Group Personality: Internal Contradictions of the Conscious Participants
Since we believe that we are about social “change” or development, can we answer the question of “why have our structures fallen ?” I am trying to describe a personality of the sector of our population that I am called "conscious participants." “Anytime that you make an analysis of an oppressed people in any aspect of their life, and you leave out the enemy, you will never come to a correct analysis. On the contrary, you will come to an incorrect analysis” taught Nana Kwame Ture. While this may be true, how can we use alternative tools of analysis to engage ideas of contradictions with our movement more typically around the age, gender, religion and ethnocentric dynamics that play key parts in explaining the behavior and of our structures, arriving at an idea of the "personality" of this sector. “Group personality” refers to the collective behavioral tendencies and characteristics that emerge from the interactions and dynamics within a group. Radical social change activism has a complex personality that I, as an organizer, contribute to and at the same time interact with. These last few years, as I have come to question and uncover what “movement” is through experience, I have observed that it includes group tendencies towards collective narcissism, various kinds of chauvinism, delusions of grandeur, kwk. We have popular aphorisms like “we will win” that in my opinion do more harm than good. I'm intending for this critique to be sincere, anecdotal in service of being authentic, and open-ended. Again, I have not come to any immovable conclusions. Feel free to disagree, challenge or improve on these ideas. A part of the parsing through ideas here is compartmentalizing the internal forces, or the forces that act within our movement, arising from interactions between its parts, rather than the externalities, as well as how these internal forces inform the behavior of the group and its interaction with other groups that make up the general population.
Much of my critique comes from participating in what I consider to be movement activity and movement apparati. As I am only 25 years old, most of the movement apparati that I have engaged with has been inherited from previous generations, and thus dominated by their ideas and dispositions. I have watched as my generation accepts world-concepts, ideas, definitions, and behavioral tendencies without so much as a word of critique. The previous generations exploit the naivety and zeal of the youth. It is upon this foundation that I issue my main appeal inspired by a line written by Harold Cruse in his “Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,”
"This new young generation must first clear the way to cultural revolution by a critical assault on the methods and Ideology of the old-guard Negro intellectual elite. The failures and ideological shortcomings of this group have meant that no new directions, or insights have been imparted to the Negro masses ... The old guard gives no leadership, clarifies nothing and confuses everything."
A part of my research of black movement history has been sitting in the living rooms of movement notables of the previous generation. This began with my own grandmother who was involved in activity in Harlem in the 70s and 80. It continued with sitting at the dinner tables, speaking on the phone or exchanging writing with other notables. I am blessed to have Harlem running through my veins for four generations and to still live there where former Black Panthers walk the streets almost expecting questions from young movement hopefuls. Radical social change activity is not a hobby for me. It is not some youthful ambition, or some passing fancy. It is a family tradition. Being so, I am interested in our triumphs and failures. If I'm being honest, I am more interested in the failures. That being said, and as you might have been able to infer, I am incredibly concerned about the methods that we are using. It does not seem to me, and to the movement notables, and to other regular folks, that we are learning from the mistakes of the past. It almost seems like we don't believe we have made any mistakes. It seems like we believe everything that went wrong in previous generations can be attributed to state repression. I would have accepted this idea as well if I had not taken the time to speak to those who remain alive from those times. I often explain it as akin to a man walking into a room that smells like cat piss. The folks that have been in the room for some time cannot smell it. When you ask them about it some have no clue what you are talking about. Others who walked into the room with you smell the piss. Some who have been there for some time still smell it, but their motivation to change it is outweighed by their expectations of the status quo. I have spoken to multiple movement personnel from different structures that will criticize the way things are done, and express discontent, but are ill-motivated to find a way to change it. This is why I charge us with the group characteristic of conformity.
For five years I participated in an international structure. Its primary strategy was coalition building. Like many of our structures, the rationale and outline was solid and although I did not agree, in theory, with all of the parts of the plan I still participated in earnest because at the time of my joining I understood the importance of gaining experience. I had recently become frustrated with what I perceived to be the sectarian personality of grassroots organizing in New York City. The primary strategy of coalition building and a focus on the African continent fell in line with my understanding of what should be done at the time. I still, in terms, feel this way. However, I eventually came to realize that the structure was sick. Sick from the pandemic of the lack of innovation concerning how we build and develop grassroots structures. Initially, I along with other young adults resolved to tend to the sickness throughout the structure through reasoning that abandoning ship was incorrect for two major reasons: 1) the sickness that affects this structure affects other structures and 2) this sickness was a great opportunity to practice systems engineering.
Our first step was descriptive. We wanted to start with identifying trends and relationships that could tell a story about what is happening if properly documented. We took note of how a coordinating committee completely fell apart when in 2022 the 81 year coordinator abruptly transitioned and the developing cadre had not been trained to handle such an abrupt and emotional change. We documented the ineptitude of the youth coordinator of the international preparatory committee who for 5 years served in that position without producing a single piece of meaningful policy. We also asked the question "what does this say about the structure overall if an officer is allowed to operate with such impunity?” We also observed a high turnover rate. People seemed to come and go as they pleased. The second symptom were its dynamics around leadership, its appointment, removal and development. I also noticed that people would complain behind the scenes but were reluctant to bring things to the fore during meetings. I still don't understand why people do this.
Our second move was diagnostic. We recognized the structure was not performing and we sought to understand why. We came to identify three major factors: lack of training, leadership dynamics, and over representation of males over 50 and the interaction of this group with other age-gender sets internally. I also suspect that despite being pan-Africanist in orientation, we had not fully been able to communicate beyond the particularity of our brand of Africanism (ethnicity). It would seem here, interestingly, that our pan-Africanism backfired. After identifying some of the factors our next challenge was to understand how they interacted in order to give birth to the structures behavior. The first symptom of the infection was the high turnover rate of participants. Leadership was appointed by higher leadership and disappointed by higher leadership. It was not a directly democratic process. Ella Baker advised structures that get too big run the risk of becoming undemocratic.
Anyone could become a part of the leadership without being really tested. All one need be is favored by an official in the cabal of power and whaaam … you're in leadership. There was no apparatus or process for the development of “leadership” beyond a mandatory training by the international secretariat. This training was highly ideological and paid zero attention to behavioral factors. The third symptom was the disproportionate population demographics where black men 50 and over made up the majority of the population within this particular structure. refused to spend time prioritizing intergenerational transmission of skills and wisdom. This appeared to me to be the strangest of all the symptoms. I am still trying to understand if that rough statistic is indicative of movement activity in general. At least 3 major deaths in the leadership on various levels of operation, one of whom was the former Malian Minister of Education Adama Samassekou who served as the President of the structure's international body, and another being the head of a regional research and communications department, the structure refused to bring itself to prioritize intergenerational transmission of skills and wisdom. This is more comprehensive than “ceremonially” placing some young people in some positions and giving them titles.
Our third step was prescriptive. For two years a contingent of young adults from five cities in the North American region develop praxis for generating ideas to analyze the structure and deduce policy, with insight from Operatives within the structure, former operatives, organizers from other structures, and community stakeholders that would mitigate weaknesses through focus groups, surveys and socratic discussion. This process was a bipartisan effort between young adults and the older bureaucracy. Most of the support of the older group came from the mamas. The older men were a lot less cooperative. There was some support from notable elder babas but they were not necessarily commissioned Operatives of the structure. Chief among our recommendations was an emphasis on a course of action that prioritized internal development centered primarily on strengthening the apparatus for “training” – even expanding training past the ideological, over any projections of influence. We also emphasized a “quality over quantity” approach which stemmed from trying to reconfigure where the value of “membership” was in our axiology.
Our fourth and final step was implementary. After the youth contingent came back to the wider body with the policy proposal called the Banneker City Resolution of 2024 it was time for the ratification process whereby a council of elders reviewed and discussed the proposal with the option of adding addendum. This hearing took 3 months. Finally, after intense but amicable negotiations, we came to compromise about the policy proposal and began a change management process to money allocation and operations on the regional level and protest statements sent to the international body lobbying for specific changes and mbongi (plural). Everything was looking good. I judged the process as evidence of the structure's mutability, and thus, its viability. That is, until aggregations of authority, personality politics, and interest groups showed us that the problems we identified stemmed from a cause that was past the engineering of the structure and extended to the development of the people who were engineering. What you write down on paper and what you have the ability (moral, personality, affective) to implement are two different things.
Many Marxist-Leninist oriented structures, or those impacted by Leninist thought around social change (which account for a large number of structures that I have come in contact with) refer to Lenin’s “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social Democrats” which lays out Lenin’s basic idea about the dynamic of the “masses” and a particular group of conscious participants in social change activity in 1890s Russia called social democrats. Lenin accuses the Russian social democrats of “bowing to spontaneity” and summarizes the accusation in that they were “failing to understand that the spontaneity of the masses demands a high degree of consciousness from us Social Democrats.” “The greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses” Lenin summarizes “the more rapid … the demand for greater consciousness in the theoretical, political and organizational work of Social-Democracy.” In other words, the conscious participants should be prepared to harness the direct spontaneity of the unconscious revolutionary masses. This implies an affective ability as well as technical ability. Too often, what I have observed is that we organizers, while exceeding in the motivation to help African people, lack the affective and technical ability to do so, and the structures typically concerned with our ideological development, do not invest time and money in the former areas.
And so we fall back on cliches and aphorisms that can hardly be called strategies, like “Agitate, educate, organize.” The New York City organizer in their late teens, mid 20s or early 30s, inundated with the previous generation's ideas of social change, points out that “revolutionaries,” or those that believe themselves to be, must be concerned with the “masses.” We sing this, the previous generation singing the chorus, until by our late 30s we see that the song has not lulled the savage beast and our motivation to help African people is outweighed by our motivation to pay our rent. Disaffected from the previous generation and envious, almost loathsome of the up and coming generation, we settle into our role within the whole mess as part-time, event going, black fist in the air waving, zoom meeting attending organizers.
The structures within our movement operate on the premise that they need to be connected to the general population, but I think the question needs to be raised: are we more capable of “leading” the “masses” than they are themselves. I mean, how well are we trained as a social group ? My time as an educator in Brooklyn, interacting with black families year round says that it might occur to us that the “masses” are more organized and less spontaneous than we are. They are organized into tenant associations, work unions, parent associations, men’s circles, women’s support groups, churches, mosques, shrine houses, student unions and families. I just spoke with the grandmother of a student of mine who told me about her family reunion that took place last year and that was attended by over 450 members. This is an organization !
Let's interpret the George Floyd and Covid Riots ? The riots of 2020 were the first time that, according to grandmother “black folks rioted and ain't burn down our own shit.” I can remember the chaos. That was some “spontaneity of the masses” for yo’ ass. Folks robbing USPS trucks and burning Target. The city was placed on its first curfew since the Harlem Riot of 1943. I can remember my father texting me to “stay inside.” I can remember a friend named Ryan calling me and saying that all the things I said during highschool were right. In highschool Ryan had a white girlfriend, and a white wrestling coach. I would enjoy rattling him by talking aloud about crackers and slavery. He always became squeamish and I absolutely loved it. “I thought the things you would say about white people were crazy,” he said to me one night during the protests. He went on to describe the split between him and his white wrestling coach over discussions involving George Floyd in which he came to identify his coach as making excuses for the officers who held an armored knee on the brother’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, slowly crushing the life out of him. That summer was the closest thing to the “spontaneous action of the masses” that I have ever witnessed. I wonder how the “revolutionary organizations” that claim to be about “the masses” (still not clear on what that means) responded to these events. How prepared were these structures to capitalize on that energy ? Did we put our “theory into practice ?”
I take factionalism as a given inside a political whole, but for folks as advanced as we are in ideology, our ability to coordinate differences should be at a greater level. During an interview of a notable theorist I asked on behalf of other young organizers what I could do to prepare myself to be a tool for the liberation of African people. “Join our party,” was his response, in a matter-of-fact tone. Needless to say this was underwhelming.
Tendencies towards collective narcissism run deep. They show up in the presumptions of the Conscious Participants of our idea of our positionality and relationship to “the masses,” giving birth to our ideas of “political education.” This is why speakers and demagoguery abound, and training and incubation are a rarity. Just as the teenager who returns home from college begins to pick and prod at his country-bumpkin parents and siblings, pointing out the dangers of “pork chops,” maintaining that all they have to do is “save” money to better their situation, and accusing the family of “selling out,” similarly is our chauvinistic meaning of “political education.” What we mean is “come, let me tell you what is right.” It supposes that we are somehow in position to “educate” our target audience when in reality it is the opposite. We act as if we have been positively educated, socialized and trained because we hold half baked ideas and spout terminology that I have rarely seen people, young and old, able to clearly explain. We are not more trained to organize the population than the population we want to organize. The overtly political structures who supposedly “serve the people” are slow to analyze the contradictions present within their own structures, and how these contradictions inhibit their ability to coordinate themselves, much less the general population. In fact, my working in the schools of New York City, and playing basketball in the parks tells me that the “street gangs” are better prepared than we are. They have a better connection with the youth than we do. If you go to a political event in NYC you will rarely see anyone from, the 18-29 age-set.
Such a disposition lends itself to a schizophrenic tendency. A break with reality. One of the greatest contradictions of the structures is their approach to what has been termed “political education.” This process, which is not reviewed and developed by trained pedagogues, represents more of an indoctrination process, which at times is necessary. More than often, “political education” is a process where a group tries to expose the individual to the ideas and assumptions that undergird the structure in an attempt to bring the individual into the group, thereby strengthening the group’s membership, as opposed to sessions for intense, prolonged, socratic (ma’atic) ideological struggle where ideas are cross examined and made to withstand careful, and slow inspection. The idea of “membership” is also something needing to be clarified. The vast array of groups ultimately are competing to bring as many people into their ranks which somehow indicates their idea of being “vanguard-ship.” Vanguardship being another idea that needs close examination.
Some people choose to view the story of Nana Chairman Fred Hampton as some kind of heroic legend where a Heru-like figure comes and saves the day, only to be crushed by the Empire and its reactionaries. I see the story in a different way. I see that it casts bad omens on a movement that is so quick to expose and allow its young warriors to be prematurely exposed to the enemy. Overtaken before he even began. A metaphor for our movement in general.
"Black Power" is what we scream
As we dream in a paranoid state
And our fate is a lifetime of hate
Tupac Shakur
