About NAJMM

Means and bearings for thinking, knowing, and moving “straight ahead.”

Purpose

NAJMM is a public practice of study, research, writing, and ideological struggle through which I am trying to better understand myself, the world I am already a part of, and the historically constituted network of relations through which I encounter, experience, and participate in changing it. I begin from my position as a New Afrikan, as part of a nation whose historical condition poses basic problems of land, people, and liberation, and as a member of particular families, communities, organizations, and social formations that connect me to wider processes beyond my immediate view.

This means beginning from somewhere without mistaking that position for sufficient knowledge.

“Lately, I have taken an interest in words like ‘here.’ Here was a chapel, for instance. Here is a footprint filling with rain. Here might be enough. Could not the same be said of elsewhere? Yes, I suppose. But I know precious little of elsewhere.”

Srikanth Reddy, Facts for Visitors, 58

I am trying to understand the particular junctions at which I find myself: points where different relations, histories, forces, contradictions, and practices meet and act upon one another. Within them, I want to better understand the means available to me and to us for reading, thinking, knowing, communicating, and acting, and the meridians by which we establish our bearings: the objectives, commitments, accumulated knowledge, and historically posed problems by which we judge direction. I also want to understand how the contradictions we encounter and act upon from particular positions are connected to transformations extending beyond what we can immediately see or direct.

We do not adequately understand how our own activity participates in changing this world, let alone all the ways it changes independently of human action. Yet we must act within it under conditions we have only partially grasped. We act upon a world already being acted upon by others, shaped by histories we did not choose, and changed by processes that do not wait for our understanding or permission. What we do from one position enters into relations with activity elsewhere and with forces beyond our direction or present understanding. We therefore cannot assume in advance that we know either all the forces operating at a given junction or all the effects our own intervention will produce.

The same is true of myself. Having already lived through a number of stages of personal and intellectual development, I have no reason to imagine that I have arrived at a final form. I will continue to change whether or not I intervene consciously in that process. NAJMM is, in part, an intervention into that inevitable development: an attempt to place myself under forms of study, practice, criticism, responsibility, and reflection that may help move my development in directions more useful to myself, my family, my communities, and my nation.

Beginning with a speech disfluency that required treatment by a speech-language pathologist and that I have only partially overcome, I have long found myself struggling to communicate, to understand and be understood, and to link knowledge to different forms of practice. Whatever ability I have developed in these areas has come through limited successes and failures in trying to know, communicate what I know, and act upon it. Difficulty communicating has repeatedly forced me to ask whether I understood something as well as I thought I did. Practice has exposed weaknesses that remained invisible in study. Failed attempts to act have sent me back to questions I thought were settled, while encounters with other people have exposed assumptions I did not know I was making.

But the struggle to communicate cannot be reduced to an individual difficulty. It also reflects the state of our collective command of the means through which thought and experience become communicable in the first place. Language is one of those means, but so are literacy, habits of reading and listening, capacities for sustained discourse, and our ability to recognize, interpret, and give form to emotions that may be present before we know how to name them. The prevailing development of these capacities bears heavily on what can be thought together, what can be explained or contested, and how far disagreement can proceed before communication itself begins to break down. My own difficulties therefore meet difficulties that are social as well as personal.

Study and practice provide means of working on these problems. Through theoretical and social practice, I try to produce, test, correct, and develop more concrete knowledge of the conditions we confront, the forces acting within them, and the possibilities for their transformation. The point is to discover what particular knowledge permits us to see and do, what practice reveals about the inadequacy of what we thought we knew, and what new questions that practice requires us to investigate.

Through open study and the public documentation of research and developing thought, NAJMM records not only what I think, but the work by which I am trying to become more capable of thinking, communicating, and acting. This includes unfinished thoughts, questions, revisions, conceptual problems, false starts, changes in formulation, and conclusions that may themselves later require correction. Publicity is therefore part of the method of generating knowledge rather than merely a way of sharing it.

There is a vulnerability in doing this publicly. A public record preserves mistakes, uncertainty, abandoned positions, and stages of thought I may later move beyond. Earlier formulations may remain available after I no longer hold them and may be encountered apart from the corrections or developments that followed. Criticism may expose weaknesses in my thought or communication that I would rather not have discovered publicly. But this exposure is among the risks of making development itself visible.

That same exposure imposes a useful discipline. It requires me to return to questions, state problems more precisely, confront gaps I might otherwise leave undisturbed, and leave a record against which the development, or failure to develop, of my thought can be judged over time.

I undertake this work as one student among many, with something to learn from every interaction. NAJMM is therefore a way of seeking a path in relation with others: exposing developing thought to criticism, encountering questions I would not have generated alone, testing formulations against experiences beyond my own, and making room for others to risk unfinished thoughts of their own.

I want to help create conditions in which people can more safely think aloud, ask difficult questions, and participate in ideological struggle. By safety I mean conditions in which being wrong, incomplete, or uncertain is not treated as a reason not to think publicly at all, and in which criticism and correction can be understood as part of the work of thinking rather than proof that one should never have spoken.

I do not regard the development of knowledge and capacity as an end in itself. I make this work available for others to examine, question, criticize, develop, and put to use because becoming more capable of knowing, communicating, and acting is inseparable from the larger struggle in relation to which I am trying to orient myself: the liberation of New Afrikan land and people.

Addison Turner

Addison Turner is a New Afrikan writer, organizer, and independent researcher based in Worcester, Massachusetts. He founded the New Afrikan Journal of Means and Meridians as a public practice of study, research, writing, and ideological struggle concerned with understanding the concrete world we inherit, inhabit, and seek to transform.

His current research includes the material relations of sex and patriarchy, New Afrikan national liberation, and the urban political economy of Worcester.

Start reading

For the approach to study and communication
A Weapon in Untrained Hands
Why Possession Is Not Mastery

For the substantive research argument
Sex Class and the Material Relations of Patriarchy
Prolegomena to a Materialist Theory of the Sex Contradiction

For the sources behind the work
Library

The Name

Junction

A point at which relations, histories, forces, contradictions, practices, and lines of inquiry meet and act upon one another. We occupy such junctions before we fully understand them.

Means

The instruments and capacities through which we investigate, communicate, test, and change reality: language, concepts, methods, archives, organization, relationships, and practical capacities developed through study and struggle.

Meridians

The bearings by which we establish position and judge direction: objectives, commitments, accumulated knowledge, and historically posed problems. Before deciding how to move, we have to work at understanding where we are and in relation to what.

Orientation

Najm (نجم) means star in Arabic. The connection to meridians and orientation is deliberate. Stars have long served as means of locating ourselves in relation to the earth, its and our history, the cosmos, and the horizons toward which we move.

Independence

NAJMM is independently written and maintained by Addison Turner (me). Unless explicitly stated otherwise, material published here represents my own developing arguments and should not be attributed to Implacable Books, SOS Worcester or any other collective project in which I participate.