01/18/2026
REVOLUTIONARY BUILD AND DEFEND SELF-DETERMINISM (R.B.D.S.D.)
“Power is the ability to DEFINE phenomena and make it act in a designed manner.” — Minister Huey P. Newton
Self-determination demands the creation of and control over our own terms in order to define our own reality.
Minister Huey P. Newton was an advocate for new terms for a new reality. In his writing, he warned that when we rely on language inherited from previous eras and previous struggles, we risk conveying to the people that the conditions are the same. When the terms remain the same, the tactics tend to remain the same. Static language produces static strategy, even as reality shifts.
For Minister Huey P. Newton, terminology was not cosmetic. It was strategic. Political language shapes perception, expectation, and action. If the language does not arise from present conditions, then the politics will misalign with reality. New conditions require new concepts. New realities demand frameworks that emanate from the people themselves, not recycled formulas applied out of habit or reverence.
This insight is foundational.
If we are serious about creating self-determined spaces, then the ideology guiding that work must spring from us. It must reflect our material conditions, our assessments, and our responsibilities in the present. Self-determination is not only about building institutions. It is about asserting authorship over meaning, direction, and strategy.
Since roughly 1966 through the early 1970s in the United States, insurrectionary, state-capture revolutionary politics became a dominant framework within Black political life. Influenced by global decolonization struggles and national liberation wars, this approach understood change primarily as the seizure or overthrow of existing power structures. The objective was to capture institutions, redirect the state, and confront power directly in order to control it.
That framework assumed the state was something worth inheriting.
We reject that assumption.
We do not seek to inherit or rehabilitate a rotten state apparatus that was never designed for us and has consistently demonstrated hostility to our existence. We are not trying to capture what has already proven structurally incapable of serving our interests. Our task is different.
We advance REVOLUTIONARY BUILD AND DEFEND SELF-DETERMINATION (R.B.D.S.D.).
REVOLUTIONARY BUILD AND DEFEND SELF-DETERMINATION (R.B.D.S.D.) is not about taking control of an existing system. It is about building independent capacity. Institutions. Infrastructure. Economic systems. Political coherence. Community stability. Power is not seized first. It is constructed first.
This distinction is not academic. It is strategic.
Under insurrectionary, state-capture politics, force is oriented toward taking something from an existing entity in an attempt to co-opt and redirect it. Under REVOLUTIONARY BUILD AND DEFEND SELF-DETERMINATION (R.B.D.S.D.), force, if it appears at all, is defensive. It exists to protect people and to defend what has been built. The objective is not conquest. It is preservation.
The historical record in the United States makes this unmistakably clear.
Many of the most successful examples of Black collective advancement were not revolutionary movements. They were projects of self-determination. They focused on building economic independence, land ownership, education, internal governance, and community stability. And many of them were destroyed precisely because they worked.
The Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, often referred to as Black Wall Street, was a self-sustaining Black business and professional community with schools, churches, hospitals, newspapers, and dense internal economic circulation. In 1921, it was attacked, burned, and dismantled. The threat was not insurrection. The threat was independence.
Rosewood, Florida, was a stable Black town rooted in land ownership and internal cohesion. In 1923, it was attacked and erased. Families were displaced, land was stolen, and the community ceased to exist. This was not a revolt against the state. It was an attempt to live outside dependency.
Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, saw Black political participation and economic presence met with a violent coup. Elected officials were overthrown, Black leadership was driven out, and white supremacy was reinstalled through force. This was not revolution. It was civic self-determination crushed by organized, state-backed violence.
Ocoee, Florida, in 1920, saw Black residents organizing politically and exercising the right to vote driven out through terror and dispossession. Homes were burned. Families were expelled. Property was seized. Again, not insurrection. Autonomy and participation.
Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919, saw Black sharecroppers organizing for fair compensation and basic economic rights met with mass violence designed to annihilate that organizing. The goal was to crush economic self-determination before it could stabilize.
These were not attempts to overthrow the state. They were attempts to build autonomy. They were punished because autonomy itself was understood as a threat.
The lesson is not that self-determination is futile. The lesson is that self-determination without safety and protection is vulnerable.
That is why the framework must be clear and sequential.
Self-determination first. Build something real.
Safety second. Reduce exposure. Increase durability. Protect continuity.
Self-defense in service to both. Disciplined. Contextual. Defensive.
Build where we are.
From West Oakland to West Africa, REVOLUTIONARY BUILD AND DEFEND SELF-DETERMINATION (R.B.D.S.D.) means constructing our own institutions and linking local autonomy to global solidarity without dependency on failing systems. It means stabilizing what we build and defending it when necessary, not provoking confrontation for symbolism, but protecting people, infrastructure, and future capacity.
This requires a disciplined practice of original political thought. Not nostalgia. Not reenactment. But the continual effort to generate perspective rooted in who we are now, where we are now, and what we are actually facing.
We describe this practice as FACILITATING THE FLUX.
FACILITATING THE FLUX is predicated on FACTORING THE FLUX. It means consistently assessing shifting conditions. Power arrangements. Technologies of repression. Economic pressure. Social fragmentation. Narrative warfare. It means refusing fixed doctrine in favor of continual evaluation grounded in material reality.
Out of that practice emerges REVOLUTIONARY BUILD AND DEFEND SELF-DETERMINATION (R.B.D.S.D.).
Build where we are.
Construct what serves us.
Stabilize it.
Defend it.
Figure. Factor. Fix according to the flux.
This is not rhetorical.
This must be material.
This must be disciplined.
This must be a discipline.
