The Five Core Guiding Principles of Nobody Owns Land

We are a Revolutionary Communist publication that seeks to uplift the voices and conversations of racialized, Queer workers everywhere, but particularly in our local area of work: Louisville, KY. To that end, we set out these guiding principles in order to move forward with a well-defined internal collective vision and a clear statement of intent to the masses:

1. The core interest of Nobody Owns Land is that of the working class. This means that though we are invested in the interests of all racialized, Queer folks, we are not here to publish and promote the interests of racialized and Queer misleaders within the bourgeoisie. In Louisville and the US more generally, racialized and Queer workers have no real outlet that is genuinely theirs to promote their interests. Mainstream news, academic outlets, and social media are wholly owned by the bourgeois class and can only ever truly act towards those interests, the token inclusion of racialized and Queer folks serving primarily as a smokescreen. This creates a reality of apartheid in our artistic media, academia, and news where racialized and Queer workers’ voices are systematically erased in and sectioned-off from the mainstream, and what little we have left is forced to cater to ruling class narratives and interests to survive.

Nobody Owns Land alone cannot change this; we believe that within capitalism, a system which is premised on the private ownership of production and land, it’s impossible to change without a working class revolution. We are also uninterested in throwing ourselves against the same stone wall many others have, trying to uproot mainstream media by creating a “separate but equal” equivalent. Instead, we believe our time is better served by uplifting the experiences, ideas, and creativity of racialized and Queer workers that have been generated through our shared struggle, and primarily distributing our publication through physical distribution by guerilla printers. By doing this, by fostering a healthy in-person environment of discussion, criticism/self-criticism, and creative expression, we hope to empower racialized, Queer folks to take an active role in revolutionary struggle and generate a new wave of revolutionary theory and practice following in the footsteps of the revolutionaries of Stonewall, the Black Power Movement, and worldwide Revolutionary Communist revolutions and uprisings of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

• “worker” in this document is a diverse grouping of classes defined as those whose income is primarily derived from selling their own labor for a wage, owning no productive forces or productive land. This includes everyone from factory workers to coffee shop baristas to computer programmers, and is in opposition to…

• “bourgeoisie”, which is defined here as those whose income (and by extension power) is primarily derived from their ownership of productive forces or is irrevocably tied to maintaining one’s right to private ownership of production and land. This includes but is not limited to landlords, “investors”, career politicians, corporate leadership, etc.

• “racialized” refers to Black, Indigenous, Chicano, Asian, etc. folks. People who have had the white supremacist and pseudoscientific concept of “race” imposed on them for centuries, that concept then being used as a catch-all excuse for European settlers and imperialists to murder and steal from anyone they arbitrarily deemed “of a lesser race” or “non-white”.

2. Uplifting the interests of racialized and Queer people does not divide the working class. Quite the opposite in fact! It’s true that the class contradiction is the principal one, but contrary to TERF and white chauvinist claims, there is no coherent view of the working class that doesn’t center racialized and Queer people and no working class liberation that doesn’t directly tackle Queer and racial issues. What is so often forgotten is that Queer and racial issues don’t happen in some vacuum devoid of class struggle. These issues emerge from the class struggle organically. racialized and Queer workers face derision, manipulation, tokenization, and violence of every type in addition to and in tandem with the exploitation and oppression that every worker of the world faces. 

It is our analysis that these sites of special oppression and exploitation necessitate a proactive approach, rather than reaction or dismissal, towards locating and uplifting revolutionary working class voices in these communities. The working class is a heterogenous grouping, meaning that it’s internally extremely diverse. It’s not enough to simply “keep our eyes and ears open” for talent or genius, and it’s certainly not enough to tell racialized and Queer people to “fight for socialism” and assume that fight will naturally uphold their interests. Struggle around what those interests even are has to happen now, and it has to happen in explicitly communist spaces. This is how a revolutionary understanding of our struggle will be produced and refined.

3. To truly uplift the interests of the working class, we must remain grounded with the working class. As an organization by and for the working class, our editorial committee composed entirely of racialized and Queer workers, the relationship of Nobody Owns Land with the workers it seeks to uplift works both ways. Nobody Owns Land upholds Walter Rodney’s conception of the “guerilla intellectual”, which means bridging the false dichotomy between the revolutionary and intellectual that has been produced by the bourgeois domination of society, challenging the legitimacy of bourgeois perspectives/narratives, and decommodifying knowledge by making it accessible to all workers and function in service to working class revolution. 

Along with this, we uphold the method of “grounding” synthesized within the Rastafari movement and practiced by Rodney. This means that we have to go out into our working class communities and genuinely connect with folks and their struggles, exchanging ideas and analyses, neither side of the conversation being either a student or teacher. Nobody is truly “apolitical” or “non-ideological”, but on the flip side no worker is born a revolutionary. It is only through the practice of grounding alongside and as part of revolutionary organizing that we can refine our ideology into good sense and revolutionary consciousness, producing a revolutionary working class that puts its politics in command of the movement.

• Placing “politics in command” means to construct our revolutionary practice in a way that predicts the conflicts of interest we’ll face in the class struggle. We know that, as workers, our interests fundamentally clash with the capitalists, and we have to adjust our organizing in recognition of that. “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” We don’t expect landlords to join tenant’s unions, or CEOs to lead genuinely Revolutionary Communist parties. Likewise we understand that transphobia is a tool of the capitalists, and therefore rooting it out of working class spaces is a worthwhile endeavor as part of building the revolutionary movement.

4. A revolutionary transformation away from capitalism also requires a revolutionary transformation of our society’s thinking. We believe that for capitalism to end, and be replaced with socialism which progresses further into communism, a cultural revolution is also required. We operate off of the understanding that there is a two-way relationship between the base of society (the mode of production, capitalism) and the superstructure (the ideologies produced by capitalist society: transphobia, racism, patriarchy, etc.). The base supports the superstructure, which reinforces the base. It creates a constant loop that can only produce more oppression.

This loop must be interrupted and destroyed. Therefore, it’s not possible to overthrow the capitalist order and replace it with socialism if we allow ourselves to cling to backward and bourgeois ways of thinking. Racism, sexism, transphobia, individualism, etc. cannot be ended within capitalism, but that doesn’t mean we push back concerns about the superstructure “’til after the revolution”. The direct confrontation of capitalist ideas and narratives must happen as part of building the revolutionary movement, setting the conditions for their ultimate destruction as part of the revolution itself.

5. We should lean-in to criticism, rather than avoid it. Though we believe that racialized and Queer workers, sectioned-off and specially oppressed within the working class, are especially capable of forming the nucleus of a revolutionary working class movement, none of us are beyond reproach. We have all developed within a capitalist-imperialist world, and none of us can fully escape the ideological influences of such a context. As revolutionary communists we must pursue, as Marx puts it, a “ruthless criticism of all that exists”. It should be constructive and delivered in good faith, but we cannot be afraid to present our analyses, even when it conflicts with or criticizes that of another racialized, Queer person. Criticism with the intent to protect and educate our comrades is how we root out backwards and unproductive thinking within the working class.

Criticism isn’t a punishment. Principled criticism is an opportunity for growth on all sides. The criticized grow through the experience of either defending their position or changing it based on new information. The critic grows by exercising their skills in not only refining the content of their criticism, but in managing the form of the criticism to ensure that their perspective is understood. And lastly, the audience grows by witnessing the 2-line struggle within the movement in real time and forming their own analysis based on the presentations of both sides. This struggle is how we generate real unity. Real unity is not declared like the Democrats pretend to do, unity is created when we aren’t afraid to challenge, struggle, clarify, and synthesize new roads amongst ourselves. Of course, there may come times where a dividing line is drawn between ourselves and others. But so long as we maintain a principled stance against backwards and capitalist thinking, is it really so bad that they draw a line between themselves and us?

To be clear, this doesn’t mean we should engage with any and all sides of an issue. Some topics, such as the validity of trans people, the personhood of Black and Indigenous people, and more are settled and are not up for “debate” in this publication. 

• “2-line struggle” is a natural process that happens in any movement or organization, ours being no exception. Disagreements on line/direction will naturally occur, and in this struggle competing bourgeois and working class lines will form. These situations of line struggle can either be suppressed and hidden behind closed-off discussions, generating frustration and confusion among comrades, or they can be embraced and developed along principled lines, fostering a rich terrain bristling with new ideas to challenge dogmatic and eclectic thought alike. This process reinforces our understanding of our successes and allows us to weed out our failures in an organic and democratic way.

Following these principles we at Nobody Owns Land hope to foster revolutionary growth within working class racialized and Queer communities, raising collective consciousness and forging an ironclad revolutionary unity among workers more generally. We invite all working class racialized, Queer folks to submit their analyses of current events, philosophical interventions, and artistic contributions to this publication so we can lift ourselves together to a new stage of revolutionary consciousness!

Educate yourself, educate others, and always expand what is possible.

We are revolutionary!