MXGM Self-Defence Manual

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Malcolm X Grassroots Movement March 2013
The threat of our resistance is evident in the extent the United States government goes to
suppress it. One glaring example is the prison-complex built by the settler-colonial Garrison
state. The US government has built the most extensive prison-system – with the highest
incarceration rates – the world has ever seen. This system serves two purposes. First, it aims to
contain the resistance of the national liberation movements of Indigenous, New Afrikan,
Xicano, and Puerto Rican people. Repression of the organized resistance of these liberation
movements has resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of political prisoners and prisoners of
war from organizations like the American Indian Movement (AIM), Revolutionary Action
Movement (RAM), Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Black Panther Party (BPP), Provisional
Government of the Republic of New Afrika (PGRNA), MOVE, Armed Forces of National
Liberation (FALN), etc. Second, it aims to warehouse and repress the more unorganized
resistance of oppressed peoples to their economic dispossession and other forms of superexploitation.
This repression takes the form of the extensive criminalization of the
underground economy and various strategies of survival employed therein (including
immigration). Mass incarceration has resulted in the imprisonment, state supervision, or
deportation of nearly 10 million people in 2012 alone! 15
As in the past, with the slave patrols, the Klan raids, the enforcement efforts of the apartheid
police, the disruption and assassinations of COINTELPRO, etc., the US government uses
every means at its disposable to contain and repress us. As we organize our people on a higher
level to defend themselves and remove the settler-government from our internal affairs, we
must be prepared for even greater repression. This is why we must learn from the errors of the
past, particularly those of the COINTELPRO era, and take our time to dig deep into the
organizing of our communities in a systematic fashion.
When many think of self-defense within the Black radical tradition they think of individuals
like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Kathleen Cleaver
and Assata Shakur and paramilitary organizations like the Fruit of Islam, Black Armed
Guards, Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Black
Legionnaires, etc. These types of formations have lost none of their relevance and we must
learn everything they have to teach about their accomplishments and their weaknesses. But
attempting to reproduce them is not where we should start or center our defensive organizing
initiatives.
In our present era romantic and often hyper-masculine notions of self-defense centered on
militaristic images, practices, and traditions can be very problematic. They can sometimes be a
deterrent or a turn-off to large sectors of our people seeking to avoid unwarranted
confrontations with the state. They invite an influx of agent provocateurs into our
organizations and communities, and give the state an easy target and excuse for intensified
repression before we have built the movement we need to defend ourselves. Their oftenundemocratic
practices have historically fostered hierarchy, patriarchy, and heterosexism.
Rather, we must have a broad and dynamic understanding of self-defense that addresses the
material and social needs of our people first and foremost and intentionally incorporates the
positive and negative lessons of our historic legacy of struggle against white supremacy and
genocide. And we must resolutely address the limitations and possibilities of our present era as
determined by the interrelations between time, space, and social conditions (material
conditions and the balance of political forces in particular).
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