Let us return to the gaze of the Other: the man immobile in the doorway of the bedroom looking at his wife? Will he join her on the bed? No. The gaze, here, is certainly a gaze of desire (Would there really be cinema if it wasn’t for the search for desire, explicitly or implicitly, or at least for its preliminaries?), but it is not observed with sufficient insistence to suggest shared pleasure, the promise of intimate union. The Other’s way of looking at the desirable woman, a gaze on which we too are spying, is not the gaze of a voyeur. Slowly and with increasing intensity (a minute and a half can be a very long time), he is, despite himself, contemplating his impotence and the pain of separation. It is a gaze before the desert, a gaze that confronts, that makes more distinct the dividing line between a couple, between the sexes.

search for an answer to the question as to the nature of the Other’s look at women, in a culture in which, for centuries, the eye had been closely guarded? One eye only existed, the eye of the master of the harem who forbade all visual imagery and invoked religious taboos to reinforce this dominance. The gaze of the Other, unless it is the gaze of a voyeur (an aggressive, invasive gaze), perceives nothing but the image of the woman, a mirage enshrouded in poetry and melancholy.

As I Was Moving Ahead / The Homeless Wanderer

stones too know how to scream when need be.

kek-ed

the anime btw.

read the book if you're interested.

መልካም

sunday

reading theory so i don't have to kill myself

the modern resurgence of Pan-Africanism itself is a product of an unchecked idealism that becomes shockingly apparent once it is revealed. In Black-owned storefronts, Black barber shops, hair salons, plastered across t-shirts, pendants, logos, and artwork you are sure to find it: the silhouette of the continent Africa. Where once we would have found crosses or depictions of Christ, some more progressive Black/Africans have replaced them with a more noble God. Our reverence for this God conveniently renders all strategies to strengthen its position superior to criticism, and thus make any scientific inquiry or challenge impossible. Pan-Africanism thus becomes an infallible idea, and unless we are able to understand this flaw of idealism, and to shed our reverence for metaphysical identities, we will be blind to errors in our practice. As with all things, Pan-Africanism must be observed scientifically.

Pan-Africanism falls into the same trap that Afro-Pessimism does: it views the non-African proletariat of whatever lands we inhabit as incapable or less capable of effectively waging struggle due to chauvinistic and racist attitudes. Again, this represents a fundamental error of dialectical materialist thinking: that things are fixed in their nature and cannot be changed.

To declare that we are somehow better suited to organize a vastly diverse group of people half a world away, with whom we share only a few hours of daylight, and who speak a variety of languages that we have (for the most part) not bothered to learn would be a remarkably audacious claim.

In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily “from the masses, to the masses”. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. -mao

This inversion of democratic centralism reinforces petty-bourgeois and patriarchal tendencies within the party. By privileging Africans in its analysis instead of the undivided working class, the party renders itself the “one true representative” of Africans and forecloses all possibility of theoretical struggle from both within and without. While the communist party can be readily criticized by all who carry the mantle of working class struggle, the Pan-Africanist party can refute any and all ideas that it finds misaligned with the idealism of Africanity. Even the most correct of criticisms could be handily tossed aside by declaring them “un-African” or out of line with the party’s particular interpretation of what it considers to be African cultural values. In this way, legitimate criticisms of tendencies that exist in all organizations struggling under bourgeois society like male or petty-bourgeois chauvinism would become impossible terrains of struggle. This tendency would also predictably lead to accusations of infiltration and sectarianism amongst the rank-and-file and the reproduction of distinctly petty-bourgeois dynamics within the party like members engaging in antagonistic competition for leadership roles and ratting out comrades to curry favor with leadership, and leadership playing junior members against each other as a means to further consolidate power and obtain reports on other members.

These are the logical outcomes of any organization which put thought primary to being and declare themselves the “one true representative” of a people. Any political project based upon the idealism of race, clan, family name, gender, or other metaphysical identity would be subject to these contradictions. We cannot have an All-African socialist project any more than we can have an All-White or All-Hmong, All-Men, or All-Christian socialist project. They would inevitably collapse under the internal contradictions of what is ultimately a bourgeois ideology.

when we go around insisting “we Africans are all one family”, we put the race contradiction ahead of the class contradiction and engage in idealistic thinking. Like family name, race is a component of the superstructure and emerges from the base. Class must always be primary, including in how we conceive of our political objectives and how we refer to the people we struggle for. There will only be one world communism and the sooner we dispel with this idealism, the sooner we will be able to come together and forge a real and scientific path toward socialism.

the reason for taking up Pan-Africanism is the perceived value of a lost culture and homeland. For colonized people, the re-discovery and development of our language, dress, music and other cultural manifestations is deeply rewarding, and can also be of a revolutionary utility. The rotten bourgeois culture that we have been immersed in must be destroyed, and the more actively we do so, the less susceptible we will be to its various poisons and intoxicants. But we must simultaneously be vigilant and not take a one-sided view of these cultures and practices that we are taking up. 

By training our focus on the African continent and neglecting to wage struggle domestically, we isolate ourselves from the global proletariat and facilitate the fascistic backsliding currently underway in the U.S. In insisting on our unity in isolation and our uniqueness in a global context, we commit fundamental errors of metaphysical thinking that hamper our movement domestically. Simultaneously, we neglect our responsibilities to the international proletariat whom our government continues to slaughter with relatively little effective contest.