Also, someone asked me this morning what I thought about "allyship"...

Short answer: you can’t trust allies who don’t accept the leadership of the oppressed...

Allyship is a rebranding of what was popular in the late 90’s known as “advocacy”. What it means is that people in positions of power across dimensions of class, nation, gender, and ability use that power to supposedly promote the interests of the oppressed...

Allyship is wrapped up with liberal discourse concepts like “social justice”, and “anti-racism”. The reason these concepts are part of the liberal discourse...

Is that they are intended to cover and distract from the causes of social injustice and of racism which are capitalism and national oppression. The liberalism of allyship spreads to discussions of gender and justice for LGBT persons...

Accepting the liberal model, allies are supposed to use their platforms in status quo institutions to boost and promote the slogans, causes, projects, and organizations of oppressed people...

This is nice but it means allyship is limited by the constraints of the status quo and is thus a safe way for oppressors to put on a show acceptable to the power holding classes while the oppressed spin their wheels in place...

Allies in the liberal model cannot -and do not want to- do more than what is acceptable to the oppressor groups they belong to. The revolutionary alternative for aspiring allies is to accept the leadership of the oppressed and hand over the power...

This is what it means to commit class, national, gender, and ability suicide and it is a complex, social, sometimes personal, possibly long process involving self-criticism, struggle, study,...

And acceptance of the basic premises of the revolutionary left shown in practice that enables trust and acceptance to the side of the oppressed...

There is also some discussion about “decolonizing” the work of allies -this means that aspiring allies for the most part have a colonial mindset that they’ve inherited from their history and material reality as colonists or settler-colonists...

And that their suggestions and initiatives supposedly helping the oppressed are extensions of the “civilizing” missions of the varieties of colonialism. This is all true....

But there can be no decolonization without transfer of power. From the standpoint of the revolutionary left, there is no decolonization without national liberation...

Common cause and life in common with colonists can only come after colonists are stripped of their power and the oppressed build socialism to the benefit of all...

There is no shortcut to it while the oppressors hold onto the power -the land, the institutions, and production relations. The way to decolonize allyship for supposed allies to commit class, national, gender, and ability suicide as described above...

And at the institutional level it comes in the form of either joining a revolutionary led mass-organization or joining the united front.

Almost forgot, what I told this person in the end is: think about it. There's already a ton of allies -from "woke" businesses to settler colonist philosophy bloggers "trying to do their part" to careerist academics peddling wokeness and what do we have?...

We have the status quo upholding liberalism and the petite bourgeoisie leaning towards fascism. Let the liberals have their allies. We're not asking for the scraps. We're taking it all.