New Maroons (an introduction)
Black Survival and Self-Defense as Revolution Against Racism and Colonialism
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Today, just like yesterday, and the yesterday before that, Black peoples are unfairly being identified and targeted as a threat by multiple populations of people. In response to the increasing intensity of these unfair prejudices, Black peoples have found themselves beginning to understand what it means to be Black in this “civilized” world; as an international population, and as individuals, Black peoples have begun to self-actualize — to cooperate and realize the potential Blackness has — more than ever before.
Black people are understanding what “Black” is, and discovering its purpose to non-Black peoples: exploitation. With or without seeing the implications of such an understanding, Black people understand that there is no reason why we should continue to live in the misery and suffering of poverty, under fear of authority, and within a dependence on those who give not a damn for our well-being, and the exploitation of our parents, parents of parents, children, and friends.
More often than not, Blackness is often found to be the stuff “civilization” thrives upon— for it can be said that the world would not exist the way it is, anywhere, without the labor of African slaves. More accurately, anti-blackness is found to be the primary people-ingredient in upholding this unfair, anti-black, discriminatory world drenched in hierarchy and therefore unfair pain, and suffering. Without anti-blackness, it can then be said that there is no civilization, and no world. And so, Black people are beginning to decide to proactively create a new world — new ways of existing.
By self-actualizing, Black peoples internationally are growing more in tune with their collective and individual reactions to oppressions in wholesome ways ranging from emotion, to understandings of socio-economic reflections of health and mortality, to both material and ontological slights observed in the present and echoed in an always-hidden , always material history of oppression; being Black means belonging to an eternal class of people who are doomed to be indebted to the world for nothing at all, ripped off for nothing at all, bought and sold for nothing at all, dying for nothing at all until now. The invention of Blackness then is finally beginning to be understood as what it was intended to be: an eternal dance with Death and dying, in which those peoples designated Black are in a constant state of dying for the sake of capitalist, propertarian (private property-holding and building), and therefore hierarchical ideals held by their oppressors — a sort of eternally returning Moloch of Black sacrifice to which no Black person has ever consented with full understanding of neither terms, nor conditions.
In self-actualizing, and in bridging the what has been done to the what is being done, Black people have begun visilualizing a future without oppression. We are once again growing from past and present, to future: what is to be done? In presuming a future for Black peoples, we have grown into what is then a state of survival, for there can be no future without surviving.
In surviving, Black people understand that they can no longer be this consistently near Death every day of their lives — whether Death take the form of disease, rape, police brutality, hunger, or any other kind of slight a Black person may observe against themself or another Black person.
In a way, Black peoples’ minds have changed in response to intensified and/or further investigated oppressions once again, in such a way that has allowed us to maroon ourselves from from the present in thought, and therefore action, and therefore material time and place. Maroons eventually find themselves elsewhere. It can therefore be said that the destiny of the Maroons resides Elsewhere. Visionaries become Practitioners under the weight of reality. New Maroons are being born.
Tenets of New Maroons
New Maroon is a method of achieving sustainable autonomy in a world of oppression without consent in response to superstructures and/or substructures of hierarchy.
New Maroons have come to terms with being doomed, and thus act towards liberation with a productive and efficient sense of urgency. One has no personal interests other than liberation and care for one another. New Maroons have no business affairs other than that which benefits The People, no familial attachments, only compeers, no property, no name, or many names, and absolutely no face and/or brand.
New Maroons value secret societies over theater not only to preserve one’s movement against co optation but also for security culture, and after recognizing the uselessness of social capitalism. New Maroons have decidedly stripped themselves of their identities for new ones without surnames.
New Maroon collectives should operate completely clandestinely, as if allergic to cameras and media. New Maroons must operate in small groups of no more than 20, forming confederations with other groups.
New Maroons understand that politics outside of revolution will always lead to a dead end, and sees these avenues of “social justice” as residue of the privileged classes, civilization, and a system of politics that colonizers and slavers have forced upon Black people, sometimes even through Black people.
It must be understood that New Maroon is not an organization, it is a praxis. However, New Maroons may organize in ways they see fit, as long as they follow these tenets. In this way, New Maroons will practice a liberating autonomy and self-determination in what must be a horizontal fashion. New Maroons have the opportunity to not follow these tenets, and thus cease being New Maroons.
New Maroons must above all make common cause with those elements of the masses.
New Maroons seek to weld Black people into one single unconquerable and destructive force, not so that something can arise from the ashes, but so that New Maroons and the liberated can build with the ashes they create — aim, conspiracy, and task.
New Maroons understand that when governance ceases to serve the People and instead exploits the People at every turn, they are entitled to dissolve it and replace it by another by any means necessary. New Maroons also understand that any state is susceptible to corruption and therefore anti-blackness. New Maroons are aware that time and time again, ballot “elections” have failed the People at every turn. New Maroons understand that the People have lost trust in governance, and seek the answer to this breech in the security of their well-being. To hinder the fertility of corruption, New Maroons seek to dissolve states the moment they fail The People. They are an immunity to statism.
New Maroons understand that the currently existing hierarchy of Black/non-Black is more direct and therefore efficient a means of addressing Black autonomy than any other available.
New Maroons understand that in order for the Black/non-Black categorization of hierarchical classes to produce any new way of existing, we must confront the identity forced upon us (ontologically, and socioeconomically) by understanding that they are Black, first (without race reduction); a Black person can not address the oppression of Black people whilst including themselves as an oppressed Black person, without first admitting that they are Black and not color-blind to the unbalanced oppressions Black people face on a global scale — from underdevelopment to non-representation, from tokenhood to poverty and socioeconomically-induced illnesses. By proxy, this also means that an attack on any single Black person is an attack on all Black peoples.
New Maroons understand that self-reliance and self-sufficiency are necessary tenets within the framework of the Black/non-Black dichotomy. These ideals are constituent characteristics of Black survival and self-defense, encompassing the entire range of knowledge of the body and mind required to assist Black peoples in surviving, to be implemented at every stage of life, regardless of identity within the Black population. New Maroons understand that survival also involves knowledge of the Earth, and what it has to offer us as a neutral player in our lives. Thus, survival must involve knowledge of the land, sea, horizon, and sky: what it is made of, what one can make of it, what lives on it, what dies on it, what can it support or destroy, what can its constituents and existences be used for or known for, who lived on it, where those peoples are if they still are at all, and most of all, what it can do for Black survival and autonomy. This begins with seeds: knowing how to grow necessities, and learning about what it takes to protect necessities. New Maroons, then, must expect each other to be working in coalition with one another. Cooperation is a necessity in learning and sharing useful information that will benefit Black survival and self-defense. Co-operation between industries, fields of expertise, learnings, access to information, goods, and services ranging from mental health to agriculture must be readily available to all Black peoples, especially the New Maroons. Not only must this information be readily available, but also constantly practiced in order to develop a cooperative culture of survival and self-defense. It must then go without saying that it is the duty of New Maroons to seek out those who could provide this information for Black survival and self-defense. Each individual New Maroon is expected to maintain thorough knowledge of a skill, whether it be identifying plant life/wildlife, gunsmithing, teaching mindfulness, or soap-making — anythibg useful to survival as a Black person in an anti-black world. If a New Maroon is not able, they ought to be in the company of those who are. At least one skill per New Maroon must be shared and available for all pro-Blacks to learn and/or make use of.
New Maroons understand that there is no end to what a living, or dead, world will demand of you, and therefore it is of utmost importance that one understands what is needed, and what is not. Work will be a necessity until technology deems it less and less so. But care will always be a necessity, regardless — care to not reproduce systems of thievery and exploitation from foreign lands. New Maroons analyze and improve upon tactics and strategies in this manner.
Revolutionary passion dyed in urgency is to be practiced at every moment of the day until it is habit. At all times, and in all places, New Maroons need to understand their needs, be able to communicate them to compeers, and thus be unafraid of conflict, so as to completely unify and create a personable, consensual, and empathic connection between New Maroons as best serves revolution.
New Maroons are not entitled friendship or attachment, nor are these required of them except for those who have proved by their actions that they are dedicated to liberation. The degree of obligation toward compeers is determined by one’s degree of his usefulness and dedication to revolution.
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces. —Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler
It must then be said that New Maroons follow a doctrine of consent and change. To change is to put forth a thought, action, or material existence, and have something, or someone, new or different come out. New Maroons are changelings seeking to free Black people from oppressions both internally (at levels of the individual and by population) and externally. Change is always temporary, and temporality may be temporary as well. New Maroons, as changelings, are then seeking to implement proactive, self-adjusting tactics and strategies to further Black liberation against material and ontological oppressions.
New Maroons understand that change is an exchange, or a conversation, and that they must put into movements for consensual autonomy what they desire out of it, at any cost.
New Maroons define the phrase “at any cost” by understanding that they may not consider an orderly revolt as a means to an end. These almost always fall short of ending the notion of the non-black conditional known as “human rights” that Black people are refused access to. New Maroons seek to end notions of property and the traditional social systems of so-called “civilization” and “morality” that protect non-Black peoples from social death at the expense of Black peoples, globally; these orderly revolts limit themselves to the overthrow of one political form in order to replace it with another, attempting to bring about a “new revolutionary state”. New Maroons reject the notion of nation-states. The only form of revolution beneficial to Black people is one which destroys the entire State apparatus, and civilization itself (which has born all forms of always anti-black oppression) at the root, exterminating all the anti-black traditions, institutions, and classes.
One is not a New Maroon if one has any sympathy for this world.
New Maroons ought to live within society pretending to be as civilized as colonizer-slavers would like them to be seen as to understand The People and what The Land has to offer. Everything the New Maroon knows and about The People and The Land must come from The People and The Land. Everything the New Maroon lives off of must come from The People and The Land.
New Maroons ought compile lists of people and entities to be condemned according to the relative gravity of their violence against Black people, justice being carried out in efficient order. Public outrage should be considered to the extent of propaganda warfare that benefits Black liberation; communiques, report-backs, and the like are important, especially when they create a sense of urgency in the public to pick up the cause of the New Maroon. The senses of outrage and urgency are useful insofar as they incite the masses to to join in the cause for liberation. It is necessary to be guided only by the relative usefulness of these executions for the sake of revolution. And the reaction of the opposition and antagonism will be important — for the larger powers strike to heavily for their own good in reaction, leaving even more destruction and pain than the New Maroon could ever perpetuate… This will be converted into energy for the New Maroon, as the barbaric state of the opposition exposes itself.
New Maroons recognize themselves as victims of colonialism and recent descendants of chattel slaves, thus victim to both Western/Eastern and Global South/North hiearchies. New Maroons know they are the most exemplary revolutionary figures of the Fourth World, because every oppression a person can face is found within the Black community. New Maroons may declare that they are vanguard, where vanguard consists of the most class conscious of a revolution, where Black people belong to a class, and where those Black people can be most conscious of economic, social, and ontological classes. New Maroons then constitute every True Revolution because their sufferings are unique in their comprehensiveness. In doing so, they understand their position in the world as that of an object of labor— a means of production through which the entire world’s culture and productivity at least somewhat hinges upon. In essence, this is ownership until a New Maroon decides they are owned by no person or institution, and until a New Maroon acts upon such recognition.
New Maroons understand that the existing social superstructure in all its manifestations is designed to destroy Black bodies for profit. For New Maroons, ethical thought is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution, for it has been denied Black people long enough.
New Maroons who possess the same revolutionary passion and understanding should use consensual decision-making processes to deliberate all important matters together and come to unanimous conclusions.
When a New Maroon is in danger and the question arises whether one should be saved or not saved, the decision to save a Maroon must be decided through the safety of other Maroons, and the success of restorative action. If a New Maroon is tapped, they ought to be quarantined before being involved in further action.
New Maroons take note of those in high positions who enjoy riches, influence, power, and high positions in society. They must be exploited in every possible way; they must be implicated and embroiled in the affairs of the New Maroons almost obsessively. Their secrets must be exposed. They ought to do most of the propaganda work for New Maroons by exposing themselves. Their power, influence, and connections, their wealth and their energy, will form a treasure in all undertakings. The New Maroon must pretend to collaborate with them, while prying out their secrets until they are completely in the power of the New Maroon. They must be so compromised that there is no way out for them, and then they can be used to create disorder in the opposition.
A recent New Maroon must give proof of their loyalty not by words but through deeds, to be received into a collective only by the reaction of the public in relation to the New Maroons collective’s strategy.
New Maroon collectives may use all its resources and energy toward increasing and intensifying the antagonisms between opposing forces until the patience of The People is exhausted and they are driven to a general uprising in the form of nationwide strikes and beyond.
New Maroons understand that leaders are neither born, nor made. They understand that that no small or exclusive group of persons, regardless of educational background, have the right to sit down together in a room and declare themselves to be Better Than Thou. New Maroons understand that leadership must be decided and accepted by the People based on commitment, dedication and hard work in to the benefit of the People. New Maroons will not be required to know everything better than or be more intelligent than the people. New Maroon does not mean the creation of Masters. Leadership instead should regard itself as the Servants of the People, and will render nonexistent the relationship between master and slave, employer and employee, oppressor and oppressed. In summary: no masters, no slaves, no ownership, and no new implementations of the aformentioned.
New Maroons understand that survival as a Black person is self-defense and self-preservation. New Maroons define self-defense in an anti-black world as the ability to achieve consensual autonomy, without oppressing another Black person, by any means necessary. New Maroons define the phrase any means necessary as the increasing (eg along with technology available and developed) range of tools one can use to achieve a whole Black consensus and autonomy. New Maroons take a holistic approach to this understanding, meaning that all forms of oppression that uphold the Black’s dance with death are constituents of anti-black ideals. This includes substructural oppressions as well — such as colorism, ableism, transmisia, homomisia, misogynoir, and the centering of non-Black perspectives . Black voices ought to be centered seeing that every sort of oppression, unique and not unique, are exemplified within the Black community, making Blackness itself a unique existence.
New Maroons must also understand that all Black people are Black first and foremost. Any form of discrimination against Black people, whether from a Black or non-Black person, is anti-black— whether that person is Afro-Latinx, a Black Native person, or a Black Jewish person. And since anti-Blackness is the form of violence used to install every form of oppression known to modern civilisation, New Maroons understand that all oppressions and their questions must be addressed. In this way, New Maroons seek to destroy anti-black slights both within and without the Black population (ie internally and externally to Black populations, respectively).
New Maroons understand that for former Maroons were not completely liberatory. Many of the former maroons worked with the slaver-colonizer to recapture chattel slaves in exchange for a modocum of self-determination — which barely existed because they remained tied to land and purposefully and systemically underdeveloped. The former maroons failed their future kin, and so we find ourselves in today’s suffering. The New Maroons will instead take the opposite response to internal strife and strike down at and/or hold accountable those Black people who seek to hold on to or otherwise create systems of anti-Black subjugation… NNNot for New Maroons, but for all Black people.
New Maroons question ownership: of people, of ideas, of animals and of existence. New Maroons own no one, and are owned by no one. There is no ownership, only those struggling for their lives, and those preventing others from surviving how they please. New Maroons do not own children, and they do not own women or non-binary peoples. They do not own animals, places, or things, but they do protect, animals, places, and things when they can be used to perpetuate anti-blackness, from perpetuating anti-blackness — for the New Maroon recognizes the non-Humanity of the animal within the self as imposed by Master’s, overseers, and thekr tokens. New Maroons question ownership, and every hiearchy that exists in any way, shape, or form. They question the use of ego (ie egoizing), or lack thereof, in each decision. New Maroons question capital, and its necessity in a new world. They question capitalism as an anti-black institution. They question authority in an anti-black reality. New Maroons know Death intimately, by investigating the stress and fear in their lives for themselves and other Black people, then question the necessity of irs causations as well. New Maroons question centrism’s neutrality and therefore its complicity in anti-blackness. New Maroons question Leftism’s reluctance to consider ontological oppressions, even while some leading scholars say it mustn’t be considered. New Maroons reject the Right in its entirety due to its economically and ontologically hiearchical tendencies. It would be most accurate to say that New Maroons reject the entire playing field.
New Maroons embrace the diversity of everything that does not oppress Black people— the diversity of non-humans, of Black people, as well as the diversity of strategy and tactic to our disposal. Diversity is key to survival on a genetic basis, as well as in methods of survival. Diversity is adaptability — again, paramount to survival.
The New Maroons seek ways to preserve Black culture and history in spaces that are not susceptible to exploitation, where Black culture can not be commodified and misused, bought, perverted, and sold without a fraction of support given to our well-being.
New Maroons recognize intelligence as an ongoing process, forever changing. Intelligence is the ability to think, and to change ones surroundings consciously. New Maroons view intelligence as a gift to be learned, and shared between Black people. Any adaptations intelligent peoples make in a day are the same that unintelligent animals may make over multiple generations via selective breeding or selectice dying. That being said, New Maroons are always anti-genocide, for genocide is anti-black, and anti-diversity within Black “communities”. This also implies that intelligence is something earned to oneself, and required to be shared with Black people who will not harm other Black people. If intelligence is withheld in action or in disregard of those who are not able, then intelligence is being weaponized as an anti-black tool. Intelligence has needs of its own as well. If it is misused or disparaged, it willl foster its own destruction.
New Maroons understand that Black peoples’ ontological and material sufferings are what bring us together.
New Maroons understand that power over others is always a struggle, and that struggles to end all struggles must be enacted in self-defense from every oppression, or else they are no more intelligent than rams butting heads. The New Maroon seeks to end struggling.
New Maroons understand that policy change, reformism, and revisionism are anti-black methods of maintaining the same hiearchy with what is essentially a new haircut. That is not a change of oppression but a change in flavor of oppression. Instead, New Maroons are invested in the development of self-thinking, Black individuals who can work together in consensual coalition for all Black peoples. Government, which is power over Others, is not what New Maroons strive to give legitimacy to through policy change and vote-begging.
An abstraction of the New Maroon objective is to tear down walls that create hierarchy of validity and merit between ideologies that are Eurocentric and/or curated by a non-Black person, and those of which the Black community curate. In doing so, some may refer to New Maroons as a vanguard, but it is up to the New Maroon to decide for themselves.
New Maroons understand that there is no persuading non-Black peoples to consider the full extent to which anti-blackness has created the world as we all know it today. Never be deceived that your oppressor will allow you to beg yourself into the well-being they withhold from you.
New Maroons understand that all complaints against humanity stem from the power that governances bestow unto institutions or individuals, and/or unto itself. Therefore, governances must be made of all people it leads so that all people are in power together, and in equal measure and therefore wholly consensual and autonomous unto itself.
In recognizing this, New Maroons reckon with the irreconcilable blessing-curse of placelessness placed upon us. New Maroons recognize that the Black of any social classification is always more subjugated in relation to any other ontological classification. Therefore, the New Maroon struggle transcends colonial, pre-colonial, and non-colonial borders for the liberation of Black Palestinians, the Black indigenous people of West Papua and the Phillipines, and every other Black peoples that can be known. The New Maroons understands that in taking hold of the center of the pit of subjugation, once can find the seed of liberation for all to be planted in the fertile soil of solutions that will take the shape of the struggle. In other words, if one can find a means of liberation for a peoples embodying the ultimate accumulation of subjugation, all of that which can be found in a Black person in any way, we can find liberation for all.
New Maroons have broken all bonds which tie them to the social order and the civilized world’s laws, ethical reasoning, and customs that benefit white supremacy and capitalism. New Maroons are the enemy of the aforementioned , and if New Maroons continue to live with them it is only to sabotage them quicker.
New Maroons disregard all doctrines if only to leave them for the liberated people of their revolutions. The New Maroon then only knows the science of revolution, and so they will study if not share the applied scientific knowledge of mechanics, physics, chemistry, and especially medicine. More importantly they will study the needs of The People: their character, circumstances, and antagonisms, so as to unify Black people internationally, African or not.
Proceeding as they wish, in step with the due and most likely eternal process of black liberation for consensual autonomy, New Maroons will continue to inspire until all Black people are gone from this earth, and go we must if we ought to survive. Myself, as a New Maroon, will continue to train in self-defense tactics, community building, and survival strategy with Black people I so hope to come into contact with, and I wish all fellow Maroons the best of luck. There is always a wave coming.
