in which you were raised. I will say that I am sure that I do some things that are inherently racist, but I strive every day to try to correct that. It's the people that deny it that are really the problem. And I think that this is the same thing with people wanting to, you know, having this idea that, well, I'm smarter than most people. I'm stronger than

most people i'm more clever than most people i have you know these whatever people think that they should be in a higher category of person than other people and we have to actively fight against that sort of logic both societally as well as within ourselves so listeners i mean if you think that you don't have that bias you probably do so just take on board that you probably have that and do more to fight against that if you do that's that's my recommendation yeah because i think something um quite Tommy Trey said he was like capitalism exacerbates the suicidal tendencies of humanity. And essentially to say like we, we human beings can go many different ways. We have darker parts of us and we have, you know, more like enlightening parts of us at the same time.

Again, dialectics like these things are and these things kind of feed off each other in some ways. but a society can structure itself to try to suppress some of those more darker tendencies and build us up in a way that doesn't put us in that we'll still have some of it

but it doesn't it doesn't like give you here's a route for all of that shit to rise to the surface like capitalism says we can let all of that rise to the surface you know just keep it maybe keep some of it enough just so you can make your money but ultimately here's you can let all of that shit out here

because we your word it's all about greed or whatever in a different society in a in a more socialistic society then that's something in in theory we would you know suppress or we would at least try to work through but since we live in this society all those proclivities that we we can have in any given context because humans are complex are fed like they're not starved out they're not taught to calm like they're fed they're they're promoted right So that happens on a more like macro level as well as within the micro within ourselves because we live in that world. We don't live outside of that world. We're not just watching it happen like we're happening with it. You know, we're in it, right? So all of those things, whether it's racism, whether it's homophobia, like it's going to, it's you're going to look at yourself and one is because you're taught to see yourself in competition to people. So it's natural to be like, from natural in response to that to be like, yeah, well, I'm more masculine than this person. So, you know, I'm better or whatever.

Like, that's something you're just going to have because because it's not just that you feel this is that society creates incentives for it. That's why I mean by it feeds it. So if you play into that, rewards come with it. You know, you can become powerful with it. You can, you think if I play into it, maybe to your point, maybe I can become the oppressor. If I can play into that, if I can feed that part of me, maybe that will get me somewhere. Now, what's funny, I say this even in the essay, when I was talking about that sense of how the state tries to socialize us to want to be that, like, you know, most of the time, people won't ever get to that status. You know, but it's like playing the lottery.

And, you know, like I say, the state is the house. And as they say, in gambling, the house always wins. but you keep playing the lottery, whether it's the racist ticket that you think is going to take you somewhere or it's going to put you up somewhere. And it often doesn't work out for most people, particularly for those of us who are the most oppressed, it really doesn't work out for us when we're at the bottom of society, wherever that is in a given context, and we're trying to play into that. Most of us won't get rich. Most of us won't make it out, quote unquote. Most of us will be right here just a hateful poor person, you know. That's most of the time what's going to happen. right so but it's like it trains you because if you've deprived people of resources then you're

like well here you can you dangle the shit you stole from them like well you can come get it but you need to be these things to do it and people will play into that and that you know that but that's in and of itself it becomes part of the laundering because I would say I didn't write this out because this is more of our kind of semi it's still material but semi psychological in a sense that I think people are taught to build themselves up as their own fronts within this kind of society. So, like, as you say, I present myself as a good person, whatever. But I know that's bullshit.

Like, ultimately, I just need to kind of, I need to say that so I can get to what I need to get to as a means to win it, you know. But ultimately, like, if I want to really win, I know those aren't the roles. And I might continue to build into my own front and tell myself that this is what I had to do because, you know, times were rough

and it might even be true. Like, I had to do this or I create all these justifications that are fronts for what is ultimately harmful behavior. And you see that often that when people rise to the top, that's kind of what they have to do.

So they have to build up a noble image to combat what they're really doing. Like, so it's just, it's embedded in the, like it's a hegemony, it's embedded in the kind of day-to-day activity that we all take on, even when we're not aware of it,

let alone the way, the way that capital is doing this on a much more vicious level because they have the power? I want to just turn things towards one last topic because if we don't wrap up after the next topic, my wife will probably murder me. We don't want that to happen. No, no. I have a couple more good years left than me, I fear. But the last topic that I definitely want to make sure that we hit is the commodification

of Black Rage as well as profit. you know, profiteering and we can think of it embezzling from Black Rage. So these are like very similar commodifying Black Rage and embezzling from Black Rage. The point is somebody's getting money from Black Rage. But the processes of these are slightly different. I know that with embezzling, you talk about the leaders of the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation Network, which, of course, is a very interesting story itself. that is a very different process than actually commodifying black rage and trying to profit off of it in that way.

So I'm just wondering if you can kind of lay out those two parallel tracks for the listeners, again, who haven't read the piece yet, but hopefully we're encouraging them to read the piece and think about these questions themselves about how black rage is commodified and, you know, money is extracted from people that are, you know, being, I don't want to say. they subsumed, but that are, you know, being taken up by the black rage. How are they profiteering off this is the question? So there's two tracks here, and I'm wondering if you can kind of lay them out for the listeners. Okay, I'm going to speak. And then if I'm not getting it quite what you're asking, just let me know, just so I can make sure I understand it just in case I didn't understand it correctly, but I think I get it.

Coming all the way back to even before I wrote it, One of my first premises of the whole thing was I was originally just trying to write about the black elite, and then I tried to understand what puts some of their behavior in motion, and that's however I have at the state and capital, because it's not enough to just criticize a class that doesn't have much power as if they're doing this all by themselves. Like, that just wouldn't be a good analysis. so but my but but even with that being said my initial theory was or how about this is was that um in prior generations of black elite like in the colonial times were just just launderers essentially because that's that's what they had to do they had to stand as a kind of a buffer class and because near under neo-colonialism there's more open accumulation for them than there was in a different era that they are not just launders that they were in bezzlers I still believe

leave that. So the difference between laundering is laundering requires bribes, as I talk about in the piece. So if I'm going to be the top class of the oppressed group, then I need to be able to kind of corral that group of people that I'm over and make sure their rage doesn't get out of hand. So I'm kind of bribed to do that. In just a direct colonial situation, that only works so much because I'm not I can't really separate myself from these people so I still feel really strong solidarity with the overall group that I belong to as the elite within that group because we're all like colonized by Britain or whomever like very directly we don't even you know we don't even really have representation within you know our own country right within our own like geographic area so there's not really much space for me to do anything so so so so bribes are only so effective in that context and i don't really get enough surplus in bribes to really embezzle um beyond the thing that i was maybe supposed to pass on in a neocolonial context is a little different i get i get more bribes as as the elite group and i and i don't

really have to have fill as much solidarity with the group that i come from i still need them like i say in the piece they're the the the elite a black elite is a double agent Like, I still need them to give me power, but I don't need to be as directly with these people as I used to be. I just need to appeal to it. I need to have my own kind of personal front to appeal to that. So often in that case, if I get, if I'm bribed a book deal or if I'm bribed a position at a university, or if I'm bribed to be the president of the United States, for instance, or whatever representational thing. of that nature i don't really have to share like like in a different time i had to share right i think i say this at the end this generation has morally captured than prior i don't really have to share

i just kind of need to stand there and be an inspiration to the people who want to be like me i can share like a little bit but the there's not enough social pressure of me to share today in a neocolonial you know period as there would be in the in the colonial period i just don't have to share so even if the state gives me the bribe, which in theory I'm supposed to take my cut and then pass it on to kind of buy off the rest of the people, what you're seeing today is a BLM doesn't, they didn't pass the cut on. That's why they got so much criticism. Like, it's not, I really believe, like I didn't say it's in the piece where I really believe if BLM had just given that money out, nobody would have said anything. Because as I know, the NDACP and the Urban League, who are way more

crooks honestly than BLM as far as like black fronts they come from that era of the more colonial period so they know how to pass on their cut the these some of these new people don't pass on their cut and that's what gets them in trouble they embezzled the part they were supposed to pass on like that's kind of what I was getting at with them in general like just talking about that the the assembly line occurs and I'm pocketing the stuff I'm supposed to pass on so when I that they embezzle black rage, it's like, okay, there's a kind of an implied understanding that even if we're only reformers, we get mad, we protest, you know, the state gives us some crumbs, and then you share the crumbs a little bit with us. You're going to take the chunkiest

crumbs, as I say in the piece, but you're supposed to share them with us. But what you're seeing now is like, we're not even going to pass any of that on. And that, that, that, that fucks with even the already established process, you know, because it doesn't, it doesn't, they don't even share what they already have as far as the commodification of black rage that's even worse than what i just described because that's just kind of an intercommunal situation we have going on that's its own problem but the commodification of black rage again we think about it as a sense as a form of labor as if people are actually doing something not just filling things and thinking about things they take that rage to the streets and they manifest it in very material ways that we could

visualize um so the point is to like take that and turn that into a commodity so that that labor can produce things that works for the benefit of capital as opposed to to destroying capital so we can produce take that labor and funnel it into a tv show funnel it into their representation funnel it into something that's more something we so can consume versus something we can really act upon. So now we're debating movies. Now we're debating celebrities. Because the rage is always trying to find someplace to force grievances to be heard. So if you create commodities for rage, then it can just be consumed into that. But the labor valorizes itself throughout that entire process. So you train the incubation, the three stages, it's kind of like the

training of the laborers. Or as I said in other interviews like, the raw materials like you're training the laborers and you're training that rage so when it inevitably does uproar you can already have a direction for you already have the fronts in place you already have the elite class within the group in place sometimes this doesn't work as I noted as well there are like Haiti's a great example where that at least in that moment of the revolution it didn't work right it just didn't that's why they've been punished what they've been punished for but once you've incubated it and then the labor stage comes up you've already kind of socialized

so even though people are angry that outlets that they're looking for it's just like again when we think of laborers I still work here I don't own this shit yet and if I can't take it back then ultimately I might get a better wage I might get you know less time or more days off or whatever but I still got to work

I'm still stuck under these capitalists I still work these are still my bosses so if you can't take that shit back then you kind of have to go to work you got to go back to work and then that becomes so then your labor is a commodity so again coming back to rage you got to go back to work you got to

you know so we take the bribes you know maybe we could maybe we were able to exact better bribes you know and but we didn't get we didn't really get out of a situation we just exacted better bribes but 2020 was a good example of like we really saw how the bribes didn't get

passed on at all that's why I met coming back to the embezzling thing like if you go back to the civil rights movement just using American examples here at least the bribes got passed on a little bit you know in some cases there were some improvements for people you can at least eat somewhere um that you couldn't eat before you could if you if you had enough money you could at least leave your neighborhood or or get a better house you can own a house even if it is in your neighborhood you don't have to go through the bullshit

red line loans or whatever like there was some material improvements even if it wasn't revolutionary same thing within the neo in the neo colonial world you know be beyond America. There are some material improvements. Like, you have, you do have in theory, even if it's flag independent, it's your own country. You do have some, you do have some ability to better your life

within that context, even if many things are still not improved. Some things even got worse, but you have, you got some of that. But once you put these people in place, you see how even in a lot of these African places, like, we're just going to take a cut, give you our resources, and we're just going to lay back.

We're not going to even share. you know so so i'm saying you see the same thing in america maybe not to the same extremity because they're not over the country itself we're just going to embezzle it like we're not going to share it at all that i think instead of putting that solely on the class i think that is still prompted by the western capitalist state by white capital i think they're the ones that put that in motion now but they have collaborators to do it and they've always had collaborators they just need those collaborators more so that's kind of what i was getting at with that as far as like yeah it's embezzlement more than it's ever been because there's not as much

incentive to share even the to just share a bribe like there's not enough incentive to just share the bribe alone let alone um liberation or anything like that yeah that's uh excellent and i i know that i said that that was the last point but i guess i'll give you the opportunity just to say something since it's timely and then as you finish up, you know, addressing this point, you can let the listeners of guerrilla history know where they can find you on social media and find black myths. One of the things that you wrote laid on in the piece, it's towards the end of part two. So this is both to prove to you that I read the entire piece as well as to encourage the listeners to not just read part one because there's great stuff all the way through.

And if you're like me and you like facts, figures, and statistics, I know we have talk too much about like specific figures and statistics within this episode but two black has them all throughout the essay so if you like that sort of thing you should absolutely check out the essay one uh small paragraph that you have within this says the black elite shriek at the fate of the rebellious slaves the western back coups and assassinations of black leaders like patrice lemumba thomas sanker and malcolm x but still recognize the need to project a similar militancy for popular appeal they are incentivized to crave freedom with sacrifice so they legitimate legitimize their bribes black liberation to maintain the delusional front

this labor aristocracy bullishly appeals to racial kinship and the reason i bring this up in closing is that we're recording this on october 19th 2022 october 19th 1983 was the day that maris bishop the revolutionary leader of granada was executed during a coup western backed coup uh as if that needed you know any further explanation and uh october 19th 1986 was the day that samora machel the revolutionary leader of mozambique died in a plane crash under somewhat mysterious circumstances i put out a brief commemoration on twitter uh from the guerrilla history twitter for both of for both of these uh revolutionary leaders who you know both left far far too early um but i think that you know talking about black revolutionary leaders and and the mention that you had here in the piece

might be an interesting note to end on. So any reflections that you have on, you know, leaders like this as well as this paragraph that I just read to you and then let the listeners know how they can find you and the podcast that you do. Yeah, I think, I really, I mean, I thank you for bringing me to, like, literal paragraphs because you're bringing back memories of, like, my struggle with what word to use. And I really, this is one of ones, this is really one of those paragraphs that when you just read that I really played with.

I think I had something totally different. I even talked to my girlfriend about this one. Like, this is one I really played with. But because on one level, I was like, damn, I'm really beating up on the Black League right now. So on one level, I was like, I don't want it to come off too moralistic. So I was like, how do I, you know,

still situated within kind of a material context, while still holding them to the fire, as much as I can do without throwing them all the way in. So it's like I was struggling with that. And I feel like you have to be able to have some kind of like moral argument without it being, morality being like the base of everything, right? Like I think you have to, that's the, that's a real dialectic that I really try to work with in this whole essay was like how to condemn something,

but not just turning it into just, oh, people are just bad because they're just bad. You know, like that, I just, because I don't think that that really explains anything. I think I'm trying to get us out of that, so I don't want to do it myself. So I really struggle with this paragraph because I was like, I'm just looking at it right now because I didn't want to do that. So when I say they are incentivized to crave freedom. Incentivized shows you that's still part of this bigger part, but without sacrifice. So they legitimize their bribes of black liberation. So the incentive creates the behavior that we would probably condemn morally wrong.

And I remember when I was talking to Phimmy. Femmy Taiwell who wrote elite capture and I don't think I would be able to get here without a lead capture. I think one day we, him and I should probably have a conversation about how our analysis compare. But I remember we were talking and Femi tries the same thing

in elite capture in his book about trying to not push this like overly moralistic argument. There's some things I don't know if I fully agree when he says that Phenon was saying that about the National Blues I think, I don't know if Phnom was making a fully, like, you know, a moralistic argument either, but neither here nor there. But I remember I had asked him when he was on black myths as far as, um, if he had said, you know, we create people.

It's not that we build people, I think is what he said. So it's not that people are just inherently good or bad. But I was like, if you, if we build people to be like this, then it would it be fair to say we build bad people? you know there's because there's still some question of like the kind of people we have roaming around that do terrible things like there has to be some statement of what that means for for the world like you can't just be oh it's just material like that's a bad Marxist analysis like and I don't think that's what Phimmy was saying either so I say I'd say like when we have like these revolutionary leaders who are you know overthrown and you have usually in the case when we're talking about Sankara whose best friend was involved in that you know, or even Patrice Lumuma, like, you know, Malcolm X, all three of the people I listed, it was black folks who were involved in their actual assassination. It was backed by the West or backed by the government or backed by some Western power, but it was directly, the direct involvement, people who pulled the trigger off

and were black people. So it's a question of like, what is that meaning? And it's like, I don't think we can just solely say, oh, it's just United States. It's like, yeah, but there is something to be said about a class of people who are willing to collaborate on that. You know, like, that does, that bothers me. I don't feel like I can just let that off on like, yeah, but it was the government. Like, no, that just doesn't sit. I mean, that is where I will take a moral line. Like, that does not sit well with me.

Like, that bothers me. Like, I think there's something about that where it's like this class of people who gets away with that too often because we're more likely to blame, because we don't want to blame ourselves. We're going to blame the media. or we only blame ourselves. Neither one of those are sufficient for me. Like, I don't belong to this class, people, so I don't even feel like it's ourselves. You know, like, I don't, I see them as something else.

But I think that this class of people, because black folks have a very particular situation within, even the left, even for all the racism on the left, there's still a certain homage that's paid to, like, the black revolutionary struggle. Like, even if people co-opted, take from it, there's a certain homage paid

to it. And I think sometimes that flattens the internal contradictions that we have as black people. And I think these people stand in the way of even other groups trying to help join in. Because everyone standing at the door, they're gatekeeping turning people away, turning people

off or taking, or even when, so even when white people truly mean well, these are the people who will take the aid that comes in and do bullshit with it. These are the people who will squander it. Even in a moment, where the intentions initially were good, you know, so I feel like this is a group of people

that has to be struggled against very, like, very militantly, you know, it doesn't mean that it always has to be a direct confrontation. Sometimes this is a question of, are you willing, is this really the route you want to go or do you want to stand in solidarity with your people? But I feel like that, that just pisses me off because so many possibilities are ruined. Like, Grenada didn't happen. We don't get to see what Grenada was because of somebody collaborating with the pigs. We don't get to see, you know, we don't get to see what the Congo was because somebody collaborated with the pig. We don't get to see, you know, we don't get to see the world that we were trying to build because partially because of this class.

Like, we can look at it over and over again. So that, that honestly just bothers me. But I wanted to still hold my line of what I was trying to argue. So I had to make sure I still said it in a way that fit. But like that's why I said, like, laborer is something that Dr. CBS had, um, had said in a, I think, an off-camera conversation, I thought it was a good way of looking at it since we were in the labor stage

that this is a group of people who, I think I'd say earlier, we should think of as scabs. You know? Like, that's how we should think of the black elite that's just total scabs. Like, and they appeal to a certain flattened, you know, racial kinship, which is no different than, unfortunately, in some way.

I don't say no different, but similar even under like fascism when we were we appealed like national character you know or some kind of national personality like it's very similar i'm not saying all of them are fascist but they appeal in a very similar way and they collapse everything just to the national character the racial identity as if all of our interests are the same uh so i know that was a long answer but like yeah you took me back because oh it's great it's great yeah so how can the listeners find you in Black Myths podcast. Again, we're on all podcast streaming platforms.

Anything you're listening to Gorilla Pod on, I believe you can listen to us on as well. I don't, I think for the most part. We also are on Black Power Media on YouTube. If you want to actually watch us, sometimes it's helpful because, you know, like Henry said, I do like quotes. So we'll put the quotes on the screens

if you want to, if you can read along where some of the stats and stuff will appear on the screen as kind of a presentation and just support Black Power Media in general. As far as me, you can find me on Twitter

to Black. I mean, if you're listening to this, you clearly can read how to spell the name 2 underscore Black underscore, so there are no numbers in that. Thank you. And you can find me on Instagram, not on TikTok, because the only video I do is for this show.

Otherwise, I have no interest in it. So, yeah, and Henry, if you could do the same with the guerrilla pod, with the guerrilla history, and just explain, you know, where people could find you. And I would be interested if you were just to give, even, I know we already kind of did it, but just give people another pitch as to why they should listen. I think that needs to be underlying, because I did a lot of the talking, so I want you to be able to do that. Oh, sure. And it was good that you did a lot of the talking. I mean, I learned a lot from the conversation, even in addition to what I learned from the piece. So it was great to talk with you about it.

So, yeah, listeners, if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me at Huck 1995-H-U-C-K-1-995. I much more recommend following the podcast guerrilla history on Twitter because the things that we put out from the podcast account are much more useful than my usual just rantings and ravings on Twitter. So you can find the podcast at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A. and I will emphasize G-U-E-R-R-2-R-S-I-L-A.

We have people mess that up all the time because you're not really messing it up. It's spelled both ways in the dictionary, G-U-E-R-I-L-A and G-U-E-R-R-A and G-U-E-R-R-R. But, you know, you had to make it. Yeah, it both are correct, but the thing is, you know, you have to make a decision. And then the algorithm never recognizes that, hey, these words are both acceptable ways of spelling the same word. So if you type it in one way, it does not show up. And we've had numerous times people contact us like, you're not on Spotify. We are on Spotify.

The algorithm does not recognize it if you only put one or either that or they're trying to censor us. But I think it's probably the former. In any case, yeah, guerrilla history, I actually recommend listening to all three shows of the Revolutionary Left Radio family. That would be Revolutionary Left Radio hosted by our co-host, Brett O'Shea, Red Menace, which is hosted by Brett and Alison Escalante, who is his co-host there. That's like revolutionary theory.

Rev. Left is basically everything. And guerrilla history, which is hosted by myself, Professor Ednan Hussein, who's a professional historian at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. He's a medieval historian and Brett, O'Shea, of the other two podcasts I just mentioned. It's a great time. You can find it anywhere that you get your podcasts. Like I said, real, real, like, left-wing anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspectives on global proletarian history, going way back into history and covering the entirety of the globe. And as time goes on, we will expand to even more remote parts of the globe more than we already have.

So, yeah, hopefully, you know, you check it out. Let me know on Twitter if you find any of our episodes interesting. and we have a pretty decent back catalog now so I'm sure you'll find something that's interesting for you and yeah until next time yeah and that last point like that's the beauty of doing these kind of episodes is they're not just like responses to the news or if they are there's still like a history to it so they age well you know yeah oh yeah all of ours all of ours are very historically based, even if we are, we do have a couple of episodes that are, we call them dispatches. They're about current events. So for example, when it had been leaked in that,

that leaked draft memorandum from the Supreme Court that Roe versus Wade was going to be overturned in the United States, we did a dispatch on that. But we looked at the history of abortion rights within the United States. We looked at the history of, you know, abortion related fatalities in the United States, things like that. Or, you know, right now last week, and not last week this upcoming week it'll be coming out the same time that we put this on patreon we're talking about the upcoming elections in brazil the runoff election that's taking place on october 30th as well as boulsonoro and the the current rise of neo-fascism within brazil but we take a very like long historical approach to understanding the rise of bulsanaro the rise of neofascism within

brazil like we go back more than a century we talk pretty heavily about the military dictatorship that was in place from the 60s until the 80s. So even when we're talking about contemporary events, which is not the majority of our episodes, the majority of our episodes are like points of history. Even when we talk about current things, it is historically grounded. So you will still get some useful things out of it,

even if the event itself has passed in the case of those few episodes that we're talking about current events. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. And I think, you know, I know, I know with your podcast or with the whole Rev. Left collective, I like to, I like to listen to your stuff when I'm driving somewhere, especially if it's a long drive. Oh, yeah.

Like, I think I found that that's my most, that's the best time because it gets me from thinking about BS. I can sit, I can really sit down and be like, okay, I'm going to, you know, take this in. Like, I remember one time I was listening. I don't know what the episode was. I think it was Rev. Left and they were talking about, like, it was a philosophy. for the episodes. It was about like Hegel and stuff. My girl, oh, yeah. My girl's like, what is this? I'm just like, and I had to turn it off because I was like, I can't, I need to be in the car alone. Like, I need to be able to like pay attention. I don't want to miss anything, you know, so. Oh, yeah. That's like we had one episode. I'm sorry that I know we already said we're going to wrap up.

My computer's just about to die. But one of our episodes is social estates and the environment and it's almost a three hour long episode. And I know I've had a couple people be like, yeah, I put this on in the car and people were like, I'm now learning about, you know, my wife or my husband is now complaining that we're listening to environmental policies of China in the 60s versus in the 90s and the Soviet Union from the Stalin era to the Khrushchev era. Like, you know, this is a very esoteric topic, but I think very important to understanding the possible futures that we can try to develop as we move towards, you know, a more just society and a more just future, hopefully. So, yeah, I think on that note, let's wrap this up

to Black. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, thanks for the collaboration and, you know, entertaining what I wrote. Absolutely. And until next time, listeners, solidarity. All right. Thank you.