The few times I’ve seen the lives of those I’ve struggled with improve are instances wherein the collective became pertinent to the individual. My entire well-being; mentally, physically and spiritually rests on my involvement and relationships within the collective. I learned very young the “if I got it, you got it” get-down, which keeps us alive and well. I also learned “one fight, all fight” at a certain point too (the hard way, at first), when we were younger and more confused about who the “enemy” was and what we thought they represented. We would often find ourselves at odds with folks just like ourselves, other have-nots or “have-littles”.
This was a reaction to being bogged down, stressed out, and carrying misguided anger. Anger that is to say, that hadn’t been channeled correctly. It hadn’t been conceptualized to us by individuals who were “politically mature”, or even materially mature in most cases. Fathers were often absent- thanks to crime bills, repeat offender laws, drugs or alcohol. Or they just abandoned us because they themselves had been abandoned, I think. In some cases if they’d stuck around, a lot of us may have ended up under even rougher circumstances. So we sought love and guidance from one another and from our mothers. Fortunately for me, my mother gave me adequate love in my very young years. She does today, now that I’m acting right. Being upright.
When we were all in our later teens and had either dropped out of school, already been institutionalized, or were put outta the house for being too troublesome- we gradually piled into another very close friend’s house, into several different houses in a neighborhood together and unknowingly started what I understand today to be a survival-cooperative. Some people refer to these as “street organizations” but I don’t care either way how it’s referred to- so long as the reader/listener/interpreter understands that we were poor kids trying to stay alive together and feel whole, humanized, and loved. We’d often use our “skills” to “come about” surpluses of food, money, jewelry, guns, drugs, cars, and motorcycles. We’d stay alive and fed this way, and keep shelter. Not many of us were privy to being exploited at a job, so we’d take risks at our freedom instead. Usually critics of the “common criminal/career criminal” never take circumstances into account, they usually just think most folks crime because they’re inherently “deviant” (always remember *her* words, “super-predator”).
A few methods of escape from these circumstances I saw from friends of ours was to leave the city, to join america’s armed forces, or some of us would just end up locked away. I still have several friends who’ve been locked up since around that time, since around 2007-2010. I’ve been in and out on installment plans a handful of times. I credit my radicalization to these experiences growing up and at that time was also reading a lot of old Panther literature (Revolutionary Suicide, Soul on Ice, etc.). I realized that Capitalism had to die completely for us to live freely and peacefully. I can remember being a little boy and wondering “why does mama have to go work so much for us to have to little?”. I was a very inquisitive child and eventually revolutionary politics spoke to that question, to my frustrations. These politics gave me words to my feelings, guidance to my frustrations. Discipline to my thoughts and actions as I matured over the years. As this politicization/radicalization grew, the more literature I consumed- in retrospect I was able to see where my way of living in my later teens was communal. Co-operative. We’d often head out East to take from the wealthiest in the city (and sometimes, I hate to say, other working class people in our surrounding communities) to have what we had- and most times we took from them to take care of each other.
Anarcho-communism was born organically from my experiences. There were no leaders or hierarchies and we unknowingly lived by “from each according to ability to each according to necessity”. I’m not a pacifist because the state hasn’t been pacifistic to me or my own, capitalism hasn’t been pacifistic to me or my own. It’s been directly violent to us. It continues to be in a different form for me today, as a tenant in a shitty building owned by a shitty corporation who owns about 80% of the shitty rental properties in the parts of the city I’m now living in. Hiking rent, poor maintenance, outright neglect, and direct aggression and intimidation to tenants. My current project (which I’m dragging my feet on) is helping to start Alabama’s first tenant’s union, with so much help from my lover- who I’ve said is my “left-leg” (Mao said “women hold up half the sky”). AFC, Mechonomist- the members of our collective are largely comprised of pacifists and folks all around the revolutionary political spectrum and some of us are apolitical, so my aversion to pacifism shouldn’t reflect any of their views. Their pacifism helps give me balance, helps me pause and think before I act. Be more tactful, where I may otherwise be likely to swing.
I’m grateful to be writing, grateful to be involved and locked into such a caring community (inside AFC and outside AFC), pleased to be making our first attempt at tenant unionization, grateful to be in the free world, grateful to be a southerner/redneck, enjoying my journey at trying to grow and develop as a southern tattoo artist working outside of the “sailor jerry” traditional style-perspective, deeply impassioned and grateful for my lover, warmly and dearly full of love and eternally indebted in every way for and to my mama (thank you mama for everything you’ve done for me), and happier than hell about my S10 (Luna) and my ‘83 Cutlass Supreme (Uncle Hollis) that I’m not old enough to understand the mechanics of..
Thank y’all,
-B Sure.
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