A look inside the militant movement that seeks to “burn down the American plantation”
BOOK REVIEW: “BURN DOWN THE AMERICAN PLANTATION, CALL FOR A REVOLUTIONARY ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT”
The Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) is a little-known extremist movement based on a Marxist foundation and philosophy that has violently burst onto our city streets in recent years.
In an 84-page booklet entitled Burn Down the American Plantation: Call for a Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement these self-identified revolutionary anarchists describe their plan to overthrow our constitutional republic.
RAM maintains that the Civil War did not end slavery in the U.S. but rather that slavery continues to be practiced in America today through “mass incarceration” of black people, principally males, and a capitalist system designed to exploit the work that black people have done to build America over the centuries.
In order to burn America down, RAM calls for close collaboration and cooperation between political organizations and militant organizations. RAM proposes building an “underground railroad”, a network of “revolutionaries, social centers, and Antifa groups that are already active can help build greater infrastructure of resistance.”
RAM maintains that “with the civil rights movement there was too much focus on political work and not nearly enough on military components…” (p. 73). In this way they harken back to early division between peaceful Civil Rights icons, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and black power advocates such as Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton who advocated violence.
RAM mentions some immediate objectives: “to abolish the prisons, the ICE facilities, the detention centers and the American plantation as a whole.” To achieve its final goal of taking America down, RAM provides the following long-term vision:
“…abolish the State itself…the nation-state and the capitalist economy it upholds, make continued suppression inevitable…institutes control through institutionalized racism, patriarchy and domination…This violent apparatus is maintained by the entire judicial system…” (p. 74)
In it’s place RAM proposes an autonomous territory organized along collectivist lines, using the Kurdish territory in Northern Syria known as “Rojava” as inspiration. The authors write:
The Rojava Revolution, the anti-state revolution in northern Syria, provides us with a successful example of the strategies of organization and resistance we need to apply in the US today. This revolution is based on anti-state struggle, feminism, multiplicity, and the ending of ethnic oppression. The revolution is rooted in the Kurdish freedom struggle in the Middle East. (pg. 12)
In March of 2019, RAM-NYC issued a communique in support of Italian anarchist Tekoşer Piling, killed during fighting in Syria.
In an “orientation” power point created for the RAM’s “Kuwasi Balagoon Liberation School” –named after a former Black Liberation Army member and anarchist Donald Weems– the authors describe the creation of armed self-defense groups and note “any local who wants training can get it [Through YPJ/YPG or HPC]. The YPG refers to the Kurdish “People’s Defense Units” while the HPC refers to Society Protection Forces (HPC), which act as a kind of armed community policing organization in the Rojava autonomous region.It is not immediately clear whether RAM maintains an ability to move people in and out of Northern Syria to receive such training or whether such a statement is largely aspirational.
The issue of Antifa and other anarchist and left-wing militant foreign fighters in Northern Syria has been a controversial and underexamined issue. Despite open reporting from outlets like Rolling Stone, a Trump Administration Department of Homeland Security investigation into ties between Kurdish militant groups and antifa foreign fighters was widely criticized.
The FBI later arrested self-described “hard-core leftist” Daniel Alan Baker after the Florida resident issued public threats against Trump supporters and Florida law enforcement. Baker, a former U.S. Army soldier, had trained Kurdish YPG fighters abroad and served as armed security during the short-lived Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, Washington during the 2020 summer rioting.
The group’s view of “self-defense” is perhaps best illustrated by its endorsement of the Black Liberation Army, which conducted multiple murders and robberies in late 70s, early 80s including the infamous 1981 Brinks Armed car robbery. The same orientation PowerPoint describes BLA as having “no centralized command structure, but organized as autonomous, decentralized cells” calling it the “most successful guerilla organization in the United States in the 20th century.”
Where RAM differs from BLA suggests some of its own aspirations. RAM notes that BLA failed to establish a successful “above ground” organization, which limited its ability to act politically. RAM seeks to build networks between local armed guerilla or self-defense groups through political “neighborhood councils.” The authors write:
The political paradigm we are working towards is a network of councils and communes without the State. It’s a vision of autonomy that runs through neighborhood-based councils, where decision-making rests at the local level. This political formation reverses hierarchy and centralized power by making the most local unit the most powerful, and regional bodies simply a means for coordination. We propose starting from the nexus of the small, revolutionary groups already active in many cities, towns, and rural areas. (pg. 21)
An examination of RAM’s actual branches suggests that few groups have adopted their platform in full. Beginning in New York City, significant chapters appear to exist in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, with locations in California, Florida, and North Carolina as well.
At one time it would have been easy to dismiss a movement and a book like this, but over the past 4 years a belligerent force on our city streets resulted in the murder of multiple Americans, including law enforcement officers, and waged destruction measured in the billions of dollars.
Additionally, what RAM espouses is worrisomely close to a vision endorsed by far more mainstream left-wing leaders. RAM’s endorsement of the BLA is proudly echoed by the “above ground” leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, who have openly described their support for BLA leader Assata Shakur, and the influence Shakur had on their worldview. And well-known media figures promote Antifa propaganda by comparing it to U.S. World War II veterans.
Furthermore, our bureaucratized counterterrorism apparatus and America’s political leadership have chosen to be willfully blind to this movement, to the point that district attorneys and the Justice Department alike have declined to prosecute members of groups like Antifa and its affiliates.
We can no longer ignore what we are seeing played out on our streets. We must decipher this anarcho-Marxist ideology which has burst onto the scene to ensure that our children and grandchildren are not saddled with a “people’s republic” in the place of a constitutional republic.
