Community Movement Builders
Geechee Yaw, National Communications Coordinator
Howdy Y’all,
As the ecological collapse intensifies and Fascism rises, we are grateful that you are part of the growing Redneck Gone Green community! A friendly reminder that in addition to this weekly writing, we also broadcast live every Monday at 3pm pacific, 6pm eastern on the Democracy at Work YouTube channel.
Our next live show will be Monday, June 9th km 3pm pacific, 6pm eastern. Our guest will be Geechee Yaw of Community Movement Builders. You can join the conversation and make live comments on YouTube by clicking here
I encourage you to join us live if possible, which will allow you to make comments on YouTube. Just click here. If not, remember that you can always access the recording (both video and audio) by becoming a subscriber on the Redneck Gone Green Youtube channel by clicking here.
Below my signature is a short essay about Geechee and his work, which serves as a “deep dive” companion piece to the live broadcast.
Onward to the world we deserve,
David Cobb, The Redneck Gone Green
Geechee Yaw serves as NationalCommunications Coordinator for Community Movement Builders. He is a Gullah Pan-Afrikan Ecosocialist, Emancipatory Journalist, Community Organizer, and Researcher. He’s a Cofounder of bARTer & build THINK tank. Geechee’s 24 years as an organizer and journalist began in Charleston, SC and includes work in the US and abroad. He’s worked on environment issues in the Appalachian mountains, helped displaced Afrikans fight against US Imperialism in the La Guajira Peninsula of Colombia, and assisted youth organizers in taking power in west Baltimore. He’s led campaigns on climate change (opposing clean coal rhetoric), police accountability, and grassroots listener-lead radio stations. Geechee has coordinated research proving the ineffectiveness of the capitalist system at the local level in cities like Baltimore, Charlotte, Charleston, SC and Lynchburg VA. Geechee is an author of two books and is soon to publish his 2nd Children’s Book.
Community Movement Builders (CMB) is a member-based collective of black people creating sustainable, self-determining communities through cooperative economic advancement and collective community organizing.
Our Values
Self-Determination
We reject our position as a colonized nation within a nation. We believe that Black people have a right to self-determination; we define this freedom as having the ability to govern our own destiny, control our communities, and create institutions that serve our people.
Sustainability
Black communities can create cooperative economic systems that build shared wealth within communities and simultaneously cultivate an “ecology” rooted in black love; an ecology that sources our community well-being and facilitates educational, agricultural, cultural, political, and judicial institutions to serve the community needs.
Leadership
The ability to lead is within all of us. As leaders we must study the world around us. We must understand that leadership comes from the community and we must work with the people and never abuse or impose our own will.
Humanity
All life has value. We staunchly oppose all practices and ideologies that devalue human life, including racism, capitalism, classism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia. The ability to exist in a world free of oppression is a human right.
Solidarity
We fully recognize that the forces that maintain our oppression are the same forces that oppress other marginalized groups. We stand in solidarity with all oppressed peoples.
Black Love
We believe love is the cultural foundation for collective healing. We believe that we, as a people, must learn to build trust, respect, and appreciation for one another despite a history of oppression that has torn us apart.
LIBERATED ZONES THEORY
Liberated Zones are territories where the masses (the community of people who live in and around a specific area) are in near-complete control over their political and socio-economic destinies because they control the institutions in a specific region, city, town or state. Because liberated zones/territory will exist within larger capitalist economies and hostile state institutions, complete control can’t happen until another later stage of transformation. The control gained exists within a larger strategy of challenging state institutions and capitalism.
Economically, the community will run the market system through various worker-controlled enterprises and cooperatives. This is to ensure that the surplus-value of local communities’ labor is controlled within the liberated zones and not exploited by the outside capitalists. For this reason, that surplus can be distributed to developing the community and addressing human needs instead of capitalist wealth. Thus, the communities will be in charge of generating and sustaining economic wealth from within.
At a further stage in liberated activity, the state governing apparatus will also be under the control of the people (current institutions or new ones). That can be done through either revolutionary political parties that truly represent the people’s interest, or through the consistent political struggle of the masses. In any case, the state can be used to support cooperative economic activities and the creation of new economies to deter reactionary forces from reentering the liberated zone.
The people within the zones will control their local resources such as land, housing, and labor and will be the decision-makers on how these social elements will be maneuvered. Ideologically from our perspective as a Black self-determining organization, the masses will see themselves as a part of a larger pan-African struggle and therefore, embrace the unity and resistance struggles of African people at home and abroad.