Mocambo's Deep Freedom

• Over the last decade, I have been on a twin journey to deepen my relationship to both cadre commitment and the life of embodiment. This work has taken me on two distinct paths, and those paths over the last year have finally converged into a great new path, which has culminated in Mocambo, a new deep freedom project.

• Being a BOLDer has left an indelible mark on my relationship to Black history and Black life. Through BOLD I became politically and somatically connected to some of the brightest and most skilled revolutionaries this side of the 21st century. BOLD is a marronage of Black leaders and Black revolutionaries. The term “maroonage” is not just a metaphorical reference to our ancestors and their temporary absconsion from the clutches of enslavement. Rather, BOLD is a physical and political marronage of Black people (across worldviews broadly defined as Left) rooted in the domains of transformative organizing, political education & embodied leadership.

• My cadre-level commitment commenced after having been convinced, through theory and struggle, that the great tradition of revolutionary socialism, more so than the Black liberal idealism of my early political life or the reclusive Black anarchic disposition I had adhered to for a few short depressing months in 2013, provided the most comprehensive, meaningful, and useful political theory and practice I have yet to take up as my own. The formal process was both an intellectual delight and politically challenging. Studying both the history of the long transition towards socialism with a specific focus on the communist revolution in China and the Reconstruction Revolution in the US South allowed me to view radical history in a new light.

• Today- both my cadre life and my relationship to and with embodiment have deepened and widened to a level I could not have conceived of when I joined these paths. Through my cadre leadership I have led and refounded what I genuinely consider to be the most skilled, strategically positioned and courageous collection of revolutionaries this side of the 21st century in the United States. I am increasingly inspired and convinced that the work of rebuilding cadre organization not only has helped lead to a significant and consequential forward advance for the movements for liberation here in the US south, I am convinced that the work of refoundation, regroupment and realignment is necessary to the whole project of a revitalized movement for a 3rd Reconstruction in the United States.

• I feel similarly about my BOLD leadership: I consider it a blessing of historic proportions to be able to be a commitment to a powerful and coordinated Black left. BOLDs contributions to revitalizing Black social justice infrastructure played a massive role in the Black-led insurgency from the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the reimposition of Donald Trump in 2025. I am simply proud of being a contribution to this generation of history of Black struggle.

• I feel increasingly clear that converging deeper levels of embodiment with revolutionary cadre organization is a vital need of this moment in the history and future of the US left. We need to converge embodiment praxis and cadre praxis. This is because the last 5 years have revealed with a ruthless clarity the historic lack in both liberation traditions; the social justice infrastructure of somatic and embodiment practice has entered an interregnum period. On the one hand, somatics and embodiment work is becoming more popular in society given the collapse of the social order around us, and on the other hand, organizations across the somatic social justice landscape are either too small and nascent to have deep enough impact, lacking in necessary financial support or are becoming increasingly untethered from their radical origins and visions.

• A similar lack has revealed itself in the socialist movement; only a handful of socialist organizations are taking seriously the ruthless autocratic regime of the New Confederacy and its program to wage war against civil society and the communities of the oppressed and increasingly the world (see Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba). Too many socialist formations are trapped in an inward-oriented navel-gazing one-upmanship that is more obsessed with taking the left position most likely to isolate them from the majority of peoples than it is with taking the strategic and principled line of electoral advance. Too many socialist formations are obsessed with building their political micro-fortresses where criticism is viewed with suspicion and democratic mechanisms of accountability are treated with contempt. And the handful of socialist organizations able to navigate beyond these depressing dilemmas find themselves in need of deeper relationship to each other, in need of a deeper ethic of generosity and in need of a far larger popular base of support than they currently have built.

• One challenge in the wider socialist movement spaces is that a multi-tendency orientation can easily slip into an any-tendency orientation, allowing for the cowardice of right-opportunism or the arrogance of ultra-leftism to reign supreme. And one challenge in the wider somatic movement spaces is the temptation towards either a metaphysical abstractionism that literally ceases to make sense or a semi-Machiavellian orientation to embodiment which aims to calculate and manipulate from somatics what shrewed and short-sighted benefits that it can.

• Mocambo is a deep freedom program for Black cadres. Its purpose is to unleash the deep freedom of each participant, enabling them each to be more capable & courageous leaders of their work and wider life. It is an intervention in the stale socialist culture that predominates too much of socialist organizations by foregrounding the rich array of cultural practices of Black people. And it is an intervention into the politically underdeveloped nature of somatic spaces by making as a condition of ones participation an extraordinarily high level of ideological, strategic and political unity, a unity grounded in the socialist politics. It includes an innovative curriculum called the 9 Paths of Deep Freedom, and combines the best of the Black radical tradition (Black Marxism, Black Feminism, Black Nationalism and Black Propheticism) into something altogether luminous and liberatory.

• Mocambo is an ongoing intervention to test hypotheses around the dilemmas of socialist cadre culture and somatic social justice spaces.

• Mocambo, like BLACKUNBOUND, is a major part of the purpose for my life on this Earth.