Who am I— a question asked in poor faith nearing as often as the previously articulated “What does victory look like?” It is a question that frequently loses its own aims when being asked. What does a person gain from being asked who they are; what does a person gain from pondering on themself? As communists, as progressives, as the masses of the people, and as subjects of history itself, what does it mean to pontificate on the nature of our own selves as social beings?
If one were to pose this question to one thousand differing people, they would promptly receive one thousand differing answers. All answers shrouded in class and ironically mixed and blended by the various identities on which they are being interrogated.
PART I — THE LIES OF LIBERAL IDEALISM
There is an idealist and metaphysical view of identity that seems to compress the nature of the subjects of history into a narrow prism. The liberal idea is that identities are essential features of the mind and body— that identity is constructed in the womb. The liberal identitarian views himself as composed of intersecting, but essentially disparate parts of the mind that tie around themselves to produce a knot of personhood. This world outlook frames each issue— each “lane” as a separate one wherein those who may “tick” a certain box are the foremost vanguard of identity.
On a more bassist level, this view of identity is the view that there are Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, and that centrally identity is a facet of one’s innate character that ought not be changed or struggled against. The knot of personhood is an unstable collectivity; it is the fragmented merging of various aspects of character. The liberal worldview centers its definition of identity and the identity’s character as a metaphysical quantity. Identities are the margins within which one must operate. The ideas associated with a certain identity or another are centered and the moral character of any identity grouping is absolute and unchangeable. Identitarian experience becomes doctrine, and the conditions of the world are merely perturbations in identity.
I ask to the liberal if he believes that my Blackness inherently oppresses me. Does he believe that my transness inherently confines me. I ask the liberal if my states of identity are but unalienable states of mind. I ask to the liberal if my being is simply a pre-social “essence” that I simply discover and move through rather than actively transform.
Are my identities and ideas the limit of what I am? Do beings with static identities have a true independence? Are they capable of creatively transforming the natural world around them? Are they even conscious at all outside of the unchanging and hog-tied nature of the soul? Is a cup of water incapable of boiling because its present existence is liquid?
PART II — SAY IT LOUD, I’M BLACK & I’M PROUD
To define Blackness— what it means to be Black in America— is a question that has been pondered and pontificated on for centuries. It is a question steeped in as much argument as it has internal contradiction. What is Blackness? The simple answer being:— “Well Blackness is the color of my skin.” But what a lazy and unfaithful answer that is.
“Well Blackness is my family— I’m Black because my family is Black.” The questioned responds, but alas we are not satisfied with such an answer either. I am Black, my immediate family is Black, but they are not the totality of my experience.
Fundamentally, Blackness is contradiction. Blackness is the contradiction between the Portuguese prince and the African tribe. It is the contradiction between Victor Gant and Shanta Scott. It is the contradiction between Huey’s Newton and Long— between myself and my country. Blackness is the contradiction between possessor the dispossessed. Blackness is the new synthesis that is made from those conditions. It is not a loose knot of stereotypes or cultural catechisms, but the logical inevitability of struggle.
Blackness was invented. It was invented five-hundred years ago to steal resources and build an empire. It was invented to overnight, with a single document, materialize a new reserve army of the underclass. Blackness was invented for our labor, for our strength, and for the material reality that our ancestors had materials that their colonizers could utilize to build up their own financial aims.
However, contrary to the notion of Blackness being unilaterally dictated by the conditions of the Portuguese monarchs, Blackness was (and continues to be) transformed through struggle. Blackness was built by the people upon whom it was ascribed. Blackness is Nat Turner; Blackness is Huey Newton and Fred Hampton, Blackness is Malcolm X, and Blackness is the struggle for the abolition of the subjugating conditions that created it.
Black people have struggled and struggled for eons for liberation and it is that struggle through which our culture has emerged. In the Americas, Blackness has languages. Blackness has languages and food and customs and dances and beauty, and they are all the synthesis of that central contradiction between the slave master and the enslaved. Blackness is joy. Blackness is struggle. To obliterate careerism is Blackness, to struggle with oneself is Black, and to criticize and self-criticize is Black.
These truths do not ascribe some sort of metaphysical essence to Blackness for they are all the material result of Black people struggling against the contradiction of their oppression. Black people for so long were compressed into being simple machines of production rather than even being blessed with the indignities of proletarianism, yet they struggled. Black people created cultures and music. They struggled, fought, and killed their masters. Black people have endeavored to “dare to struggle” to the fullest extent of their capacities.
Obviously we cannot make sweeping overgeneralizations and it would be a lie to say that Blackness has not been co-opted (to an extent) by the monopoly capitalist class, but even the co-option of elements of Blackness is the struggle. There are internal contradictions in our nation, but even then Blackness struggles against them. We’ve invented the terms “coon” and “Uncle Tom,” we belittle and deride the anti-Black within our ranks. We struggle with them and isolate their backwards and hostile ideas. We engage in ruthless criticism of their backwards action. Blackness is a nation. It was forged through history and struggle, and maintains a revolutionary and independent stand as a sword with which revolutionaries may behead our oppressors.
So when I ask myself, Who am I? I will respond with “I am Black.” I am the result of a million contradictions all synthesized. I will respond with action that elevates the destiny of my community and mine own. When I ask myself, Who am I? I will respond with the Black power anthem, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”
PART III — ON CREOLISM: THE BODY AS A SYNTHESIS
In the piece, Introduction to the American Nation, we said that the body of the Creole person is revolutionary synthesis in material form. That his body is the emancipation of the colonized. My Louisiana Creole ethnicity is another central facet of the question, Who am I? My Creolism is another condition under which I became a social being.
Louisiana Creoles emerged as another result of interacting and contradicting forces. French and Spanish settlers, indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans intermingling in close connection with each other lead to a generation that is not necessarily one or another but a new thing created. We have a language, a way-of-life, systems of social organization, and as Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi put it, a sense of “belonging and shared destiny.”
The Louisianais people, too, were forged through struggle and colonial processes. Born through the mating of colonizers and colonized, their tongues symbolically cut from their mouths in the era of Americanization. There was resistance. Creolization is another byproduct of this contradiction between colonial and colonized forces. They are a new people.
¿Kèské mo minn kand mo di “Mo Kréyòl”? — What do I mean when I say that I’m Creole?
It means that I, too, contain contradictions in my blood. It means that my circumstances come from all strata of life. It means that all conditions and contradictions that form me create a new thing. It means that I learn from the history of my people and I will not allow my tongue to be cut from my throat.
So when I am asked, Who am I? I will respond, “I am Kréyòl. I am Louisianais.” I will respond that I am human social interaction made manifest. I will respond that I am a synthesis.
PART IV — THE TRANSFEMININE BODY I HAVE MADE
To the liberal, transness and transfemininity may seem borderline superficial— it follows from liberal ideas that sex is part of one’s immutable characteristics and any effort to change that is superficial. The question asked of transfeminine people by liberals is frequently, “Will you look differently?” The obvious medical answer is yes, for the hormonal changes undergone in the medical process of transsexuality is a material change. I do doubt, however, the integrity of the liberal posing this question, but let us respond with analysis.
Under the liberal idea that there is an innate essence in one’s soul that contains a marked sex, it is simple to follow that any transformation of that quality would be tantamount to an obliteration of the self. The question that the liberal poses is not, “Will you look different?” but “Why are you attempting to change the unchangeable?” It is in this reading of the liberal’s ideas that we can identify a new contradiction that is no less material than water or the stars.
There is a contradiction between the role imposed by the structures of society and the self-actualization and consciousness of oneself and one’s circumstances. The Juche idea teaches us that man has an independent, creative, and conscious character that forms out of his social relations. Independence is defined as the ability to elevate one’s social status and shape their destiny; creativity, the ability to transform oneself and the world around them to suit one’s needs, and consciousness, an intellectual awareness of the direct circumstances relating to any transformation.
Present societal and patriarchal structures are material conditions that stifle one’s ability to fully actualize their social character as human beings. The truth of the matter being that during development, people are assigned social roles, presentational styles, and a set of expectations of how they ought to move through the world. The contradiction emerges when it becomes self-evident that deviation, subversion, or transformation of these roles would shape the destiny of the person in question.
One’s consciousness of themself does not necessarily sit cleanly within these roles. As contradictions weigh on society and produce crises and strife, they may do the same within one’s body-mind. The contradiction between the expectations placed on one by their environment and their internal consciousness of themself as social beings in the world necessitates a radical transformation of oneself just as it does in society.
To undergo this transformation is a material process. There is labor in transness. The emotional labor of argumentation and self-validation, and the more material labor of elevating one’s own consciousness of themself and materially and creatively subverting the norms of traditionally gendered society to suit their needs and shape their destiny. Trans people take time to find their style, to build chosen families, and to materially change their bodies. We struggle with our families and our communities and the contradictions between societal structures, familial pressures, and personal consciousness often become antagonistic— wherein only one side of the contradiction may persist. Trans labor is family labor. Trans labor is emotional labor, and trans labor is the labor of resolving contradictions within oneself.
The liberal asked, “Will you look different?” and the most truthful answer is, “I will be different.” Transformation is a creative process wherein the old is reconstituted into the new and the actualized. We do not deny the struggles that our beloved liberals have internally over transformation, for they have convinced themselves that personhood is immutable and unaffected by conditions.
When an ideal-metaphysicist declares that they love someone, they are declaring that they love the static idea of the person that they store in their mind. They are proclaiming that they hold the bound knot of identities that they view as personhood is of great importance to them; however, they cannot perceive that knots are not permanent. The materialist-dialectical understanding is different. The dialectical-materialist declares “love” in that they are willing to struggle and labor with a person for the creation of new things. The dialectical-materialist welcomes transformative change with open arms. He elevates the creative, conscious, and independent character of his beloved.
If I could communicate to the liberal a simple thing, it would be that I am not merely what was assigned to me. I am not merely what others read upon my body. I am a conscious being who is undergoing a struggle. I take part in my own transformation. Transformation of class, transformation of body, and transformation of mind. My identity is one of self-struggle and struggle with the world to build a new transformative character. The synthesis of gendered-contradictions is the trans body.
So when I am asked, Who am I? I will respond that “I am transfeminine.” I will respond that I am the synthesis of contradiction. I will respond that I am a new thing forged from the reconstitution of the old. I will respond that I will look different and I will be different. I will respond that I am a woman and I live in a woman’s body. I will respond that I am conscious of myself, and that I labor for my own transformation. I will respond with my name. “I am Mikaylah-Rosalina Dukes Victorian Framboise”
PART V — THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL
At this point, a number of identities and their various characteristics of contradiction and social-relational development have been identified. We have seen the historical structures of Blackness, the synthetic character of Creolism, and the bodily labor of transfeminity, but we have yet to articulate the ideological and philosophical glue that binds them into a unified personhood.
There is a spectre haunting the subject of history, and all the powers hereto have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: bourgeois capital and national chauvinists, the Zionist and the Christian nationalist, the liberal and the conservative. This spectre haunts the individual body of each historical subject to the same degree to which it haunts the powers of old Europe and the technological bourgeoisie of San Francisco. This is the spectre of communism.
The ideal-metaphysicist— the liberal— is confused by communism. He is perplexed by a seeming rejection of careerism and personal accumulation. For the ideal-metaphysicist, he cannot imagine a united front of identities bound not into a woven knot of disparate figments, but the synthesis of contradictions internal and external operating by the shared principle of shaping their collective destiny. The revolutionary front of communism— the working class, the Black, the Creole, the trans, the marginalized— declare their independence from their identity states into a new personhood. They cease to be the coalescence of independent essential identities and turn the contradictions of the old society inward upon themselves to build a revolutionary personhood— to build the subject of history.
The communist is an interesting person; he is not a disparate constellation, but a new forged from the old. The structures of old society— the liberal ideas and internalized bourgeois thought— obliterated in himself through a creative transformation of himself and his environment. The communist is not a theory, not a practice exclusively. He is a praxis. He is the commitment to practicing revolution in his everyday life, theorizing and systematizing his struggle, and returning to the practice of revolution through reconstructed theory.
As was noted in the article, “Obliterating Careerism,” the communist’s “goals no longer rest in the accumulation of personal wealth or status but in the elevation of the social standing of [his] entire community, class, and nation.”
The communist is not ideal, nor metaphysical. He is becoming. The theory of communism originates not with an idea of liberation, nor with unchanging metaphysical quanta of a revolutionary’s being, but as the result of a central contradiction between the working class and the ruling class. It is the synthesis of a ruling class who produce nothing but have dictatorial power, and a working class— a subject of history— who produce everything and yet cannot dictate or transform their society for their interests.
Fundamentally, the communist— before he seizes any machinery of the systems of the world— must seize the independence, creativity, and consciousness that has been stolen from him as a function of his social relations. The Juche idea teaches us that the masses of the working people are the subject of history— that man is the master of everything and he decides everything. The Juche idea elucidates that human beings build themselves through social relation and social structure. It argues that that is the base from which independence, creativity, and consciousness are built.
The accumulation of capital creates axes of dispossession:— through national oppression, through colonization, through assimilation, and through social expectation. The liberal-metaphysicist sees these axes as fundamentally evil, but the communist sees them as tactics. The communist sees these axes of dispossession as an act of dictatorship that serves to lock the independence of man behind a cash register.
The communist is a scientist; he sees how ideas form the contradiction of the real and material. He evaluates his behavior and the behavior of his society, makes observations, experiments in practice, draws conclusions, and continues the cycle again. The communist reshapes and reforms his practice in accordance with the everchanging nature of society. Fundamentally, the practice of the communist is a scientific method of discovery.
The communist is a social being. He embeds himself in the working class and multinational struggle for liberation. He has friends and comrades and partnerships and community. The communist struggles for success and loves dialectically. He organizes himself into a vanguard that will strike the enemy as a sword and protect the people as a shield under which the old may be transformed into the new.
The ideal-metaphysical view of identity is foreign to the communist. One cannot simply be a knot of disparate identities. He must be a new identity. He must be unequivocally and unapologetically himself. He must work to transform himself, his community, and the nature around him. He cannot remain stuck in old ideas and must be constantly reflective.
The communist works to reshape the production and society. He works to synthesize from contradiction. He works to create new things and breathe materialism into new ideas. The communist loves dialectically in that he struggles and labors to transform the old into the new. He labors to transform natural resource into new material just as he labors to transform liberalism into communism. In that sense, the communist must love himself.
So when I ask myself, Who am I? I will respond that I am a communist. I will respond that I am a laborer. I will respond that I labor with the old to transform it into the new. I will respond that I am not a knot of identity, and I will respond that I dare to struggle, for as Fred Hampton said, “If you dare to struggle, you dare to win, and if you don’t dare to struggle then damn it you don’t deserve to win.”
PART VI — WHO AM I? A MATERIALIST CONCLUSION
Who am I?— a question asked in poor faith nearing as often as the previously articulated “What does victory look like?” It is a question that frequently loses its own aims when being asked. What does a person gain from being asked who they are; what does a person gain from pondering on themself? What one gains is a clarity of themself more picturesque than the May Day sky. What one gains is what they already had.
Who am I?— I am not the doctor, nor the attorney, nor the professor. I am not the liberal knot bound together by tension. I am a new thing. I am the labor of the old transforming into the new. I am not the contradictions themselves but the synthesis of contradictions new and old.
Who am I?— I am a social being with an independent ability to determine my destiny, a creative capacity to transform myself and the world around me, and a conscious knowledge of the contradictions that formed me. I am the subject of history, and the main purpose of all of my practical and cognitional activities is to shape my destiny. It is to elevate my social standing through the elevation of my community. It is to dare to struggle to the fullest extent of my capacities.
Who am I?— I am a being forged in the fires of contradiction and competitive society and hammered on the anvil of ideology. The liberal asks me what identities I have, and I reply that I have all of them and none of them. What is centrally true is that identity is not a noun nor an adjective, it is a verb.
Who am I?— I am myself. I am the synthesis of contradiction. I am the labor of the new being transformed from the old. I am the labor of my body, the ideology of my mind; I am love. I am Black; I am Creole; I am trans; I am a communist, and I am the subject of history. I am the Creolized and contradictory collectivity of the American masses. I am my action and my labor. I am Mikaylah-Rosalina Dukes Victorian Framboise.
