Rev Left Radio - Nonviolence is Violence Too (Pt. 2): We're All In the Gunk

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

In this episode, Breht is joined by writer, intellectual, and poet Too Black to discuss his essay "Nonviolence is Violence, Too (Part 2)—We're All in the Gunk." Together, they critically examine the liberal mythology of "nonviolence" as a pure moral alternative to violence, arguing instead that all movements operate within conditions already structured by state, colonial, racial, and imperial violence. Drawing from the Black freedom struggle, Ghana's independence movement, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Gandhi, Indian independence, riots, armed resistance, and the "positive radical flank," Too Black shows how so-called nonviolent movements have often depended on the threat, presence, displacement, or redirection of violence in order to win concessions. Rather than offering a simplistic celebration of violence, this conversation asks us to think more honestly about power, confrontation, sacrifice, propaganda, state repression, and the real historical conditions under which oppressed people struggle to breathe beneath the boot. At its core, this is a discussion about what movements actually do, how victories are actually won, and why peace is not the absence of conflict, but something that must be fought for.   Listen to our previous discussion on Part 1 of Too Black's essay here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/nonviolence-is-violence-too-somebodys-gotta-die   Subscribe to Black Myths Podcast ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show recurring guests, one of my favorites, Two Black, to talk about part two of his essay, nonviolence is Violence 2. Part 1 was called Somebody's Got to Die. This one is subtitled, we're all in the gunk. There are two parts of basically a singular essay that dialectically examines the relationship between nonviolence and violence, the violence of your opposition, strategic violence, in your same movement, the violence inherent in the state and the need to defend any gains you may have with the state, the need to appeal to the state in certain instances, et cetera. So really complicating the false binary of nonviolence versus violence, not naively arguing for one over the other. I think, you know, perhaps if you were just to read the title or just kind of make an assumption, you might think, oh, they're arguing for violence over nonviolence, not at all. He's contextualizing nonviolence in a violent concrete.

situation that already exists and navigating the relationship between nonviolent movements, nonviolent electoral strategies for socialism, whatever it may be, into the broader context, that violence is always there. Violence is in the state. Violence is in your opposition. Violence is in the ability to defend your position ultimately or any gains that you may have made, et cetera. So I think it's just a really serious, deep way of thinking about these problems that

rejects the false binary and approaches these things dialectically, which is, you know, incredibly important. And we end this conversation at the end of it with a discussion on what this means for actual organizing, what this means for how we carry ourselves as socialist, as communist, as anti-imperialist with regards to other aspects of the left ecosystem, as it were, and just how you actually appeal to people and really how you get away from hyper-personalizing and hyper-moralizing things to a structural analysis and the advancement of our analysis and our concepts as Marxists in a broader ecosystem. So I think it's an incredibly insightful investigation of nonviolence and violence and violence. And it's also at the end of it, an interesting and worthwhile and really

useful strategy for thinking about how you and I and all of us involved in this broader movement should move, should behave, should think about what our role actually is and get away from a lot of The more petty and petulant online, particularly online drama and personality clashes that we sometimes see on all sides of the political spectrum. There's something very unsurious about that and very unstructural that we get at towards the end of the episode. So we talk about Ghana and Kwame and Krumu. We talk about the dialectic between Dr. King and Malcolm X and the civil rights movement and use those as examples to highlight this investigation. And I think it's incredibly worthwhile. I'll link to part one in the show notes, but I truly believe you can listen to these conversations in any order.

And you can even listen to Part 2 as a standalone episode and still get so much out of it because the core argument remains the same, although he uses different metaphors and addresses, you know, different aspects of it. But, you know, there's no need to go listen to that first and then this. But I do encourage you to listen to both because I think putting them together is really good. And I'll link to the essays themselves if you want to read them in the show notes. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev. Left Radio, you can support us directly 100% independent media, DIY at Patreon.com forward slash Rebel Left Radio $5 a month. You get access to a bunch of bonus content, community meetings, Zoom calls, meditation groups, even fun stuff like NFL and NBA Fantasy Leagues, which we had a great time doing this past year. It's just a cool way to get into contact with good comrades, good friends, and people that are on the same page as you.

So without further ado, here's my conversation with the one and only two Black on part two of his essay, nonviolence is Violence 2. We're all in the gunk. Enjoy. Yeah, my name is 2 Black. I'm a poet, scholar, an organizer, a member for Black Alliance for Peace, and happy to be here today. Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you back on the show. Listeners of Rev Left will be, I think at this point, very familiar with you. You've been. been on several, several times, one of those repeat guests that we have on because I genuinely appreciate your voice and your work. This will be part two of a discussion that we've done before on nonviolence. Nonviolence is violence two. I'll link to part one in the show notes. People can listen to it, but again, I truly believe that you can listen to either one of these in any order and get a lot out of it. So today we're talking about nonviolence is violence two, part two that we're all in the gunk. So let's go ahead and get into it. For people that haven't,

read the essay or aren't familiar with it. Can you kind of give us a 30,000 foot overview of what you're trying to do with this essay? Yeah, there was, I guess, a little bit of background. I know I gave someone the first episode, but I was wrestling with this, what appears to be this aversion in the so-called American left,

if such a thing even exists. To, there's aversion to violence, right? And not that everybody needs to embrace it and grab guns and go out and shoot up everything. Like that's not intelligent anyway. There's no strategy there. But there's this, I think even leading to what I might write about next, but there's this inability to reconcile with the fact that people are going to have to use some kind of force in their liberation struggle. so we tend to prioritize victimhood, I think,

as a way to avoid that question, right? So it's easy to look over in Palestine and say, I don't want to see innocent children and women being killed as if the men are just fair game or something. And this is not to make it some kind of gender thing. I'm just saying it's just an odd way that people will talk about it.

And it's only when people are starving and they have no recourse that people tend to come to their side, right? I was thinking, so I was talking to somebody about that, and then that led to, we were just talking, it was one of my comrades of the Pendleton, too. We were just talking about how that also is exposed, even when you look in not so-called, the history of so-called not-violence,

that there still had to be some kind of violent force that enforced the world that the, the nonviolent people were trying to bring into fruition. Like they're, they're required, it required something. And it also, as I know in the first essay, you kind of had to, you had to confront violence and consume violence in the sense that, you know, even if you're not hitting back, somebody's hitting you, somebody's shooting you, somebody's killing you. And that is the thing that ultimately brings other people to your side is the violence,

not so much the nonviolence, is the fact they're looking at you, is in this kind of asymmetrical. warfare where you're not hitting back but somebody's hitting you and like that's wrong so we need to stop that but it all requires violence so then this essay gets at how there's other aspects of nonviolence that still requires violence there's trying to get a state on your side which any state has a monopoly on violence and then there's often the masses of people who may not be directly under the nonviolent movement but take on more explicitly violent actions that do bolster the bargaining position of that nonviolent movement. So those are the three things, just that we recalled it, um, sacrificial violence as opposed to nonviolence. And then as in people are sacrificing themselves to bring

about violence, to bring people to their side. And then again, there's, you're advocating to have a state on your side or you're advocating to become the entity who controls the state, which in either way, there's a monopoly on violence to enforce laws, to enforce a certain order. And then you are helped or assisted by the masses of people who will take place in some kind of insurgent violence or some kind of armed struggle, even if it's not in total grid with nonviolence, there's a way that complements it as well. So we can get into all that in more detail, but those are the basic three. arguments. Yeah, absolutely. And kind of zooming out and putting it perhaps in my own terms is, I think you do a really important thing in breaking down a false binary that is often put up,

especially perhaps in some instances by, you know, more liberal people who really want to stick to nonviolence and think there's no room for violence. You complicate that picture by showing that any, that that binary is ultimately false, that there is a sort of dialectical unity of opposites here where nonviolence always occurs within the context of violence, as you said, the violence of the opposition group you're facing, committing violence on you as a nonviolent movement. Think of like the Edmund Pettus Bridge incident or many other incidents where there's peaceful protests being met with violence of, in that case, either racists in the population or the state itself. There's the dual violence of a strategy, so one part of a movement, which we'll get

into here in a bit might be nonviolent while another is open to violence and that sort of as you said changes the calculus for the nonviolence movement and perhaps gives it some energy and some momentum and some backing ultimately and then there's the there's the background violence of the state always at play whether the state is against you whether you're lobbying the state on your behalf or whether you're taking over the state in some sort of revolutionary action you can never ever separate nonviolence from the violence in which it exists and is the actual the context for it to exist in the first place, which I think is an important and more nuanced way of thinking about these things. So with that in mind, let's go ahead and get into this question, because early in the essay,

you use this powerful image of oppressed people living, quote, unquote, under the boot, sorting through the gunk for whatever tools might help them breathe in. Can you kind of unpack that metaphor and what it reveals about the false cleanliness of these categories that we're talking about violent and nonviolent? Well, I guess at the core, what I'm saying in that, and I guess it might be better to read it actually just so we can all have a common point of reference for those who have not read the essay, just that opening paragraph. When living under the boot of oppression, even gunk can become a weapon for those underneath it. With oxygen at a premium, anything and everything becomes a tactic to loosen the pressure on one's neck. some will shoot, some will stab, some will kick, some will swing,

and some will even die trying to regain breath. All is sorted through the gunk, attempting to make something of the sewage. And I go on to use that metaphor for a few more paragraphs, but the point is, like, the position that we all start from is under the boot of oppression, right, in terms of people who are trying to liberate themselves. We all start from that position, and that position is a muddy, you know, gunked up, fucked up position. There's no ideal circumstances to choose from. You are

looking for anything, including the very gunk that sits on top of you within the boot to get yourself out of that position. So when people say we're going to use nonviolence to get ourselves out of that position, or people say we're going to use arm's struggle to get ourselves out of that position, they're all starting from the same position but non-violence likes to the kind of practitioners of it or some of the propagandists of it I think like to situate it

above that position you know above somehow like it's not in the gunk where everybody else is and then looks down on people who choose violence as some kind of you know like just reactionary or hateful or vengeful

or there's no like love or liberation involved in it. And I think that could happen on the other side, too, where people who do choose arms struggle, as we talked about in the last episode, can look at the nonviolent side as soft and, you know, unconfrontational. And I don't really think either of those hold up. But in the case of this, I say, I'm just trying to situate at the beginning, nonviolent, nonviolence as just in the gunk to explain some of these other contradictions that we eventually get to in terms of lobbying the state or trying to become the, state or, you know, your position being strengthened by folks who are more explicitly violent.

Because when you're in the gunk, you don't have the, you don't have the moral high ground to just say, this is what we want to do. And that's it because the boot is still on your neck. You want to get the boot off your neck or at the very least, you're trying to relieve the amount of pressure that the boot has on your neck. So I just feel like we have to start there because they're just particularly nowadays. I don't even know so much in the days of King and Ghana. as much as it is today, nonviolence is seen as this path that stays out of like the blood and the slaughter and the and all the ugliness that people talk about and this is the right way. This is this is the just way.

And I'm like, it's just another response to being under the boot. That's all that is. And we can argue about it from that perspective, but not is it being above any of the other gump. We're all in the shit. We're all under oppression. You know, we're all trying to figure out how we can end it. Or some of us are at least trying to figure it out, the ones of us in those positions. And we don't get to say our shit is above that or we're somehow not in the mud.

Because nonviolence requires just as many or if not more compromises and contradictions and things that might seem opposed to the ideology as anything else does. you know to actually to actually achieve victory because if you were to simply say nobody in any case in any time can use any kind of weapon at any time nonviolence would have never worked right you know like it just so you need all these other components to assist you so it becomes more of a kind of i mean we'll get to it later but kind of more of a propaganda because you're attempting to use what you're using the moral high ground to try to get the boot off of you so you're saying we will not hit back you're saying you know we will not become just like our enemy we will not

attempt to put a boot back on your neck right like we don't want that kind of world and I think there's virtue in that but you're saying it as if you're not intent you're not working in tandem with all these elements who do have weapons guns and everything else as if you're not, again, in the gunk, in the sewage like the rest of us, because we're all just trying to find a way to breathe here. So let's at least start there. Even if we arrive at the position and nonviolence is the better direction in a given circumstance, let's at least equal the playing field

and just start there or not. And this violence is terrible and it's vengeful with nonviolence. It's soft and weak. And it's like, we're all under the gunk here. Let's have a more serious conversation about it. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think in the American context, perhaps the one that we're operating in, that the predominant non-violent strategy employed by today's American left, whatever that means, the socialist left, democratic socialism, whatever, is not necessarily, we think of nonviolence,

we think of Gandhi, we think of MLK. It's not so much protest movements in that way anymore, fighting for rights within the system necessarily in that protest-level grassroots way. I think the predominant approach is this nonviolent, it's in the name, right, Democratic socialist approach that if we play things by their rules, if we win elections correctly and cleanly, we can pursue even a mildly socialist or even social democratic set of goals in a way that doesn't require us at all to deal with the messiness of violence. And I think, and I've argued that if you succeed enough, right, if that movement succeeds enough where it actually starts putting pressure on the wealth and power of the elite that they will meet you with violence, that the democratic facade that you are using as your moral high ground, as it were, to get your political project forward, that falls away. And you will be met with some sort of violence at the end of the day if you succeed in your nonviolent approach. And if you're not ready for that, if you don't account for that,

if that's not part of your long-term strategy, then I think you'll be caught off guard by. it and oftentimes destroyed by it. So even that pretense that we can do this through the mechanisms that are, that the elite hand to us and that we can do this the right way. And if we win fair and square, they'll have to hand over the money and the power. I think that's ultimately naive and perhaps the predominant nonviolent strategy on the quote unquote American left today. Do you more or less agree with that? Yeah, I would share that. Because I think that there's a, there's a kind of technocratic approach, which I get the appeal to it at times, but I don't think, I think ultimately, like you said, it doesn't work, but there's this technocratic approach that if we just have really

smart policy and it can be, I guess, relatable to the working class and the masses, and they support it overwhelmingly, then we will have such a majority that the ruling class will have to just give it, right? Like, they'll just say, all right, we can't do nothing, so we have to give it. But, you know, historically, that's not ever really worked. I mean, I even think about the Cuban revolution, which I think people should study more often because there were different factions in that revolution. So there was the ones that most of us know about with, you know, with Fidel and Che and Fidel's brother. And that was like the nationalist faction. And then there was also the labor faction. And earlier in the movement to, you know, for the revolution, the labor

faction, which was ran by what was the Communist Party in that country at the time. And there was some interesting history in that period. We're talking about the 50s. The Communist Party was not in good shape in many cases around the world. And there was a lot of cases where they, because they were so embedded in labor, they would make concessions with the working state of the time to strike on certain occasions or things of that nature. And the labor movement at the time didn't believe that violence would be necessary. They thought that they could just strike, which we're not even at that point here. But they thought they could go on a strike, and that would be enough. They thought they didn't have to necessarily engage in armed struggle.

and I can't remember off the top of my head the particular incident or the name of it, but there was an incident where they went on strike and Batista, who was the ruling leader at the time, the puppet of the United States, responding with extreme violence to this stripe, demonstrating them that a strike just wasn't going to be enough. And that was when they kind of came to the same page

with Castro and them like, yeah, we're probably going to have to pick up some arms too. You know, like we're not going to just be able to to go on the strike. Like it just, it wasn't enough. Now, it's not that strikes didn't matter because I believe when the revolution was won.

That was the first thing that they did was they went on a national strike. And that was what, like, totally toppled the empire. Or not the empire, but, well, if you consider the United States as a proxy, but totally toppled the Batista government. So the strike was important. But a strike has to be done.

Like many things when you're trying to fight, a battle, they have to be untanned with other things. So there's this tendency to believe if we just reach this critical mass, that they're just going to be like, oh man, you know, y'all got us. Here's all our money. Like, that's not how this works.

You know, like, that's just not how I was going to go. So, you should try to, I think those things still matter. Like, we should try to get popular will and we shouldn't try to just impose our way on the people and, you know, but at the end of the

day when they, when the state caused their, cause up their goons and the police and everybody else, if even if, let's say even if there was a so-called, like Michael talked about a bloodless revolution or something, even that is a bit of a smoking mirrors because it's like if there was a, if the United States actually did that, that would be because the military and the police somehow, some way, agree. with the masses of people and they just said we're not going to follow those orders. So people would say, oh, that's non-violence. It's like, no, the people with guns decided that they're just not going to point them at the people and that if the ruling class keeps pushing, they'll just point them at the ruling class. That's what that would be. And then the ruling class

negotiates a settlement like, okay, now we give up because the people who we arm with guns no longer listen to our edicts or, you know, what we want them to do. So there's no version of this. Like even when you hear about military coups that no one died, it's because everybody's like, yeah, I'm not going to fight because they all got the guns. So you know what? You got it.

Violence still, the possibility of violence still determined the outcome. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. There's no version of it where that question is not have to be resolved or confronted in some way. Like you're going to have to deal with that. Yes, there's no blood shed, but there's still power to shed blood.

concentrated somewhere. And that power either decided to be on the side of the masses or something or people were able to get to contest that power or something. But there's no version of this that I've seen throughout history where some blood will either not be shed or there will not be a threat of it because somewhere violence is consolidated in some capacity. Like that's just we can't really get around that. And that was what I found revealing about doing this was like, I just don't see how you get around that question. And it doesn't mean that everything should be obsessed with it.

But, you know, you just can't really escape that. Yeah. No, I completely agree. I always say that, you know, the ruling class, the global capitalist, imperialist, colonialist class, if you will, speaks two languages. And if you're unable to speak them, you're not going to win. Those two languages are money and violence.

and if you can't harm their money or harm them physically in the ultimate instance, right, whether that actually plays out or not, even just the threat of it is enough to deter it, then you're not going to contend with them in any way that actually matters. And in fact, that itself is a false dichotomy because the money and the violence really come together in the same way. Like they actually are two sides of the same coin. And if you did a general strike, if you shut down their economy, they would meet you with violence. You would have to be prepared to defend yourself at least against violence. violence, if not employed itself, or have the possibility and the threat of violence sufficiently

on your side to deter their aggressive violent attack in the first place. But at the same point, and I want to make this very clear for anybody who might still be confused about this, you are not arguing that, you know, we should do this and not this. You're saying there's a place for nonviolent approaches. There's a place for violence. If we try to do some adventurous nonsense right now we would just be slaughtered and put in prison forever. That's obviously not a viable strategy. But your simple argument is not that you are for violence against nonviolence. That's absurd. You're saying that nonviolence itself is always contextualized within a sphere of violence. And we have to contend with that if we're going to be honest about it and stop treating them

as two separate routes that can be taken, but is actually intimately interwoven from the jump. Yeah, I mean, that's why the title is nonviolence is violence too. I really only use nonviolence and violence as categories so people can follow the conversation, right? Like if I just start calling it all one thing, it gets confusing for people who haven't worked through the ideas. But I don't think there's really much of a distinction outside of the tactical aspect of it. If we're talking about, like, grand scale, I think you can, if you look at things on, like, a micro level, like, if you try to get your child to eat some food and they're like,

I'm not going to eat. you know, and you just say, okay, because you don't believe in whooping your child or something. Like, that might work, you know. Yeah, for sure. You know, like on a micro scale, sure. Like, you know, a child that doesn't want to do something is, doesn't have to be violent to make it really difficult for you. You know, but even in that case, again, I don't, I don't, just for the record, I don't believe in whooping kids. But even in that case, like, that's always, that's always an option that some parents choose nonetheless.

less, but in any, like, grand, any, like, bigger picture, we're talking about millions or billions of people in the world here. I don't think there's a situation where you could not address all these questions at the same time. Like, you know, so, I mean, you could look at the war in Iran, and technically there's things they're doing that are nonviolent, like, on their face, talking about Iran more so. And then, you know, if you're going to go to a meeting of diplomacy and try to work out to deal with another country, that's technically nonviolent.

But you go to that meeting because of what happened on the battlefield, right? Like, you don't just, I mean, even before the meeting, even before the war was launched by the United States and Israel, you know, they tried to have diplomatic conversations about it. And, you know, the United States obviously wasn't going for anything because they didn't want a real deal. So you could say that's nonviolent. But then the United States attacks them with Israel. Israel and they, you know, kill what is 174 children in a school.

And it's like, all right, well, what they pose to do is all go out in the streets, you know, and just just scream to the sky. Like, no, they got to have military. They have to have an understanding of science and how to work and how to defend their country. There were stories of when there were threats, think about Midway, when there were threats about, I think around the time that Trump was like he's going to destroy a whole civilization. or whatever nonsense. There were reports that people were forming human barricades

around critical infrastructure. Oh, yeah. I saw the videos, yeah. Yeah. So, again, these things can happen in tandem, right? So those people weren't there with guns because not much they're going to do if Obama's coming at you. But, you know, they were challenging on the moral side of it too.

But then there's also just a military, you know, that is able to blow up 13. military bases in the United States. Like this stuff is happening at the same time. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's something I didn't get to in the piece. If I ever write a book on this, I might say something on this front, but there's actually military journals, United States military journals who have advocated for teaching what they call, you say non-vines, but they call it civil disobedience. They advocate for teaching that in the actual military. They see it as a form of their regular war as a form of asymmetrical warfare.

They see it as an aspect of it. They've even talked about teaching it to, you know, countries that they usually want to buy off the resistance or something. Like, they understand it as, like, part of the broader warfare framework, not as something separately in a corner, you know, not detached from anything else. Like, that's not how they understand. And I'm not saying we should view the world like the U.S. military.

does, but we should understand how they even see so-called non-violence when we try to talk about it, like it has no connection to those things. I think that's another fact that just kind of gets left out of the conversation. Well, I do want to talk about the question of the state because you argue that all movements eventually run into this question of the state because the state is the institution that claims the legitimate monopoly on violence. So can you explain why even victories won through ostensibly non-violent struggle like civil rights, national independence, legal equality, etc., ultimately depend on state violence for enforcement. Yeah, so there was a, just reading from the piece, there's another quote, said,

a movement can non-violently march against the state for independence and win, but that independence will be defended through state violence. It can not violently march for equal rights and win, but those constitutional rights will be enforced through state violence, conversely, If either independence or rights or loss, they'll be lost through the same violent force that brought them into being ultimately all outcomes are worn or lost through violence administered by a state. Right. So it's not even to, and I give a definition of the state, and I know my definition comes from my co-author and comrade of Rasul Wawad. So our definition we put in Laundering, Black Rage. That's the book we wrote together, was a bit more, a bit broad.

broader than just thinking about the state as the government. So we say corporate interests, classes of elites and upper levels of bureaucratic management class, implements the ruling classes, goals and aides that sits at top and accumulated economic base. So the state's not simply the government for us. That's another conversation for another day. But obviously the government is a major aspect of that.

For us, in this particular case, yeah, like, we can use the most, I guess, famous one that folks know, like the civil rights movement, there was, Domenicoa Lslerdo was really helpful to helping me think. He wrote a book on the history of nonviolence and helping me think through some of this. But, you know, there's the ability to say, okay, we're going to, honestly, since we just had this recent court decision, we could just use that, but I'll use both. But, but the ability to say, all right, we're going to enforce segregation. and those are going to be the laws of the land

and black people have to drink at these water fowings and go to these dilapidated schools, et cetera, et cetera. That was a law, once it was on. To some extent, still is. And you needed a state to enforce those laws, and that was primarily done through the states. I don't mean like the broader state, but like the states of Alabama or Mississippi or whatever,

like the local and regional governments of the area. And then you had the federal government who had other aims. So what they did as what happened, even going back to the Civil War, was they imposed a different rule and they're like, no, you have to follow these laws. But no matter what laws are being followed,

whether it's the laws of segregation or whether it's the so-called laws of desegregation, laws mean nothing if they're just laws. They're backed by, you know, enforcement. They're backed by guns. They're backed by institutional power that can pressure people with consequences if they don't follow these laws.

So even if you read the Civil Rights or the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act before it was shredded, there were penalties for not doing these things. Right. So if you originally with the Civil Rights Act, even before this recent Supreme Court decision, we're going back to 2013, that got rid of the, you had used to get pre-approval if you were a government in the in the South to change any voting laws because you had a history of, you. racial discrimination. So if you change laws and they didn't get the approval of the federal government, there were penalties for that, right? If you redistrict, right, and you, before this law just got struck down, if you redistricted it, and it was, it was, it offended blacks, black people's ability to vote. There were penalties for that, right? Some of that was economic. But if you just continue to violate those laws, then troops are going to be sent down to force you

to follow those laws or someone might get arrested or something of that nature. Even when we think about integration, like Ruby Bridges or some of the stories of black kids having to go to a white school and they had to be escorted by who? The police, you know, or the National Guard or the Army or something like that. Some kind of military escort was by their side so they weren't attacked. That's not just to protect them, but it's also to project power to the South that there are consequences if you attack these people for trying to go to school. Right. So the civil rights movement was really a means of lobbying the broader federal government to enforce laws through

violence, because that's the only way laws are enforced through violence to enforce laws that were, you know, more egalitarian. And I agree with the enforcement of those laws. I'm not against what happened. But it needed it needed the government to enforce those laws. the civil rights movement had no ability by itself to enforce those laws. The civil rights movement acted as a pressure valve on the federal government to enforce laws in the South, right? So it's not, that's not, I'm not reducing it to that. I'm not saying that's all it was. But I'm saying that was by and large a lot of what it is.

So if we go to the side of a country that's like, it's like, okay, we're not just trying to force, we're not just trying to push our government to do something. We're trying to become that, right? we're trying to become the broader state apparatus, you still have to deal with the same challenge. Like, okay, if you and I seize power, right, a lot of what we would have done to seize power, let's say we did so-called nonviolent things. We did, you know, boycotts and protest and cities. Like, once you get in the government, a lot of that stuff doesn't really work. So you can reduce violence. You don't have to be as tyrannical as the power that was over you

was a colonial power, but you're going to be attacked from the outside because the colonial powers, they might say, here, you can have your little independence, but you still got to cut all these deals with us. That's how we get neol colonialism. Once you start resisting that, then, you know, they're going to start being random terrorist attacks that happened that nobody can explain where these people came from, even though they're obviously backed by the West, you know, there's going to be emerging parties in your country that are not connected to the movement they got you. independence and all of a sudden they're going to be appealing to the people. There's going to be protests that are paid for by the CIA. These things are all documented that have happened

to many particularly African countries, right? So how are you going to hold on to your revolution? Are you just going to say, you know, we're going to go on a hunger strike against that kind of shit? Like, it's just, it is, again, it just doesn't really make sense. So you're going to have to, and when you, when you become the government, you inherit military, you inherit police, you inherit, you know, weapons. You inherit like the ability to purchase those things in one of the countries to make trades. You inherit the entire state apparatus.

So someone can say, well, we're against the state or we don't believe in that or we, you know, that's fine, whatever, but that's the world that we're in. And there's no way you can just act like that part doesn't exist. You know, so it's just, again, that's the part that I think rarely gets brought up, you have to deal with that question, right? Like, it's not a, so there is no version of not violence that gets power and then, like, gets rid of its military and its police.

And should it expect to last more than a day if it did so? Exactly. You know, like, it's just not going to happen. And that's just the raw, concrete truth of the world that we live in and trying to fancy, you know, yourself so, so, so. pure and you'd never have to, you get your hands dirty with that violence. If you have any world that you want that is different than the one that exists, if you have any vision of a more just, more liberatory, more equitable world in any way, shape, or form, that means taking away power and money from people who have it and who will

fight and kill and in some instances die themselves in an attempt to recapture that. And that imposes a violent sort of dialectic onto you and how are you going to deal with that? Are you going to just let them steam, you are you going to have to use the violence of the state, the legitimate monopoly on force to defend those gains? That is something that you're always going to come across if you are successful enough to get there. When you're not successful and you're just sort of, you know, imagining worlds that could be, you might be able to, you know, push that part of it out of the, out of the picture, but it's just, it's just not tenable in real life. And for the anarchist

position to completely negate, and no hate on anarchist, it is what it is, but to negate touching the state to only want to dismantle the state in a world dominated by states, you're putting down a weapon that everybody around you already has. And so doing that, you're putting yourself in an extremely disadvantageous position off the jump, and you're unable to defend the gains that you've otherwise made. So these are just realities that everybody that wants any meaningful change are going to have to face. Yeah, and even if you don't want to stay, like I was talking somebody the other day about the courage and what was it, the Rajabah,

movement that was like in Syria. But that movement, not to get deep into it. It used to be a pillory to me until I just learned more about it. But it seemed like this very like bottom up movement, right? Like you had these, it was like a confederate kind of, a confederation kind of break down where, you know, I have these small councils that all report up the chain. And it's more so represented by people in their neighborhoods and things of that nature. And And that all sounded great. And then you learn also that the Kurds had a deal with the United States that cover their airspace. You know, so soon.

And now you hear about Trump getting mad because he wanted the Kurds to go fight the Iranians because in the past that had been a thing. The Kurds, because they also are really, really good fighters, actually. And they were used as kind of paramilitary force against enemies of the United States. Even when the United States has so many, like, contradictory republics. So even when they were on one end trying to fight ISIS while the other end trying to defend ISIS, you know, one of the sides they were fighting them, right, because they were funding that. Because the United States were fun, like, contradictory things, even its own interests because that's the other thing about having an empire, it's overstretched. But, you know, so even in the case of an entity that I saw a lot of, again, I'm not trying to get into a hate on anarchist. I do my best to not take it there.

But I'm saying I saw, you know, a lot of folks that would call themselves anarchists lifting that movement up. And that movement was only successful to whatever extent. It also has now ended, by the way. Yeah. But that movement was only so successful because it was receiving assistance from the United States. A state was present, yeah, backing its interest. Yeah. So there's just not a, you know, I mean, it's tough.

I get why people don't like that world because they feel like you don't have the freedom that you want or whatever. I get why there's real issues with it. But I'm just saying there's not enough evidence to demonstrate the alternative. Somebody can pull it off and somebody can either not use violence or form something outside of the way things work. Then go for it. We're obviously not for the world that exists today anyway. But it's just you're going to have to wrestle with that. that I already knew that coming into this, but it's even more apparent when I looked at more

detail at how these things played out. Totally. In terms of the history. And it's worth noting that the Iranian Kurds refused to play that role and actually consolidated their support of the Islamic Republic in the face of imperialist attack, which is, which is interesting. And the Kurds in Syria themselves, you know, it's the destruction and dismantling the slow civil war and dismantling of the Syrian state that gave them an autonomous territory in the

north backed, of course, in some instances by U.S. military power. And if they could have a state, right, that's the goal of the Kurds. The Kurds isn't, the goal isn't just to merely be an autonomous territory. If they could become a consolidated, internationally recognized state, they would go for it. What do the Palestinians want right now? They are stateless. They are, they are under genocide and occupation, and they believe that having a state would give them much better abilities to fight back and defend their interest and ultimately, you know, defeat the occupation on some level. And that is precisely why Israel does everything it possibly can to prevent it from having a state. And so it's not, it's not hate or dissing on anarchists at all.

This is just genuine disagreement that we have. And anarchists have to wrestle with our critiques and come back and give their, their arguments. And that's, that's totally fine and valid, you know, so that's not hate at all. It's just genuine critical disagreement. And you can come down on whatever side of that. But there has to be some sort of argument, you have to contend with these very real live issues. So that just is what it is. But I want to move forward and I want to talk about anti-colonial struggles in particular. You use Ghana and Kwame Nakrumah as a major example in the essay. The Ghanaian independence movement used many tactics that we might call nonviolent, right?

Political education, strikes, boycotts marches, electoral organizing. But independence still had to be defended through state power ultimately and was eventually attacked through imperialist violence. Can you tell us a little bit about the Ghana example and what it teaches us about perhaps the limits of romanticizing nonviolent anti-colonial struggle in particular? Ghana is a lesser, I think, discussed movement for nonviolence and maybe the civil rights movement or Indian independence. I think those two, most people have some reference to, right? Like, you know, but they don't, you know, they don't know the nuances of it. But in Ghana there was the positive action movement, which I was want to shout out people who helped me think through ideas.

So one of my comrades in Bab, Nick was, I think, been on this show. Oh, yeah. Had reminded me to look into that. I knew about it, but I hadn't thought about it. So the essay actually uses those three, Ghana, in India, and then the civil rights movement as like case studies because you obviously can't get in everything. So, you know, there was a movement for independence. I mean, you know, it's always hard to track, like, when these things start.

Like, when it's like, I think people want the independence the day they didn't have it, right? But in terms of any kind of organized force, there were, you know, different iterations. But this one begins primarily in, like, in the 1940s into the 50s. and there were different political parties that were the vanguard of it and Krumah actually went from one party and switched to another that was more radical throughout the process.

It was funny, one of the things I cited and I was reading, they champion Ghana for being this nonviolent movement, you know, positive action, even though there was violence in it. But then they, but then the authors at the same time say

that Ghana becomes just authoritarian country and all of this shit. without any real contact as to why Ghana had to take the measures that they took later on once they become a country or republic. So when Ghana becomes a, Ghana gets to power through different tactics. Like I said, there were strikes, there was boycotts. There were also riots and there were also times where folks died. And the Canadians also use that to their advantage to demonstrate why they should be the rulers of the country and not the British. A lesser known fact, though, is that I think people always talk about how Ghana gets independence, like, Ghana becomes like the first independent Republican in Africa.

But the, just simple stuff, like, I found it just weird to me, but whatever. But the British had to pass an actual law saying, you know, we're going to let them be independent, which is just wild to me. Like, hey, they had to actually go to Congress, quote-on-quarter, what in their case would be Parliament. And Parliament had to pass an actual Ghanayan Independence Act. And then they also got the crown to sign off on it. Basically, like, we're not going to bother with it. Right.

And people can say that's a good thing. And definitely the movement was able to force this, to force this concession. But the fact that someone still draws up a law in another, country that this country is independent. Just that part is just wild to me. Like I think sometimes we just look, we just look past it.

So once, yeah, the Ghana Independence Act of 1957, the people want to look that up. There was actual parliament that had to grant independence, quote-unquote. But so once Ghana gets independence, you know, like Kwame and Khruma says, like imperialism, he says imperialism, colonialism die hard. And what they failed to achieve is, one form they try and another.

We must therefore be on our constant and vigilant guard against any form of subtle domination by whosoever and from wheresoever. So even they understood, okay, we got our formal independence, but for us to really try independent track or like to become a country of our own, like there's going to still be interference. So there was multiple assassination attempts on Kwame and Krumah, who becomes the, um, the prime Minister of the country is multiple assassination attempts on him. You know, some he barely was able to allude ones that actually resulted in killing of

children. And, you know, evidence eventually came to show that this was the MI6 British and or the CIA involved in a lot of these. So eventually to hold on to power, not just for some drunk authoritarian impulse, but because you're trying to maintain the revolution or maintain the independence that your country fought really hard to get, they go to a one-party rule state. And this was passed through parliament. This wasn't something that Kwame and Krummer just woke up and said that they wanted to do and they became a one-party state. But even that, even that wasn't enough because when Krumma was out

of the country trying to end the Vietnam War, I believe he was headed to China or somewhere. Don't quote me on that. And that's when the country. country is coup. And the evidence is very clear that that was a CIA-backed coup. This is, like, documented in, you know, in U.S. you can look it up right now. U.S. intelligence is online on their own websites that you can see their correspondence. And it was also documented that when he wrote the book, Neo-Colonialism, that was like the last straw for the United States. Like, that was basically when they say, he's got to go. Because that was just like too much of an an affront for them. So even when you do quote unquote,

nonviolence to get independence. And even when you take violent action somewhat to control it, even that's not, and even when you take the quote unquote violent action, the enemy is still going to try to take power. And that's what I was saying in the first essay, and we use the analogy of the bear, the bear does not really care about this shit.

This is stuff we debate about. The bear is like, you got my honey. I want my honey, right? I don't care if you hold on to it. With nonviolence or violence, I'm coming at you violent because you got my honey. Right? And if you can't stop me from taking back my honey, then I'm going to get my honey. And that's what happened.

You know, to look at it as, oh, it was a nonviolent movement or it was a violent. It doesn't really matter. Like, I guess it's my point. Like, they got independence the best way the conditions that they saw fit. They thought that nonviolence was the best way to get independence using it as like the front, even though there was other things happening in the background. So be it. You know, but at the end of the day, the bear, or in this case, the empire, the imperialist, they don't, they don't care about these things, you know, unless, unless it, like you said, it can affect their money or something of that nature.

It's the only time this matters. So you can figure out a way to make it mess with their money, fine. But, you know, there were criticisms of Incrumah that he didn't deal with the class question enough, you know, when he first. got into power. I think Walter Rodney is one of the ones that aimed that criticism that he got to that question a little too late and had he dealt with some of the class elements, maybe, you know, this doesn't happen. I don't know if that's true or not. Like, we don't really know. But I think that's also another thing is that nonviolence doesn't always, I mean, anti-colonial struggle doesn't always either, but non-violence, I think, has an even worse record

of dealing with the class question. Yeah. So, so it just because it's like we all just need to unify, you know, on these, on these, on this particular tactic or this particular philosophy. But it does it talk about how like even, I didn't really get into this in the essay. I'm just kind of thinking out loud. But even when we think about nonviolence, the people who are going to get beat up, like when we talk about the sacrificial side of that I talked about in the first essay, the people who have to take the L so the rest of us can see. see the brutality are normally not like the highest class of people within even that group, right, even within the subordinated group. So Dr. King definitely, you know, took his hits. Like, I'm not saying he didn't. But, you know, because obviously he was assassinated at the end of the day.

But it's like for large parts of those actions they took across the South, it was more local people that were getting gunned down or, you know, beaten up or lynched or something more so than it was like the the the apparatus of the organizations that were doing it you know that were like engaged in those actions it was it was usually people who had much less much less to lose even in even in those cases and the same can be said with um india and even ghana it was the it was the masses of people that were on the front lines when the when the police shot into a crowd or something so there's still a way that nonviolence sometimes times it's just sacrificing the most vulnerable in ways that, you know, I don't think it

always fully reconciles with. And since Dr. King gets assassinated, people can say, well, what are you talking about? I'm not saying that the people who are, you know, I guess of the petty bourgeois, don't, don't experience violence, not suggesting that at all. I'm just saying, if you look at the grand total of any of those movements, there was more of the masses that got either injured or killed than the leaders did, you know, the leaders is more so a culmination of that, of that kind of violence. So I don't think sometimes nonviolence also deals with that question either. Some of that I think is because it's kind of divorced from a dialectical analysis anywhere. Yeah. That's, yeah, it's incredibly insightful. You mentioned Rodney's analysis

of Nekrumah and the class question, and I think there's another parallel in history too to that, which is the, you know, Allende's Chile, where there was the biggest what-if of that, uh, particular event was what if a yende had armed the workers the organized working class which was the backbone of that socialist movement they were doing the democratic socialist thing he thought that arming the workers would have been this capitulation to violence and they were trying to do things right and had those workers been armed perhaps they could have beaten back the coup it's it's a what if we never know in history but yende opted not to do that and you know people look back on that as perhaps a decisive error in that instance where you know they're trying to maintain a nonviolent

democratically moral high ground, but you lose the entire struggle ultimately because of it. And I also wanted to mention, you mentioned Nick from Black Alliance for Peace. Him and Tunday came on last year, and we did a whole episode on Kwame Nekrumah. I'll link to that in the show notes. So if you're interested in diving fully into that entire history, Nick and Tunday did a great job exploring that particular chapter. So I'll link to that. People can go learn about that.

But in your essay, you challenge, you know, speaking of Dr. King, you challenge the sanitize. image of King by emphasizing the role of riots, black rage, and armed militancy after his assassination. You also, in the essay, bring in the concept of the positive radical flank, where more militant forces can strengthen the bargaining position of more moderate or nonviolent organization. So how did that dynamic operate in the black freedom struggle in particular? And how did figures like Malcolm X understand the strategic relationship between militant resistance and Kings more integrationist nonviolence.

Yeah, so I think during that time it's important to think about the historical context. I know we've talked about on here and other shows, but just so people can be clear on it, there's the overall like cold war occurring. And then there's, we talked about already these anti-colonial movements happening across the world. Some of them, so-called violent, non-violent.

But this creates a, a pressure valve even outside of this, the United States. So it's important to note that because the United States is trying to compete with the Soviet Union to win the world over to its side. So it has to make certain concessions because of that. So if it looks like it's, if it looks like the country's on fire or it looks like they are not taking care of their population, that has major influence over markets because you're trying to, you know, get into these markets of these decolonizing states or whatever. right like that's that's a part that i think is often left out of this you know that would that understanding

was also true internally to the borders of the united states where you have um the integrationist or someone who's asking just to be have a seat at the table and you have people who are like no we want a nation we don't want a seat of the table you know you have the the emergence of black power in its most explicit anti-colonial form not the kind of like black capitalist nonsense that that, you know, we see Nixon and even on a lesser note, Johnson, or a quieter note, I should say Johnson try to fund. And so because you have this dynamic, it creates a situation where the state is looking for, like, what's the easiest bargaining partner to deal with. So the more left you go, this theory of, like, positive radical flank was the paper that was a written by, a sociologist, it was saying that the more militant certain black organizations became,

the more money actually that went into the more moderate organizations and the more that their position was strengthened to negotiate on behalf of black people or whatever because of those organizations to their left, to the more radical organizations, which that's why I was talking about the broader context of the world because you have this broader movement happening. So when you walk into a negotiating table, you have all that behind you to negotiate, even if you're just looking for reforms, you have all that behind you. Another example of this is when Dr. King is assassinated. He had been trying to push for the, prior to him being assassinated, he had been trying to push for the Housing Rights Act, which has a lot of flaws in it. But that is, I think

the book, Race to Profit by Keonger Yomani Taylor, brought about some of the problems with that law. But nonetheless, he'd been trying to get the Housing Rights Act passed. And that was ultimately just trying to end discrimination within housing because there was no, like, federal law for that. And he couldn't get it passed. And when he was assassinated, the United States Congress and Lyndon Johnson all there, and they rushed to pass that bill because there was 100 cities on fire at that point.

Right. So they needed to give the people something because folks was willing to burn the whole country down after Dr. King was assassinated. And that was their way to try to, like, quell. the violence or quell the rage or whatever. We know concessions are just a part of warfare. Like you get into a struggle, you try to hold a certain leverage over your opponent

and ultimately hope you can force as positive of concessions as you can. Obviously, the ultimate goal is to get everything you want. Most of the time, that doesn't happen. But how do you get a strong position of leverage against your opponent? You're not going to get a strong position of leverage if you totally negate any of these things we've been talking about.

So if you say nobody should be more radical than what you are, nobody should have a position differently than you, everybody should be consolidated in this one area. So your opponent knows the only got to deal with one specific thing. And especially if it's more moderate, it's pretty easy to take that out. And they don't really have to give you many concessions of anything because what are you going to do?

You know, in this case, it was like, okay, we killed a, the most moral leader of America has ever had. And now our cities are on fire. And they were already on fire prior to this. Now it's just getting worse. We got to give them something. Now, housing rights is not enough for the assassinating Dr. King. I'm not suggesting that.

It just shows that again, this kind of chain reaction where violence sparks some kind of concession. You start seeing not just the housing rights acts, you know, affirmative action, and black people getting into more middle-class jobs, things that are actually on the decline today because these radical flanks don't exist in any real serious way. You know, but you start seeing them concede these things because they have to keep order

because order matters at some level because that's how markets function. Markets need some level of order. Yeah. Especially back then. Today, they can operate on a little bit more chaos because they can manipulate stuff. But even that's short term.

You can't do that forever. So markets need some level of consistency in certain areas, particularly in the imperial core. So it can't have constant cities where capital is inherent or capital cities are inherent to capital. Like you can't have cities on fire. When you got all this money you're trying to bring in and out of cities, you can't have that shit. Right?

So this put a pressure valve on the United States, right? So that's what I'm saying like over and over again. I think, I guess just to kind of zoom out a little bit, I just feel like we need to look more of these things as a forms of warfare. And I don't mean that to be hyperbolic or to be, you know, accelerationist or maximalist. I just mean like strategically, if you look at them from the standpoint of warfare and how war functions, I'm not even talking about just in terms of weapons and bombs. I mean, like, how do you maintain leverage to force the other side? to do what you want.

It's really that simple. Like, we can moralize all day, but how do we have enough leverage to force the other side to do what we want? How do we gain that leverage? How do we maintain that leverage? And what are the means to doing it? You know, like, that's, I think,

ways we have to think more on that level and less about, you know, whether we are on the right side of history and all of those kind of things. It's not that that shit doesn't matter. it's just these kind of moralist ways of framing battle don't necessarily deal with like the reality on the ground sometimes you know like you have to be able to combine the two we take a moral high ground because we have one over these these motherfuckers but excuse my french but but we um

but but we take it with a strategic thinking pattern that we don't just do it because we're just we think we're going to win because we're just better people or because we just believe better things. Right. That's not how this works. That's idealism in the ultimate, you know, in analysis. And it's weak and it's, and yeah, you're saying like, even the city's on fire example is a perfect example of what I was saying earlier with money and violence being

the same thing. Like the violence of burning down a city fucking with their money, meaning that they had to compitulate or offer concessions in order to stabilize for, you know, capital flow. Those two things are so deeply intertwined that they're not ultimately separate. And yeah, like for us and our movement, as, as, As weak as we are right now, we need to build, you know, a fighting force, higher, higher levels of disciplined organization that takes both of these things into account, that push the nonviolent stuff as far as we can.

Obviously, it's to our benefit, especially now, not to engage in overt violence. And insofar as we can win people over and push, you know, advance the ball for anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and socialist politics without having to engage in explicit violence. Obviously, that's preferred. But there always has to be that background. readiness to engage with it. We can't be idealist in the sense that we think we'll never have to face it or deal with it because always and everywhere and all throughout history, you know, you always have to

contend with it on some level. And so we have to be honest about that. Yeah, there was something, it might have been in the question. I didn't know if, I don't know if I answered it, but something else I wanted to touch on real quick. Yeah. Just a quick point about Dr. King before we move on was something I put in the essay about how because the civil rights movement and Dr. King had this kind of deal or this kind of

agreement with the state that, you know, we will, the state will, like, support our civil rights and will support, you know, not, it had to be forced to do it and pressure to do it, but there was a certain understanding like, okay, it was more so a debate about how quickly to go. and the civil rights movement was like, no, y'all need to move faster on this shit. And I keep messing around about it. So by the time Johnson gets it, he's willing to move a lot faster than Kennedy was. But because that alliance had been struck, when Dr. King starts speaking out against the Vietnam War, it's like, well, you struck kind of a pact with the United States government that, you know,

they're going to support you at home. And then, you know, the thing that they think they're getting out of this is like patriotism from black. folks and a certain kind of like, which there's a longer history of that, but a certain kind of patriotism and a certain like alignment with U.S. foreign policy, which up to that point, for the most part, the civil rights movement had done. Like there's documentation about how they didn't say anything about the Cuban Missile Crisis and they didn't really have much to say about much of anything up to that point. And so when Dr. King comes out against the Vietnam War, particularly on his, with his level of prominence, he's breaking that agreement, right? And it just shows

It was like the very state that was willing to protect him. Like I noted in, I can't even remember which essay. I think it was in that. I noted how there was a time with the state came down. It was in the second essay where the state when Dr. King was under, Dr. King and Freedom Writers were being harassed by basically white, racist in the clan outside of a church. And he was able to call Robert F. Kennedy,

and get people and get like troops sent in to save them so they weren't like destroyed. The same people who did that also has the ability to assassinate you. You know, because it's like, well, okay, we'll protect you against the southern races. But it's kind of an understanding like, yeah, we'll do that. But you also can't talk about our wars out over in Vietnam. Right. And when you do that, you kind of break the agreement.

And it's a weird position because it's like we should always herald him for that, but it kind of goes to show the limitations of when you get too cozy with these entities and your moral compass may lead you to move elsewhere, you are in a strategic bind there because you've put all your eggs in that basket. Now you want to move away from it. You don't have a base for it, right? And Dr. Keene didn't really have a base for it. So a lot of the civil rights establishment rejected him. And it seemed like he was almost good with death. at that point because he had to be. Now, that's what he was willing to do,

but it just goes to show that there's, again, we're talking about this asymmetrical warfare where if you strike a deal with one entity to back you up against another entity and then you betray that entity, you know, it puts you in a bind, right? So it's like we have to think about how much do we want to get in bed with the state sometimes

for the things that might work for us in the short term or the midterm, but in the long term, you really want to be in bed with those kind of folks if it's going to lead to you cannot speak about injustice anywhere else outside of the United States. And we see that today where a lot of the DEI folks and people that got caught up in the wave of 2020. And this, I hate to say it, unfortunately, a lot of the kind of black misleadership class, don't really have much to say about Palestine because they already cut deals with Zionists, with, you know, with the Democratic Party.

So coming out for Palestine really kind of messes with their bag. Yeah. You know, like it just so, so my only doing point of this is just saying, be careful how much we get in bed with the state or how much we get in bed with these entities because we might be able to do a lot in a particular context. But when we, when our analysis expands or our moral, our moral compass calls us to do differently, it might be hard to bridge out. We might reach some limitations that can lead to a similar end as Dr. King. Well, at the end of your essay, you say that nonviolence is often, quote, more propaganda than reality, because it allows movements to appear innocent while violence happens somewhere else, right, through the state, through riots, militants, or through sacrificial bodies absorbing repression. So where does this kind of leave us strategically today? How should organizers think honestly about violence, nonviolence, confrontation, and ultimately power without falling into either liberal moralism and idealism on one side, or, you know, reckless adventurism on the other? That's a great question.

And I honestly don't have like a straightforward answer for it. Because I think it, I think some of it we've already talked about in terms of, or even what I just said with Dr. King, we have to be able to look at where things, we have a, we have to have an evidence-based, hard, fact-based approach to, you know, material is approach to how we how we struggle and we can never fall too much for our own Kool-Aid right we can never get too much into thinking that we're just on the right side and that is enough it's not so it's like it's as rough as it is to hear that like being on the right side is a great start you know being on the side of the people whatever but I think we you know some things

I can't even say on this podcast, obviously, but I'm saying, like, I think strategically, I don't think we should necessarily eliminate things from off the table. Like something Dr. CBS says about communism or anti-communism, she's like, you don't have to be a communist, but you don't have to be anti-communist. So we can apply this logic to other things as well. You don't have to be for certain tactics. And I've seen some movement people apply this approach. you don't have to be for certain tactics.

You don't have to agree with how everybody moves, but you don't have to denounce it. You don't have to condemn it. Exactly. You know. But the problem is that puts you in a position where if you're getting a certain kind of funding or whatever, maybe you feel like you need to do that, you know.

But you don't have to condemn it. You don't have to say there's no place for it here and all that kind of shit. Because that creates an environment where people aren't even open to the idea and or you get the reckless. is adventurism because now the only people who are open for the idea are people who don't have it all the way together anyway.

Yeah, yeah. So all the people who do have more strategic brains and who can think a little bit more methodically and aren't just like we're just going to pop out, all those people are now in the world where, you know, we don't do those kind of things. All the people that have the ability to think through things on that level, they're not in in those spaces. So now, you know, it is just the people who are ready to pop off and do whatever in the, in the space that are going to burn a building down, are going to engage in some kind of venturism,

you know, because a lot of the strategic people felt like it was, it wasn't, they're too pragmatic to want to do that because we've taught all the strategic people that had to be so strategic that they can never take a risk, that everything has to be calculated and we can see the end goal of everything, you know, before we do it, right? So like, so we end up messing with our ability to organize because we cut off the resources to that more. That more. radical side by saying, well, you know, all the smart people should just be in this nonprofit, right? All the people who have the strategic competence should be over here. And then we just leave the, all the folks that are just, you know, mad and angry, they go over there. It's not

just saying that all those people are crazy. I'm just saying, like, we limit the resources of different size of different tactics or different strategies reaching like a peak because we're always telling all the folks like you shouldn't deal with that. You know, that's a bad thing. We just know there's no place for that here. That's going to get you killed. Y'all not ready for revolution. We always just cut it off, you know.

So it's like, we don't have to be on here saying go pick up guns or do anything. But I'm also not going to say like what to do and what not to do. Like clearly I'm on a podcast. I'm not, you know, I'm not plotting some kind of overthrow right now. But I'm not going to, if somebody's doing it, doing that, that's not my business. Right, right. You know.

Absolutely. It's not my business to speak on that. You know, you know, it is very much how we talk about Israel, right? Like, do they have a right to defend themselves? Why am I even mean, or not, not, excuse me, do they have the right to exist? Why am I even being asked this question? Why, who gives a shit? Yeah.

Like, why do I even need to answer that? Like, but they want, they, they do that because there's a certain line they want told it. don't want there to be any kind of, you know, any kind of like break from that, that line of thinking because that opens up different pathways. But I think it is not so strategically, it's not so much that we need to pick this one side or the other. Even when we think about Palestine again, if there was a decent reformist movement or group that existed there, I don't think it's really possible, but I'm just saying for the case of the sake of the argument, If such a thing was possible, then when there is an active resistance like October 7th, there's a body that can come in and negotiate for a better path forward than what existed prior.

That body does not exist, you know, like the Palestinian Authority is not going to do it, right? So that body does not exist. So we need to have the more negotiating bodies that are capable of not be. being maybe as hard line that can, but can still find alignment with the more radical flank, quote, unquote. We need those bodies. Like, it's not that everybody needs to be super hardline. We need hardliners and we need people who have a little bit of wiggle room. Like, we need both.

You know, those people need to be talking to each other. And that was something else that was noted in the essay about how even in India, the folks who were hardliners and who were willing to engage in very explicit violent acts. We're in conversation with people like Gandhi and Nehru and such. Like, there wasn't that these sides were always in, always fighting. Right. So we need to have sides that even if there is actual disagreements that we maybe can never fully reconcile, there needs to be an entity who can go in and negotiate a riddle settlement that's not just capitulation.

Yeah. If that's what we choose to do. And then we need people to be like, we're not negotiating because there is no real settlement that can be reached with these people. We need both of those, you know, we need all of that. Like, it can't be one of the other, right? So if we think about even when we talk about the civil rights movement or India or Ghana on a lesser note in terms of this dynamic, you had these entities that even the folks who weren't for experience. violence, you know, they were at least strong enough to be a presence that the, that the, that the,

that the, that the, that the, that the, that the, that the, that the, that the, that the, that the, puppets, right? Like, they weren't just lackeys, like the Palestinian Authority or something. You know, they were, they were, they were independent to some extent, even if they were compromised on some level, they were, like, if you had to negotiate with Dr. King, that was Malcolm X thing. at least if you're negotiating with Dr. King, you're going to get the end of Jim Crow, you're going to get more rights. At least you get something out of that, even if that's not enough, right? But that's because overall, we were already more radical across the board.

Even our reformists had to give up, had to capitulate more to their left. Today, if the most left thing is, you know, a Democratic. mayor who believes in health care you know like you're negotiating because this is just not that strong exactly you know it's just not yeah i mean i totally i totally agree with that it's it's basically full spectrum advance all tools and all terrains are on the table and you know to be a part of the movement whatever that whatever that is however we wanted to find that means basically accepting that like you know your organization or your strategy doesn't have to always agree with that person or that person, but you can still move forward in your way without, you know, distancing or criticizing or

condemning or pushing outside of the movement, other forms of advancement, realizing that dialectically they all work together and they actually strengthen each other's hands to have them operating more or less in unison in some sense. So, yeah, I think that is ultimately the template of the approach, although the details have to be worked out in actual struggle and organization. Yeah, yeah, because it's a, it's a tight line because it's like, on one hand, we don't want what we see like when we log on Twitter where it's just like everybody just going at everybody. We don't, we don't necessarily want that, but we also don't want a thing where we can't name disagreements, contradictions, opposites. We don't want that either. That's, you know, like a kind of, like, Mao talked about, like either commandism or tail.

Like we don't really want either one of those, right? Like, whereas just your, either everybody gets dragged somewhere, even though I think sometimes dragging is okay. Or everybody just follows everybody else somewhere, right? We don't, a little bit of dragging is okay because sometimes you got to do that, but if we got to drag everybody everywhere, eventually they're going to get tired

and they're going to leave because they don't believe in any of this shit. No, you're right, yeah. There's a fine line to walk there because, yeah, you can like, like, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be critical of like social Democrats or like AOC or something like that. Nor should we not be critical of like, you know, doing Luigi style adventurism necessarily. So you can't like completely say like nobody criticizes anybody. But yeah, at the same time, we also have to kind of balance it with the fact that people are pushing forward in different ways and pushing forward at all is ultimately a good thing. So yeah, it is a difficult line to walk.

Yeah, I mean, I think I think sometimes we just need to make our positions clear. and that be that and not it always be the maximalist somebody's a Fed or a sellout in every given case. Right. Like I just think that that doesn't

that I think leads to a kind of paralysis analysis or analysis paralysis where it's like we're not, then especially people who are coming into this stuff who don't have maybe

some of the historical like knowledge they haven't been around. They don't know that a lot of us are just bitching and we're going to go work anyway. They don't know that. So they're like, well, nothing's good, so I ain't going to join shit. Right?

Like, that's how they're going to see it. Exactly. So if it's always just like nobody's real, the left is fake, it's like, you know, I mean, I have, due to your help, I'm going to be talking to Rock Hill soon about his book on Western Marxism, because there's some of the questions I'm trying to wrestle with in terms of what does it look like to have, of you have this compatible left that he talks about that is that is engineered through like the state right like it kind of creates its guard rails to keep to keep it from supporting actual existing projects um so it's like you can read that on one level and just be like okay you can just go around and say all the y'all are just a bunch of compatible fake leftists and i don't really know if that advances anything right you know like even if i agree with his analysis is this is this is like criticizing him this more so what do you do with that analysis do you just say all right that means everybody's a phony because you took this grant or whatever like i don't know if that really

advances anything right but i also don't think we should just not acknowledge those facts if somebody did take this money or somebody is pushing this line like that's what we have to struggle like what do we do with that it's not a perfect line to hold there but i think that's more so what we need to be thinking through and not so much about like either fool out and attack on somebody because they don't hold this position and or, you know, full out complacency or just like whatever. That's, let them do them. Because that kind of let them do them thing.

That shit comes back on you. That shit comes back to bite you too because, you know. Exactly. That's that kind of like individualistic thing where people can all just go pursue their own paths and the paths never cross. That's not, that's not real life either, you know. I don't know. I think one of the ways that I kind of.

to think about it sometimes as kind of walking that line that we're talking about in the right way is that you know we're communists we're marxists we're anti-imperialists we have a very specific analysis a very specific definition of what it means to be principled right and we're like a block in a growing and evolving ecosystem on the quote unquote american north american left and the idea would be we don't want to alienate everybody we're never going to be able to like totally cut ourselves off and isolate ourselves from the the rest of that ecosystem, nor are we going in any foreseeable future take over that entire ecosystem. We are a block. We have to operate as a block. Be critical. You know, push our line,

you know, advance our analysis within this broader ecosystem, win people over to our side of things and continue to advance. But understand that we are ultimately still in an ecosystem that is broader than just us. And we have to navigate that with some level of grace and thoughtful and discipline as well, or else we become the sort of alienating, moralizing, we're right, everybody else is wrong, sort of sectarians that don't advance our cause, alienate people, and kind of weaken us as a block. So I'm increasingly thinking of us as a block in a growing and evolving left ecosystem, and I think that might be an interesting way of thinking that keeps us walking that fine line,

where we're not trying to be belligerent and alienating and hypersectarian and dogmatic, while at the same time we're not going to liquidate ourselves or turn a blind eye to people doing things that are completely against our analysis or our core principles or, you know, our red lines at the same time. So, you know, how do you think about that? No, I think that there's something to that. I think, I think that can only be done if we actually stay, I don't say only, but I think that can better be done if we stay on principle and not get into what I see sometimes is these like personality battles, right? So, you know, like H.R. Brown said we need to learn how to relate to concepts, not individuals,

right? So the concepts themselves are, and people who embody those concepts, those concepts that might be capitulation to imperialism or, you know, kind of both sides. Iran sucks. So those United States, I stand above all of it or whatever. Like, we got to call out that idea and call out, like, that kind of approach to politics and say that that's wrong and say why. I think if we, when we get into, you know, all these people are sellouts and, you know, they never these people are fake and whatever i mean that all is cool if you have an intellectual

battle but if you're on the ground doing a campaign in a local area and the democrats are the only people that have even a little bit of sway and you might need to know a few of them in the party even if you don't rock with the party that don't always work it's just you know like if you're actually doing real organizing a lot of people that you might get along with might be in those spaces so you can't have that kind of position in real life you might be be able to have it on your podcast or online, but in real life, you do have to find a way to work with those people. So I'm like, how do we work with people like that and still not, you know, become like absorbed by it or become co-opted by it, right? Like, so it was like, and so we have to be

able, like, if you put me on a panel with a, you know, a kind of democratic solace, I was long, one not too long ago. And, you know, there was some stuff he said that I ain't really agree with that I just made my point clear that this is our position. I didn't say this dude is a fake and a phony and fuck him because that's not that's not how that's going to... I still needed to work with this

individual on some level, right? Like, I can't do that. And that just makes you look like an asshole and a weirdo. Right. Which I would have been if I'd have done that. So I'm like, you have to be able to articulate your position in a way that makes you seem reasonable and sensible to folks.

And if they think you're crazy because you just have this position or you uphold this concept and that's that you have to be willing to live with because people are going to think you crazy even when you're calm and you know down to earth about things that's fine but i can't go at somebody like that and i think i even think a lot of people who do a lot of attacking i think they know that but it just doesn't appeal to them on line yeah you know yeah i think we all kind of know in real life you just can't really move like that all the time totally totally you know like it just doesn't You know, like, I got a lot of, I write a lot about the black elite and that's probably the group I'm most critical of and will continue to be.

But sometimes, you know, when me and Rasul wrote laundering black rage, we had people reaching out to us who were in those circles who were noticing those trends, you know, and we're like, yo, I'm trying to help figure this out because they're noticing some of the trends that we wrote about. but in our book we went out of our way to speak about it as concepts and not these people are just sellouts or whatever so when they contacted us they didn't contact us about it like i just want to go in on this individual because like we're not trying to do that with you because our point was that could be occupied by somebody else tomorrow whatever position you hate or whatever person you hate that position that they hold can be occupied by the person you love tomorrow it could be occupied by you or me tomorrow so if Somebody is trying to sell you, like Jay-Z's on TV saying that you should gentrify your own hood or some silliness like that. There's going to be somebody else saying that in 10 years if we don't do something different.

Right. So Jay-Z is just an avatar for that position. He's not, like, you can have your issues with him as an individual, but I'm saying somebody else will feel that thing. Right. So when we're just arguing about it, like AOC or Mounda, it's like whatever you feel, feel about them, someone else will be in that position another day until the tide turns, right? So AOC is a tragic story of what happens when you put yourself in that position. It's not really about, it's not really about her necessarily.

It's just like that's how that's going to go when you capitulate in certain ways. So that should be a lesson for us all as opposed to I just hate her because then you get to separate yourself from it as if you're not a few steps away from. from that thing yourself. Exactly. You know, you get a better job, you get a, you got a family and take care of. You, you know, you get a little greedy one day. It only takes a little bit here and there and they see, you know, you're there.

Yeah. You know. Yeah, the person, the hyper-personalizing of things is kind of an ego game. It's a personality game. It's me versus you. You know, your shit. You are actually driven by bad faith. You're corrupt.

You have these personality flaws that lead you to behaving this way. when what you're saying is like, hold on, let's, let's depersonalize this. Let's advance our line. Let's, in most cases, like that Democratic Socialist that you had on the panel, we're assuming good faith that this person is not lying or deceiving or, you know, sneakily trying to destroy the communist movement or something by adopting a wrong line. He is a good faith, or she is a good faith interlocutor that has different positions. I'm going to be likable to that person.

That person, in fact, that person liking me is going to make them, infinitely more open to my critiques as I keep them on the conceptual principled level than if I would just go in on them personally. And if I'm in a, if I'm hanging out with AOC or or mom, Donnie, I'm going to be a decent human being. I'm going to joke around. I'm going to be fun. I'm going to treat them with respect. And I'm still not going to budge an inch on my personal politics. We can talk about that. You know, I work, for example, in our deep red state on construction sites, for God's sake. I come across every type of person you can imagine, politically. And my thing is, I am, I am not going to be a weirdo. I'm going to meet them where they are. Sometimes my only advance is I'm just going to humanize the socialist position. I'm not even going to win this Trump or over, but I'm going to humanize the thing that he can dehumanize so easily, the socialist, the communist, etc. But then I'll have somebody else who's, you know, a young dude coming up into political consciousness that we go back and forth all day long. He's really open to my ideas. And I'm trying to like nurture that in him and kind of like, you know, help cultivate an

analysis within him. And so every person I come across, I'm going to take a different approach intact to, but I'm always going to first and foremost kind of like be a decent human being and fundamentally be likable and respectable. And that opens up the doorway to them actually hearing me in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think that's a great approach. Again, now if those people are assholes to you, then, you know, that's a different conversation. Then it's on. Then it's on. Yeah. So it's like, if people violate, then I think that's fair to call out. Then we can get more than a moral character.

But I still think we have to hold the concept above the individual, even in that case. Absolutely. Because we've all throughout, if we understand dialectical materialism to be what it really is, then we understand that everything's in motion and we all occupy different positions at different times. We don't, like, have a static position. So, like, something Rossul said to me. And he always says there's no such thing as sellouts, which I'm sure that throws a lot of people off. But it's not that he's saying selling out doesn't happen.

He's saying that the more, he's like upward mobility, basically, the more you climb the ladder, you assume certain taste and certain comforts. That's going to lead to, you know, what people tend to call selling out because the social ladder tends to entice those sensibilities that people often identify as selling out. It's not that the individual lost their soul, quote unquote. It's not only that. I mean, we can argue that's a part of it. But it's just that the more you climb the social ladder, you know, like people who have a three-bedroom home don't want to go back to one bedroom, right? People who have two cars don't want to go back to one, right?

People who enjoy certain riches don't want to be knocked down a notch. So they're going to try to hold on to it. And that's the nature of capitalism, right? It's not, so it's not to say that people don't have any individual, like, responsibility in that. They do. But what's driving that is more so the structure that we're all caught up in. Exactly. So that means that somebody can be what we will call a sellout or what we will call, like, you know, a CIA operative or whatever we throw around, right?

They can have those kind of positions. I don't mean literally CIA. I think if you're a CIA operative, that's probably what you're. Opportunist, careerists. Yeah, yeah. But if you're like people call you a grifter or what if those are those are the things that, you know, you might have been doing intentionally or not intentionally once in time and you can maybe reach a different position.

My thing is there's always somebody coming behind that that occupies that thing too. So why are we so caught up on this one individual? Exactly. You know, like, there's enough, like, when we wrote laundry and Black Rays, really what inspired it was just like, I was trying to understand how do we got here again? How are we in a situation where it seems like, oh, this great movement is happening, but everybody's being bought off and put in jail at the same time. How is this happening? And we don't even realize it because this happened so many times before. So we know that these cycles happen, then we really should never get too invested in our own cycle as that this is just something so unique to this moment.

You know, there have been, they're, you know, reading Rock Hill's book, there was this, the whole new left, you know, that was the whole thing, you know, now we're in another run of that, so-called new left that has no attachment or connection to the world outside of the United States. Exactly. You know. And it's worse than that new left. Yeah, yeah. For real. So, so we know that, then we shouldn't get too caught up in, like, this person or that. that person. I've been doing too much name dropping on other shows. I'm trying not to use names

so much. But I'm saying like we shouldn't get so caught up in that. I just feel like we we have to, again, like I said, if somebody's an asshole, I think you can have your smoke for him. I don't think you got to just take that layer down because obviously I'm not over here advocating for that kind of nonviolence. But I do think that's one thing nonviolence does teach interestingly enough. And I know a lot of people don't like it. It's just like you don't have to respond in every case the way they come at you. Sometimes I do think that that's actually a better way to approach things. Sometimes.

Sometimes it's not. But the context matters. Totally. And your overall point, which you said brilliantly is just like it's these things are structural, not moralistic. The more you focus on the individual and their moral failings or their perceived intentions, the less you are engaging with the structure itself that can, that person's position can easily be filled by a totally different person.

So we have to think on the structural level and not get sucked into the personality and moralistic level of things. Yeah. The world keeps turning, man. Exactly. So we have to think about it like that the world keeps turning. There's not a, nothing's, you know, history doesn't repeat itself literally because the world changes, but it does echo, it does rhyme.

It does have certain patterns to it. And that's true on both the positive and negative side of it. and people will find themselves in similar positions through the structure. So we have to change the structure. Like, a last thing I'll say on it, the guy that wrote elite capture, he was on my show on Black Mists years ago. And he said, we were talking about this kind of debate of moralism, people. You know, he was saying, like, we build people, right?

Like, people were built through the structure. And I was like, I was like, yeah. And I was like, if we build people, then I was like, you also can make a case that we build good or bad people, right? Like I was like, we can have the moralistic aspect of it. Like, we build people. But if we're building people who are okay with genocide, then we're not building good people, right? Like, we're not. But we do build people.

So we have to build better people. You know, if you want to take it in the moral direction, I'm saying. We have to build people who are able to. confront these things, but we have to, the structure that we build is what's going to build those kind of people. Yeah. If our structure remains the same, then it's not going to build better people that can actually withstand or resist or fight back against the things that we keep naming.

And that's why being a decent person actually matters, you know, because if you can't even do that yourself, it's going to be hard to build that elsewhere. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's essential. So we can't lose sight of that. It's not that it's irrelevant. It's just not predominant.

It's not the main thing. The structure is the main thing. But the morality and the values and, yeah, building people is a good way to think about it. Absolutely does matter. And we all have a responsibility if we call ourselves communist, anti-imperialist, whatever. We have a responsibility to be the best human beings we can be, to really set a high standard of ethical conduct for ourselves so that we can go out in the world and be more effective at actually organizing and trying to change it in a way that matters. So, yeah, those two things are.

Once again, in dialectical relationship with one another, not totally separable. But yeah, I think that's great. So the essay is nonviolence is violence, is violence two, part ones and two, put out by grassroots thinking.com associated with Black Alliance for Peace. Two Black, it's always a pleasure, always an honor to have you on. Can you just let listeners know where they can find you and your work and your organization online? Yeah, grassroots thinking and Black Alliance of Peace are not technically associated. just so I don't get yelled out after somebody hears this. Separate entities, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, sometimes I've been so much stuff. I don't even remember all the stuff to name. And I don't mean that to brag. I mean that because I'm literally tired of being in so much stuff. But, yeah, people can find if they want to hear me talk more, if you want to put yourself through that, you can hear me on the Black Miss podcast.

If you are interested in the writings or the work, you can get a laundering black rage. You can, you know, continue to follow me on social media and I'll just drop these essays and or if I write anything broader. Organizing-wise, I always say, you know, support the Pendleton too. I might actually have some stuff for you, Brett on that later, but I'll reach out about that later. But in terms of some action we're trying to do that, we could use some national support on. But support the Penalty 2.com. That's two political prisoners here in Indiana. John Babylon Cole, Christopher Naim Trotter, who got over 200 plus years for saving a prisoner who was getting beat by guards who were in the Ku Klux Klan. They did not kill anybody,

yet they got basically the life sentences for that. You know, support Black Alliance for Peace. And yeah, that's about it. Probably forgetting something, but that's about it. I'll link to all that in the show notes. Black Myths podcast, definitely check it out. Black Alliance for Peace, great organization. Highly recommend supporting them in any way that you can. We've had Two Black On to obviously discuss part one of this essay,

but also to discuss his book with Razul called Laundering Black Rage. And we have a full episode on The Pendleton, too, if you want to deepen your understanding of that particular struggle. All linked in the show notes. Thank you again, Too Black. I look forward to our next conversation. I appreciate it.