On Trust

Trust me, I’d love to pick up a ___. Trust me, I’d love to ____ __ a pipeline. Trust me, I’d love to _______ a weapons manufacturer. Trust me in saying that we do not have the political infrastructure to do any of those things. Not visibly. Not as loudly as we need to. It is our failure that makes that true, but it is true. I have read others’ and felt my own desire to simply slash and burn and explode these organs of genocide that churn around us at every moment. In George Jackson’s words, “the guerilla needs our help.”

When Jonathan steps forward with his anti-Nixon rocket launcher, there should be nine more like himself, with assault rifles to close an exist path for him. And there should be a political infrastructure, a cadre, not far away to explain his actions, and glean from them the greatest possible overall political effect. (Blood in My Eye, page 46)

This work is painstaking. It must be. This work will take years, and already has. Our enemies are constantly mobilizing to fracture and divide and blind us to the realities of the precedents and potentials of our struggle.

There is something romantic about ______ __ a tank or an armored car, and these actions will be a necessary element of our futures, but of what use is an explosion if we cannot explain it? The narratives of that action will be so thoroughly saturated with bourgeois condemnations that none of those who we need to rally will so much as lean towards us. How could even those who sympathize with the cause get behind an action they cannot understand?

All of the work that has come before us is valuable, and all of the work that we do now is valuable, as long as it is situated within consistent analyses of the material conditions of our moment. None of our work today would be possible without the hundreds upon thousands of people who have written and fought before us. We are part of a long and storied tradition, one which will never die, but one made of a flame that must be tended and nurtured. A flame which leaps brightly for but a moment is not a flame that can eventually burn down an empire. To reduce an empire to ash we must be careful with this flame. We must be tactical, intentional, and intelligent. We must be aware of those who wish to snuff it out. There are no shortcuts to any of these things. There are no generalizations that can give us a map to the end of this struggle, though there are footprints and suggestions that we must not ignore.

We must walk the paths that do not yet exist. To wage revolution is to live a life of radical imagination, carrying a full heart of history and love for the ancestors who have given us the room to build what must supplant this current order.

Palestine is a vanguard struggle precisely because of the weaknesses it demonstrates in the armor of the empire. The stunning resolve and steadfastness of the Palestinian resistance will succeed in exposing the weakness and insubstantiality of the capitalist machine, bringing yet more contradictions to the forefront of the world’s consciousness. I can speak to this already, for my eyes have been opened to the genuine power of the resistance, and the genuine weakness of the entities which we fight.

Go read Blood in My Eye. Join the struggle, none of us are alone. It is our duty to win.