How We See The World In This Period
By: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin
This is an excerpt from the book Anarchism and the Black Revolution (2013).
Here is how Anarchists of color (specifically we within Black Autonomy) see the world: It is a situation presently organized into competing nation-states, in military and political alliances. Through international institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, the Capitalist Western nations have been responsible for most of the world's famine, imperialism and exploitation of the economic resources of non-white peoples of the earth. But in fact, Anarchists hold all nation-states are instruments of oppression. Even though there are governments that claim to be "workers states,” "Socialist countries" or so-called "Revolutionary governments,” in essence they all have the same function as a fascist or capitalist regime: dictatorship and oppression of the many by the few.
The bankruptcy of the state is further proven when one looks at the millions of dead after two world wars, sparked by European Imperialism, (1914-1918 and 1939-1945) and hundreds of “brush wars" incited by the superpowers of the West or by Russia in the 1950s and continuing to this day. These include wars between not only the West, but between "workers' states" like China-Russia, Vietnam-China, Vietnam-Cambodia. Somalia-Ethiopia, Russia-Czechoslovakia and others over the last 40 years, who have gone to war over border disputes, political intrigue, invasion or other hostile action. As long as there are nation-states, there will be war, tension and national enmity. Shared political ideology, racial characteristics, or similar cultures will not prevent it.
In fact, the sad part about the decolonization of Africa in the 1960s was that the countries were eventually organized into the Euro-centric ideal of the nation-state, instead of some other formation more applicable to the continent, such as a continent-wide free federation. This, of course, was a reflection of the fact that although the Africans were obtaining "flag independence" and all the trappings of the sovereign European state, they in fact were not obtaining freedom. The Europeans still controlled the economies of the African continent and nationalist leaders who came to the fore were, for the most part, as pliable and conservative as possible.
Oh, there was an occasional radical like Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, who demanded full rights and freedom for African peoples, but he was quickly (and brutally) silenced in a CIA-Belgian colonial plot. The countries of Africa were like a dog with a leash around its neck; although the Europeans could no longer rule the continent directly thorough colonial power, it now did so through puppets it controlled and defended, like Mobutu in the Congo, Selassie in Ethiopia and Kenyatta in Kenya. Many of these men were dictators of the worst sort and their regimes existed strictly because of the support of European finance capital. In addition, there were white settler communities in the Portuguese colonies, South Africa and Zimbabwe, who oppressed the African peoples even worse than the old colonial system. This is why the national liberation movements made their appearances in the 1960s and 70s.
Anarchists support national liberation movements to the degree they struggle against a colonial or imperialist power; but also note that in almost every instance where such liberation fronts have assumed state power, they have become "State Communist" parties or new dictators over the masses of the people. These include some who had engaged in the mass epic struggles, but also include many based on the most obvious military dictatorship from the start. Their governments are not progressive and they tolerate no dissent.
For instance, no sooner had the MPLA (Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola) government been in power in Angola, than it began to arrest all its left-wing ideological opponents (Maoists, Trotskyites, Anarchists and others)and to forcibly to quell strikes by workers for higher pay and better working conditions, calling such job actions “blackmail" and “economic sabotage.”And with the Nito Alves affair and his alleged coup attempt, (Alves was a hero of the revolution and a popular military leader), there was the first party purge of opponents in the new government. Something similar to this also took place when the Sandinista National Liberation movement took over in Nicaraguan the 1980s. None of this should seem strange or uncharacteristic to Anarchists, when we consider that the Bolshevik party did the same thing when it consolidated state power during the Russian Revolution (1917-1921). It provided the model for all such later regimes.
Countries such as Benin, Ethiopia, the People's Republic of the Congo and other “revolutionary" governments in Africa, are not in power as the result of a popular social revolution, but because of a military coup or being installed by one of the major world powers. In addition, one or another of the African States exploits some other country perceived weaker; for instance Sudan, an Arab-controlled country, still has African slaves, which are powerless Blacks from the Southern part of the country. Thus, they have been fighting a civil war for 20 years.
Further; contrary to many of the romantic reports which dominated Western news reports, many of the national liberation movements were not independent social movements, but were rather under the influence or control of Russia or China as part of their geopolitical struggle against Western imperialism and each other.(This is not to say that revolutionary movements should not accept weapons and other material support from an outside power, as long as they remain independent politically and determine their own policies, without such aid being conditional, on the political dictates and the "party line" of another country).
But even though we may differ with them politically and tactically in many areas and even with all their flaws after assuming State power, the revolutionary liberation fighters (the people in arms as opposed to the vanguard organization) are our comrades and allies in common struggle against the common enemy — the U.S. imperialist ruling class. Their struggle releases the death grip of U.S. and Western imperialism (as Anarchists more precisely call it “Capitalist world power”) and while the fight goes on we are bound together in comradeship and solidarity. The movement in Chiapas, Mexico, by the Indigenous people there who found the EZLN, a revolutionary liberation movement, is one that we and many Anarchists support.
Yet, in analyzing national liberation movements, we cannot overlook atrocities committed by movements like the Khmer Rouge, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement in Cambodia, which just massacred millions of people to carry out rigid Stalinist political policies and to consolidate the country, when it took over in the 1980s. We must lay this butchery and other crimes committed by State Communism bare for all to see, right at the feet of world communism and state socialism. We do not favor this kind of revolution, which is just sheer power seeking and terrorism against the people to install a so-called Left-wing ruling class.
This is why Anarchism has always disagreed with how the Bolsheviks seized power in Soviet Russia. They created a police state and Stalin's butchery of the Russian people seems to have set a model for the State Communist movements all over the world to follow throughout the years. Now the Soviet state is gone, along with most of the Eastern European governments, but the legacy of authoritarian socialism lives on with their movements in a variety of disguises.
WE believe that the national liberation fronts make one basic mistake of many nationalist movements of oppressed peoples and that is to organize in a fashion where class distinctions are obliterated. This happened in America also, where in the fight for democratic rights, the civil rights movement included Black middle class preachers, teachers and others in the leadership and every Black person was a "brother" or “sister,” as long as they were Black. But this simplistic analysis and social reality did not hold for long, because when the Civil Rights phase of the American Black struggle had spent itself, class distinctions and class struggle came to the fore. They have been getting sharper ever since.
Poor people are demanding to organize in their own name and class interest, because although the rich Blacks and professional class may have prospered since the 1960s, the poor and oppressed have just sunk deeper into poverty and prisons are being used as a social tool to lock up millions.
Although there are Black mayors and other bureaucrats now holding positions in the government, they have no power to change things for their people, they merely serve as pacification agents of the State, what we call "Black faces in high places.” Their symbolic representation is supposed to inspire hope or keep the masses of people believing in the system. They are not even a serious concession to our struggle. They are put in office to co-opt the struggle and deaden the people to their pain.
This American neocolonial system is similar to the type of neocolonialism that took place in the 3rd World in the1950s-1980s, after many countries had obtained their "independence.” Europe still maintained control through puppet politicians, economic domination and a command structure of petty bourgeois agents, who were willing to barter the freedom of their people for personal gain. These people have no real power to improve the lives of the masses; they merely preside over their misery. In Africa, some of the most corrupt leaders are/were colonial subjects for the European countries and enjoy no local popularity at all; they just inspire fear through military control and passive acceptance by the masses of people.
So while Black revolutionaries generally favor the ideas of African inter-communalism, they want principled revolutionary unity. Of course, the greatest service we can render the peoples of the so-called “Third World" of Africa, Asia and Latin America, is to make a revolution here in North America—in the belly of the beast. For in freeing ourselves, we get the U.S. imperialist ruling class off all our backs.
As Anarchists of color, we wish to build an international organization against Capitalism, racism, colonialism, imperialism and military dictatorship, which could more effectively fight the Capitalist powers and create a world federation of Black peoples, a commune. We want to unite a brother or sister in North America with the Black peoples of Australia and Oceania/S.W Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, Asia, the Middle East and those millions of our people living in Britain and other Western European countries. We want to unite tribes, nations and cultures into an international body of grassroots and struggling forces.
Only a Social revolution will lead to Black unity and freedom. However this will only be possible when there exists an international Black revolutionary organization and social movement. An organization which can coordinate the resistance struggles everywhere of African peoples; actually a network of such organizations, resistance movements, which are spread all over the world based on a consensus for revolutionary struggle. This concept accepts any level of violence that will be necessary to enforce the demands of the people and workers.
In those countries where an open Black revolutionary movement would be subjected to fierce repression by the state, such as neocolonialist Black puppet dictatorships in other parts of Africa, the Caribbean and even parts of Asia, it would be necessary to wage an underground resistance struggle. Further, the state has grown more and more violent, with widespread torture and executions, maximum-security prisons and massive police controls, spying and deprivation of democratic rights, police brutality and murder. Clearly such governments-and all governments-must be overthrown. They will not fall due to internal economic or political problems, but must be defeated and dismantled. So we call for an international resistance movement to overthrow governments and the system of Capitalist world governments.
The military dictators and government bureaucrats have only proven that they know how to spend money on pomp and circumstance, but not how to dismantle the last vestiges of colonialism in South Africa or defeat Western neocolonialist intrigues. Africa is still the poorest of the World's continents, while materially the richest. The contrast is clear: millions of people are starving in much of Equatorial Africa, but the tribal chiefs, politicians and military dictators, are driving around in Mercedes and living in luxury villas, while they do the bidding of West European and American bankers through the International Monetary Fund. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution!
Our ideas about the importance of inter-communalism are based on a firm belief that only a federation of free peoples will bring true Black power to the masses."Power to the people" does not mean a government or political party to rule in their name, but social and political power in the hands of the people themselves. The only real "people's power" is the power to make their decisions on matters of importance and to merely elect someone else to do so in rigged elections, or to have a dictatorship forced down their throats, ain’t it. True freedom is to have full self-determination about one's social, economic and cultural development. The future is Anarchist Communism, not the nation-state, bloody dictators, Capitalism or wage slavery.
Building an Autonomous Peoples of Color Movement:
Building an autonomous movement of peoples of color, based on Anarchist principles is different than Pan-Africanism or concepts of La Raza, or even socialist internationalism. It means building a movement that goes beyond skin color, language, or even shared history of a people, to build the strongest movement of international solidarity. Most solidarity movements are built around identification with a particular struggle. But either giving useless statements about race unity, or vague statements of support, or subordinating one’s own struggle to that of another is not what autonomy is about. What we need is an international movement based on shared oppression and commitment to a common struggle.
This has to take us past the primacy of narrow nationalism, or regional struggles and back to the idea of revolution as worldwide social change, an international civil war of poor and oppressed peoples against the capitalist system. I am not referring to just development of a socialist state in one country as happened with the old Soviet Union, regional struggles with African anti-colonialism, or the old 1960s concept of Black Power.
The old ideas of political socialism and Pan-Africanism have been lost with nation-statism and Stalin-ism. Even the ideals of joint forms of oppression have been lost so that many believe that only the United States of America has an internal Black population subjected to racist oppression and that forms of oppression based on caste, ethnicity, or other peoples of color are not racism in the same sense. This is a grave mistake and cuts us off from many allies around the world.
The Official Blog of the Black Autonomy Federation. A hub of Black Autonomy literature, ranging from commentaries to organizational plans.
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Saturday, September 13, 2014
From Black Protest To Insurrection An Autonomous - Anti-authoritarian View
From Black Protest To Insurrection: An Autonomous, Anti-authoritarian View
By: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin
Originally Published on July 24, 2013
We are coming upon the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, and there are some things which have a direct bearing on the present moment. We need to know that back then there had been two wings of the civil rights movement, that which emanated from the 1955-57 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which produced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a national leader and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the period of 1960-1963, the youth-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had taken the early initiative away from King and SCLC, and were the ones who had called for and organized the 1963 March on Washington originally.
They envisioned a much more militant anti-government protest movement, which was coming for a long-term occupation, and to disrupt the city of Washington, D.C. to accuse the federal government of protecting the racist South, and upholding poverty and oppression. They even planned to get out on the runways of airports and prevent planes from landing at the airport, stop trains, and clogs highways, and other thoroughfares.
Malcolm X spoke approvingly of the original protest plans, as an advance past Dr. M.L. King's pacifism. However, the Kennedy Administration was able to maneuver and subvert the autonomous leadership, installing the old civil rights leadership, which was more conservative and willing to take orders directly from the government. They had been bought off by corporate and government grant money and they killed any militancy of the event at all. In fact, took it from a protest to a "celebration" of the collusion between the Kennedy Administration and those sellout leaders, claiming "victory now".
So, this tells us what is happening now with the Trayvon Martin protest movement, it has been usurped by Al Sharpton and more conservative elements. Those who want to shut down the system and protest in the streets, are usurped by those moderate and conservative elements emphasizing "peace", "calm", and "obeying the law". They are saying that "we should wait on Obama" to make up his mind as to whether he will prosecute Zimmerman, Trayvon's murderer. Listen, everyday, the feds prosecute cases that began in state courts; certainly they do it in drug cases against young Black men and teens. If he wants to do so, it should not be some extraordinary thing, but he is afraid of the right-wing fascists, and his corporate bosses have not given him the say-so yet. He must stay in his place and so what Wall Street tells him too.
This is why whatever protest there is in this period has to lead us to insurrection, long term resistance, known internationally as an "Intifada". It must maintain today's protest militancy as a stage of struggle, but escalate, first turn it into a month of resistance, and then into many months, even years of resistance, expanding our understanding every step of the way that we are actually fighting the government itself (and its corporate masters), which has sanctioned white supremacy, police terror, and vigilante violence as *some of their tools of counter-insurgency.
We are fighting fascism, and must not be neutralized or misled, just as Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the original Black Panther Party told us 59 years ago. They want to kill off Black surplus labor, homeless, and all those elements they consider as social vermin in their emerging corporate police state. The death of Trayvon Martin, and all those nameless Black/POC youth, must be united in the minds of the people, because they expose the empire's attack on the poor and low income workers.
We must have the maturity to build a United Front Against Racism and Police Brutality in this period, led by the poor, Black/POC, unemployed and low income workers.
By: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin
Originally Published on July 24, 2013
We are coming upon the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, and there are some things which have a direct bearing on the present moment. We need to know that back then there had been two wings of the civil rights movement, that which emanated from the 1955-57 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which produced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a national leader and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the period of 1960-1963, the youth-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had taken the early initiative away from King and SCLC, and were the ones who had called for and organized the 1963 March on Washington originally.
They envisioned a much more militant anti-government protest movement, which was coming for a long-term occupation, and to disrupt the city of Washington, D.C. to accuse the federal government of protecting the racist South, and upholding poverty and oppression. They even planned to get out on the runways of airports and prevent planes from landing at the airport, stop trains, and clogs highways, and other thoroughfares.
Malcolm X spoke approvingly of the original protest plans, as an advance past Dr. M.L. King's pacifism. However, the Kennedy Administration was able to maneuver and subvert the autonomous leadership, installing the old civil rights leadership, which was more conservative and willing to take orders directly from the government. They had been bought off by corporate and government grant money and they killed any militancy of the event at all. In fact, took it from a protest to a "celebration" of the collusion between the Kennedy Administration and those sellout leaders, claiming "victory now".
So, this tells us what is happening now with the Trayvon Martin protest movement, it has been usurped by Al Sharpton and more conservative elements. Those who want to shut down the system and protest in the streets, are usurped by those moderate and conservative elements emphasizing "peace", "calm", and "obeying the law". They are saying that "we should wait on Obama" to make up his mind as to whether he will prosecute Zimmerman, Trayvon's murderer. Listen, everyday, the feds prosecute cases that began in state courts; certainly they do it in drug cases against young Black men and teens. If he wants to do so, it should not be some extraordinary thing, but he is afraid of the right-wing fascists, and his corporate bosses have not given him the say-so yet. He must stay in his place and so what Wall Street tells him too.
This is why whatever protest there is in this period has to lead us to insurrection, long term resistance, known internationally as an "Intifada". It must maintain today's protest militancy as a stage of struggle, but escalate, first turn it into a month of resistance, and then into many months, even years of resistance, expanding our understanding every step of the way that we are actually fighting the government itself (and its corporate masters), which has sanctioned white supremacy, police terror, and vigilante violence as *some of their tools of counter-insurgency.
We are fighting fascism, and must not be neutralized or misled, just as Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the original Black Panther Party told us 59 years ago. They want to kill off Black surplus labor, homeless, and all those elements they consider as social vermin in their emerging corporate police state. The death of Trayvon Martin, and all those nameless Black/POC youth, must be united in the minds of the people, because they expose the empire's attack on the poor and low income workers.
We must have the maturity to build a United Front Against Racism and Police Brutality in this period, led by the poor, Black/POC, unemployed and low income workers.
Armed Defense of The Black Commune and Community
Armed Defense of The Black Commune and Community
By: Black Autonomy Federation
Originally Published on December 3, 2012
“Our insistence on military action, defensive and retaliatory, has nothing to do with romanticism or precipitous idealist fervor. We want to be effective. We want to live. Our history teaches us that the successful liberation struggles require an armed people, a whole people, actively participating in the struggle for their liberty!" - George Jackson, quoted in Blood in my Eye
We must organize self-defense units to protect the Black community and its organizations. It is the police and the government who are the main perpetrators of violence against Black people. Every day we read of the police murdering and maiming the people in our community, all in the name of "law and order." This police brutality has included the use of deadly force against children as young as five years old and elderly persons over 75 years old! We must disarm and demilitarize the police, and force them to leave our community.
Perhaps this can be done after a rebellion or insurrection drives them out, or perhaps they will have to be driven out by a street guerrilla force, like the Black Liberation Army tried to do in the 1970s. We have no way of knowing. We just know that they have to go. They are an oppressive occupying army, are not of our community, cannot understand its problems, and do not identify with its people and their needs. Further, it is the corruption of the cops that protects organized crime and vice in our community, and Capitalism with its exploitative economic conditions which is responsible for all crime.
Existing police forces should be replaced with the Black community's own self-defense force, made up of members of our community elected or appointed by their neighbors to that position, or from an existing street guerrilla force or political organization if the people agree. They would be subject to immediate recall and dismissal by the Community Control boards of an area. This is only so that we will have community control of the self-defense force, and begin to deal with fratricidal Black-on-Black crime, and be able to defend ourselves from white racist or police attacks. With the increase of white racist violence today, and the possibility of white mob action in the future, usually in the name of "law and order," this community self-defense force is most important. The only question is: can we do this now?
We exist now under conditions of nominal legality and civil rights, but at some stage in the process of building up our forces, it is inevitable that the white power structure will recognize the danger to itself represented by such a free Black commune, and will then try to forcibly repress it. We must have the self-defense capability to resist.
This concept of organizing a self- defense force accepts any level of violence that will be necessary to enforce the demands of the people and workers. Yet these self-defense forces would not be a "party vanguard," a police force, or even a standing army in the Statist or usually thought of sense; they would be a Black Peoples' militia, self-managed by the workers and community itself: in other words, the people-in-arms. These militia organizations will allow us to engage in offensive or defensive actions, either in general community defense, or as part of an insurrection or underground resistance.
But what do we do right now in conditions of legality, to reclaim our community from violent racist cops? Do we sit around and debate the appropriateness of military preparation, when the enemy is in our community now, committing rape and murder of Black people or do we hit back? How do we even get the idea across to our people and start to train them for paramilitary operations? On a mass scale, We advocate the immediate formation of defense and survival skills study groups, under the guise of gun clubs, martial arts societies, wilderness survival clubs or whatever we need to call them. A thorough understanding of marksmanship, ammunition fabrication, demolition and weapon manufacturing is minimal for everyone.
In addition, we should study first aid pertaining to the rather traumatic injuries sustained from gunfire and explosives, combat communications, combat weapons, combat tactics for the small group, combat strategy for the region or nation, combat intelligence of police and military activities among other subjects. These subjects are indispensable if too live underground or during a general insurrection.
We should put emphasis on the purchase, collection, duplication and dissemination of military manuals, gun-smithing textbooks, explosive and improvised demolitions manuals, police and government technical manuals, and pirated editions of right-wing manuals on the subject (since they seem to write the best material in this area), and also begin the study of how to build intelligence networks to collect information on the rapidly growing Skinhead and other totalitarian racist organizations, along with intelligence and counter-intelligence information on the government secret police and law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, CIA, ATF, etc., and on any and every other subject which could be of use to us in the coming struggle.
Even though in the United States, development of military skills and self defense is simpler than many other countries because arms and ammunition are widely available, it is logical to assume that the arms situation will soon be so tight so as to make firearms virtually unobtainable, except through an expensive Black market because of the government's "war on drugs" and other proposed gun control legislation to prevent street violence," or so they say (Do you think the sporting goods stores will be open during an insurrection?) Therefore we should learn to use machine tool technology to produce our own weapons. Perfectly adequate firearms may be produced using a minimum of machine tools, providing the individual or group is willing to do the necessary studying and preparation. It is not enough to know a little about these subjects; it is a matter of future survival - of life and death that one be highly proficient.
We are not advocating the immediate waging of urban guerilla warfare, especially where there is no mass base for such activities. What we are advocating at this stage is armed self-defense and the knowledge of tactics to resist military aggression against the Black community. It is a foolish and unfortunate trait among Anarchists, the white left and sections of the Black movement to condemn the study of military tactics as premature or adventuristic, or on the other hand, to cast oneself into a blind fury of bank expropriations, kidnappings, bombings or plane hijackings. Too many people in the movement have a death trip approach to guns - they assume if you are not "fooling around," then you should prove your convictions via a suicidal shootout in the streets. It doesn't have to be that way.
But the Black movement doesn't even have the luxury of such tepid debates, and must have an armed defense policy because America has a long tradition of government political repression and vigilante paramilitary violence. Although such attacks have been directed primarily at Blacks and other oppressed nationalities in the past, they have also been directed at labor unions and dissident political groups. Such violence makes it absolutely necessary to acquire familiarity with firearms and military tactics. In fact, the Black Resistance movement that we spoke of earlier should think of itself as a paramilitary movement, rather than a strict political association.
We must assert our rights to armed self-defense and revolution, even though it is true that there is a lot of loose talk about guns, self defense, revolution, "urban guerilla warfare," etc., in the Black and radical movements, but with very little study and practice in handling and using weapons. Some of the same folks think "picking up the gun" means that you pick one up for the first time on the day of an insurrection or confrontation with police. This is nonsense and is the real "revolutionary suicide," you could get led not knowing what you are doing. But many instances attest to the fact that armed community self defense can be carried out successfully, such as the MOVE resistance in Philadelphia, the Republic of New Africa armed resistance in Detroit and Mississippi and the Black Panther cases. Even as important as the act of defense itself is, is the fact that these instances of successful self -defense have made a tremendous impact on the Black community, encouraging other acts of resistance.
Insurrection:
But what is a rebellion and how does it differ from an insurrection? An insurrection is a general uprising against the power structure. It is usually a sustained rebellion over the course of days, weeks, months or even years. It is a type of class war that involves a whole population in an act of armed or semi-armed resistance. Sometimes mistakenly called a rebellion, its character is far more combative and revolutionary. Rebellions are almost totally spontaneous, short-term affairs. An insurrection is also not the revolution, SINCE REVOLUTION IS A SOCIAL PROCESS, RATHER THAN A SINGLE EVENT, but it can be an important part of the revolution, maybe its final phase. An insurrection is a planned violent protest campaign which takes the spontaneous revolt of the masses to a higher level. Revolutionaries intervene to push rebellions to insurrectionary stage, and the insurrection to a social revolution. It is not small, isolated pockets of urban guerillas taking actions, unless those guerillas are part of a larger revolt.
The importance of recognizing the true differences of each level can define our strategy and tactics at that stage, and not lead us prematurely into a full offensive, when the enemy is not yet weakened enough by mass action or political attacks. The importance of also recognizing the true causes of the revolt cannot be understated Anarchist revolutionaries intervene in such struggles to show people how to resist and the possibilities of winning freedom. We want to take the people's rebellions against the state and use them to weaken the rule of Capital. We want to create resistance on a longer term and to win liberated zones to disconnect these communities from the state means that these rebellions will assume a conscious political character like the Palestinian Intifada in the occupied territories controlled by Israel in the Middle East.
Creating the possibility of a Black insurrection means popularizing and spreading the various rebellions to other cities, towns and even countries, and increasing them in number and frequency. It also means consciously nullifying the power of the state, instead of temporary revolts against it, which ultimately preserves its power. There must be a deliberate attempt to push the government out of existence, and establish People's Power. This has not yet happened with the various Black revolts we have seen since 1964, when the first such modern revolt erupted in Harlem, NY.
In the 1960s, the Black communities all over the U.S. rose up angrily with massive rebellions against the state demanding racial justice. After the Harlem revolt, for the next four years major rebellions shook the U.S. in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, and hundreds of other North American cities. Isolated acts of police brutality, racial discrimination substandard housing, economic exploitation, "the hoodlum element," a breakdown in family values, and a host of other "explanations" have been put forward by liberal and conservative sociologist and others commissioned by the state to whitewash the true causes. Yet none of these revealed this as a protest against the Capitalist system and colonial rule, even though the social scientists "warned" of the possibility of a new outbreak of violence.
Once again in the Spring of 1992, we saw a massive revolt in Los Angeles, whose immediate causes were related to the outrageous acquittal of Los Angeles policemen who had brutally beaten Rodney King. But there again this was just an immediate cause acting as a trigger; this revolt was not a sympathy revolt on behalf of Rodney King personally. The cause of this rebellion was widespread social inequality in the Capitalist system and police terrorism.
This time the rebellion spread to 40 cities and four foreign countries. And it was not just a so-called "race riot," but rather a class revolt that included a large number of Latinos, whites and even Asians. But it was undeniably a revolt for racial injustice first and foremost, even if it was not just directed against white people in general but the Capitalist system and the rich. It was not limited to just even the inner city in the Los Angeles area but spread even to white upper crust areas in Hollywood, Ventura, and beyond this was the beginning stage of class warfare.
If an underground military force existed or a militia was assembled, it could have entered the field of battle with more weaponry and advanced tactics. As it was the gangs played that role, and played it very well. Their participation is why it took so long to put the rebellion down, but even they could not prevent the reestablishment of white power in South Central Los Angeles. Not just because of being militarily out gunned, but because they had no revolutionary political program despite all their rhetoric of having been radicalized Also the state came down extremely hard on the rebels. Over 20,000 persons were jailed, 50 were killed and hundreds wounded.
Could a liberated zone have been won, so that dual power could have been established? That possibility existed and still does exist if the people are properly armed and educated Mass resistance with heavy military weaponry may have won serious concessions, one of which is to pull back the cops. We don't know that, this is purely speculation. We do know that this is not the last rebellion in L.A. and other cities. They may come much quicker now that the genie of urban revolution is out of the bag again. We can only hope and prepare. ONWARD TO THE BLACK REVOLUTION!
By: Black Autonomy Federation
Originally Published on December 3, 2012
“Our insistence on military action, defensive and retaliatory, has nothing to do with romanticism or precipitous idealist fervor. We want to be effective. We want to live. Our history teaches us that the successful liberation struggles require an armed people, a whole people, actively participating in the struggle for their liberty!" - George Jackson, quoted in Blood in my Eye
We must organize self-defense units to protect the Black community and its organizations. It is the police and the government who are the main perpetrators of violence against Black people. Every day we read of the police murdering and maiming the people in our community, all in the name of "law and order." This police brutality has included the use of deadly force against children as young as five years old and elderly persons over 75 years old! We must disarm and demilitarize the police, and force them to leave our community.
Perhaps this can be done after a rebellion or insurrection drives them out, or perhaps they will have to be driven out by a street guerrilla force, like the Black Liberation Army tried to do in the 1970s. We have no way of knowing. We just know that they have to go. They are an oppressive occupying army, are not of our community, cannot understand its problems, and do not identify with its people and their needs. Further, it is the corruption of the cops that protects organized crime and vice in our community, and Capitalism with its exploitative economic conditions which is responsible for all crime.
Existing police forces should be replaced with the Black community's own self-defense force, made up of members of our community elected or appointed by their neighbors to that position, or from an existing street guerrilla force or political organization if the people agree. They would be subject to immediate recall and dismissal by the Community Control boards of an area. This is only so that we will have community control of the self-defense force, and begin to deal with fratricidal Black-on-Black crime, and be able to defend ourselves from white racist or police attacks. With the increase of white racist violence today, and the possibility of white mob action in the future, usually in the name of "law and order," this community self-defense force is most important. The only question is: can we do this now?
We exist now under conditions of nominal legality and civil rights, but at some stage in the process of building up our forces, it is inevitable that the white power structure will recognize the danger to itself represented by such a free Black commune, and will then try to forcibly repress it. We must have the self-defense capability to resist.
This concept of organizing a self- defense force accepts any level of violence that will be necessary to enforce the demands of the people and workers. Yet these self-defense forces would not be a "party vanguard," a police force, or even a standing army in the Statist or usually thought of sense; they would be a Black Peoples' militia, self-managed by the workers and community itself: in other words, the people-in-arms. These militia organizations will allow us to engage in offensive or defensive actions, either in general community defense, or as part of an insurrection or underground resistance.
But what do we do right now in conditions of legality, to reclaim our community from violent racist cops? Do we sit around and debate the appropriateness of military preparation, when the enemy is in our community now, committing rape and murder of Black people or do we hit back? How do we even get the idea across to our people and start to train them for paramilitary operations? On a mass scale, We advocate the immediate formation of defense and survival skills study groups, under the guise of gun clubs, martial arts societies, wilderness survival clubs or whatever we need to call them. A thorough understanding of marksmanship, ammunition fabrication, demolition and weapon manufacturing is minimal for everyone.
In addition, we should study first aid pertaining to the rather traumatic injuries sustained from gunfire and explosives, combat communications, combat weapons, combat tactics for the small group, combat strategy for the region or nation, combat intelligence of police and military activities among other subjects. These subjects are indispensable if too live underground or during a general insurrection.
We should put emphasis on the purchase, collection, duplication and dissemination of military manuals, gun-smithing textbooks, explosive and improvised demolitions manuals, police and government technical manuals, and pirated editions of right-wing manuals on the subject (since they seem to write the best material in this area), and also begin the study of how to build intelligence networks to collect information on the rapidly growing Skinhead and other totalitarian racist organizations, along with intelligence and counter-intelligence information on the government secret police and law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, CIA, ATF, etc., and on any and every other subject which could be of use to us in the coming struggle.
Even though in the United States, development of military skills and self defense is simpler than many other countries because arms and ammunition are widely available, it is logical to assume that the arms situation will soon be so tight so as to make firearms virtually unobtainable, except through an expensive Black market because of the government's "war on drugs" and other proposed gun control legislation to prevent street violence," or so they say (Do you think the sporting goods stores will be open during an insurrection?) Therefore we should learn to use machine tool technology to produce our own weapons. Perfectly adequate firearms may be produced using a minimum of machine tools, providing the individual or group is willing to do the necessary studying and preparation. It is not enough to know a little about these subjects; it is a matter of future survival - of life and death that one be highly proficient.
We are not advocating the immediate waging of urban guerilla warfare, especially where there is no mass base for such activities. What we are advocating at this stage is armed self-defense and the knowledge of tactics to resist military aggression against the Black community. It is a foolish and unfortunate trait among Anarchists, the white left and sections of the Black movement to condemn the study of military tactics as premature or adventuristic, or on the other hand, to cast oneself into a blind fury of bank expropriations, kidnappings, bombings or plane hijackings. Too many people in the movement have a death trip approach to guns - they assume if you are not "fooling around," then you should prove your convictions via a suicidal shootout in the streets. It doesn't have to be that way.
But the Black movement doesn't even have the luxury of such tepid debates, and must have an armed defense policy because America has a long tradition of government political repression and vigilante paramilitary violence. Although such attacks have been directed primarily at Blacks and other oppressed nationalities in the past, they have also been directed at labor unions and dissident political groups. Such violence makes it absolutely necessary to acquire familiarity with firearms and military tactics. In fact, the Black Resistance movement that we spoke of earlier should think of itself as a paramilitary movement, rather than a strict political association.
We must assert our rights to armed self-defense and revolution, even though it is true that there is a lot of loose talk about guns, self defense, revolution, "urban guerilla warfare," etc., in the Black and radical movements, but with very little study and practice in handling and using weapons. Some of the same folks think "picking up the gun" means that you pick one up for the first time on the day of an insurrection or confrontation with police. This is nonsense and is the real "revolutionary suicide," you could get led not knowing what you are doing. But many instances attest to the fact that armed community self defense can be carried out successfully, such as the MOVE resistance in Philadelphia, the Republic of New Africa armed resistance in Detroit and Mississippi and the Black Panther cases. Even as important as the act of defense itself is, is the fact that these instances of successful self -defense have made a tremendous impact on the Black community, encouraging other acts of resistance.
Insurrection:
But what is a rebellion and how does it differ from an insurrection? An insurrection is a general uprising against the power structure. It is usually a sustained rebellion over the course of days, weeks, months or even years. It is a type of class war that involves a whole population in an act of armed or semi-armed resistance. Sometimes mistakenly called a rebellion, its character is far more combative and revolutionary. Rebellions are almost totally spontaneous, short-term affairs. An insurrection is also not the revolution, SINCE REVOLUTION IS A SOCIAL PROCESS, RATHER THAN A SINGLE EVENT, but it can be an important part of the revolution, maybe its final phase. An insurrection is a planned violent protest campaign which takes the spontaneous revolt of the masses to a higher level. Revolutionaries intervene to push rebellions to insurrectionary stage, and the insurrection to a social revolution. It is not small, isolated pockets of urban guerillas taking actions, unless those guerillas are part of a larger revolt.
The importance of recognizing the true differences of each level can define our strategy and tactics at that stage, and not lead us prematurely into a full offensive, when the enemy is not yet weakened enough by mass action or political attacks. The importance of also recognizing the true causes of the revolt cannot be understated Anarchist revolutionaries intervene in such struggles to show people how to resist and the possibilities of winning freedom. We want to take the people's rebellions against the state and use them to weaken the rule of Capital. We want to create resistance on a longer term and to win liberated zones to disconnect these communities from the state means that these rebellions will assume a conscious political character like the Palestinian Intifada in the occupied territories controlled by Israel in the Middle East.
Creating the possibility of a Black insurrection means popularizing and spreading the various rebellions to other cities, towns and even countries, and increasing them in number and frequency. It also means consciously nullifying the power of the state, instead of temporary revolts against it, which ultimately preserves its power. There must be a deliberate attempt to push the government out of existence, and establish People's Power. This has not yet happened with the various Black revolts we have seen since 1964, when the first such modern revolt erupted in Harlem, NY.
In the 1960s, the Black communities all over the U.S. rose up angrily with massive rebellions against the state demanding racial justice. After the Harlem revolt, for the next four years major rebellions shook the U.S. in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, and hundreds of other North American cities. Isolated acts of police brutality, racial discrimination substandard housing, economic exploitation, "the hoodlum element," a breakdown in family values, and a host of other "explanations" have been put forward by liberal and conservative sociologist and others commissioned by the state to whitewash the true causes. Yet none of these revealed this as a protest against the Capitalist system and colonial rule, even though the social scientists "warned" of the possibility of a new outbreak of violence.
Once again in the Spring of 1992, we saw a massive revolt in Los Angeles, whose immediate causes were related to the outrageous acquittal of Los Angeles policemen who had brutally beaten Rodney King. But there again this was just an immediate cause acting as a trigger; this revolt was not a sympathy revolt on behalf of Rodney King personally. The cause of this rebellion was widespread social inequality in the Capitalist system and police terrorism.
This time the rebellion spread to 40 cities and four foreign countries. And it was not just a so-called "race riot," but rather a class revolt that included a large number of Latinos, whites and even Asians. But it was undeniably a revolt for racial injustice first and foremost, even if it was not just directed against white people in general but the Capitalist system and the rich. It was not limited to just even the inner city in the Los Angeles area but spread even to white upper crust areas in Hollywood, Ventura, and beyond this was the beginning stage of class warfare.
If an underground military force existed or a militia was assembled, it could have entered the field of battle with more weaponry and advanced tactics. As it was the gangs played that role, and played it very well. Their participation is why it took so long to put the rebellion down, but even they could not prevent the reestablishment of white power in South Central Los Angeles. Not just because of being militarily out gunned, but because they had no revolutionary political program despite all their rhetoric of having been radicalized Also the state came down extremely hard on the rebels. Over 20,000 persons were jailed, 50 were killed and hundreds wounded.
Could a liberated zone have been won, so that dual power could have been established? That possibility existed and still does exist if the people are properly armed and educated Mass resistance with heavy military weaponry may have won serious concessions, one of which is to pull back the cops. We don't know that, this is purely speculation. We do know that this is not the last rebellion in L.A. and other cities. They may come much quicker now that the genie of urban revolution is out of the bag again. We can only hope and prepare. ONWARD TO THE BLACK REVOLUTION!
African Inter-Communalism
African Inter-Communalism
By: Black Autonomy Federation
Originally Published on December 2, 2012
The Black Autonomy Federations / Anarchist ideals lead logically to internationalism or more precisely trans-nationalism, which means beyond the nation-state. Anarchists foresee a time when the nation-state will cease to have any positive value at all for most people, and will in fact be junked. But that time is not yet here, and until it is, we must organize for inter-communalism, or world relations between African people and their revolutionary social movements, instead of their governments and heads of state.
The Black Panther Party first put forward the concept of inter-communalism in the 1960s and, although slightly different, is very much a libertarian concept at its core. (This used to be called "Pan Africanism," but included mainly "revolutionary" governments and colonial or independence movements as allies). Because of the legacy of slavery and continuing economic neocolonialism, which has dispersed Blacks to every continent, it is feasible to speak of Black international revolutionary solidarity.
Here is how African / Black Anarchists see the world: the world is presently organized into competing nation-states, which through the Capitalist Western nations have been responsible for most of the world's famine, imperialism and exploitation of the non-white peoples of the earth. In fact, all states are instruments of oppression. Even though there are governments that claim to be "workers states," "Socialist countries" or so-called "Revolutionary governments," in essence they all have the same function: Dictatorship and oppression of the many over the few. The bankruptcy of the state is further proven when one looks at the millions of dead over two world wars, sparked by European Imperialism, (1914-198 and 1939-1945), and hundreds of "brush wars" incited by the superpowers of the West or Russia in the 1950s and continuing to this day. This includes "workers' states" like China-Russia, Vietnam-China, Vietnam-Cambodia. Somalia- Ethiopia, Russia-Czechoslovakia and others who have gone to war over border disputes, political intrigue, invasion or other hostile action. As long as there are nation-states, there will be war, tension and national enmity.
In fact, the sad part about the decolonization of Africa in the 1960s was that the countries were organized into the Euro-centric ideal of the nation-state, instead of some sort of other formation more applicable to the continent, such as a continental federation. This, of course, was a reflection of the fact that although the Africans were obtaining "flag independence" and all the trappings of the sovereign European state, they instead were not obtaining freedom. The Europeans still controlled the economies of the African continent, and the nationalist leaders who came to the fore were for the most part the most pliable and conservative possible.
Entire countries of Africa were like a dog with a leash around its neck; although the Europeans could no longer rule the continent directly thorough colonial rule, it now did so through puppets it controlled and defended, like Mobutu in the Congo, Mengistu Haile Mariam, leader of the Derg in Ethiopia, and Kenyatta in Kenya. Many of these men were dictators of the worst sort and their regimes existed strictly because of European finance capital In addition, there were white settler communities in the Portuguese colonies, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, who oppressed the African peoples even worse than the old colonial system. This is why the national liberation movements made their appearances in the 1960s and 70s.
Anarchists support national liberation movements to the degree that they struggle against a colonial or imperialist power; but also note that in almost every instance where such liberation front’s have assumed state power, they have become "State Communist" parties and new dictators over the masses of the people. These include some who had engaged in the mass epic struggles, but also include many based on the most obvious military dictatorship from the start.
They are not progressive and they tolerate no dissent For instance, no sooner had the MPLA government been in power in Angola, than it began to arrest all its left-wing ideological opponents (Maoists, Trotskyites, Anarchists, and others) and began to forcibly quell strikes by workers for higher pay and better working conditions, calling such job actions "blackmail" and 'economic sabotage." And with the Nito Alves affair and his alleged coup attempt, (Alves was a hero of the revolution and a popular military leader), theirs was the first party purge of opponents in the new government. Something similar to this also took place when the Sandinista National Liberation movement took over in Nicaragua in the 1980s. None of this should seem strange or uncharacteristic to Anarchists, when we consider that the Bolshevik party did the same thing when it consolidated state power during the Russian Revolution (1917-1921).
Countries such as Benin, Ethiopia, the People's Republic of the Congo and other "revolutionary" governments in Africa, are not in power as the result of a popular social revolution, but rather because of a military coup or being installed by one of the major world powers Further; many of the national liberation movements were not independent social movements, but were rather under the influence or control of Russia or China as part of their geopolitical struggle against Western imperialism and each other. This is not to say that revolutionary movements should not accept weapons and other material support from an outside power, as long as they remain independent politically and determine their own policies, without such aid being conditional on the political dictates and the "party line" of another country.
But even though we may differ with them politically and tactically in many areas, and even with all their flaws after assuming State power, the revolutionary liberation fighters are our comrades and allies in common struggle against the common enemy - the U.S. imperialist ruling class, while the fight goes on. Their struggle releases the death grip of U.S. and western imperialism or as Anarchists more precisely call it Capitalist world power), and while the fight goes on we are bound together in comradeship and solidarity.
Yet we still cannot overlook atrocities committed by movements like the Khmer Rouge, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement in Cambodia, which just massacred millions of people to carry out rigid Stalinist political policies and to consolidate the country. We must lay this butchery and other crimes committed by State Communism bare for all to see. We do not favor this kind of revolution, which is just sheer power seeking and terrorism against the people. This is why Anarchism has always disagreed with how the Bolsheviks seized power in Soviet Russia; and Stalin's butchery of the Russian people seems to have set a model for the State Communist movements to follow over the years.
The national liberation front’s made one basic mistake of many nationalist movements of oppressed peoples, and that is to organize in a fashion that class distinctions are obliterated. This happened in America, where in the fight for democratic rights, the civil rights movement included Black middle class preachers, teachers and others, and every Black persons was a "brother" or" sister," as long as they were Black. But this simplistic analysis and social reality did not hold for long, because when the Civil rights phase of the American Black struggle had spent itself, “class distinctions” and class struggle came to the fore. They have been getting sharper ever since. Although there are Black mayors and other bureaucrats, and now Obama; they merely serve as pacification agents of the State, "Black faces in high places."
This neocolonial system is similar to the type of neocolonialism which took place in the 3rd World, after many countries had obtained their "independence" in the 1960s. Europe still maintained control through puppet politicians and a command of the petty bourgeois class, who were willing to barter the freedom of the people for personal gains. These people merely preside over the misery of the masses. They are not a serious concession to our struggle. They are put in office to co-opt the struggle and deaden the people to their pain.
So while Black revolutionaries generally favor the ideas of African inter-communalism, they want principled revolutionary unity. Of course, the greatest service we can render the peoples of the so-called "Third World" of Africa, Asia and Latin America, is to make a revolution here in North America - in the belly of the beast. For in freeing ourselves, we get the U.S. imperialist ruling class off both our backs.
We wish to build an international Black organization against Capitalism, racism, colonialism, imperialism, and military dictatorship, which could more effectively fight the Capitalist powers and create a world federation of Black peoples. We want to unite a Brother or Sister in North America with the Black peoples of Australia and Oceania, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, Asia, the Middle East, and those millions of our people Living in Britain and other Western European countries. We want to unite tribes, nations and Black cultures into an international body of grassroots and struggling forces.
All over the world, Black people are being oppressed by their national governments. Some are colonial subjects in European countries, and one or another of the African States exploits some. Only a Social revolution will lead to Black unity and freedom. However this will only be possible when there exists an international Black revolutionary organization and social movement. An organization which can coordinate the resistance struggles everywhere of African peoples; actually a network of such organizations, resistance movements, which are spread all over the world based on a consensus for revolutionary struggle. This concept accepts any level of violence that will be necessary to enforce the demands of the people and workers.
In those countries where an open Black revolutionary movement would be subjected to fierce repression by the state, such as in South Africa and in same Black puppet dictatorships in other parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, it would be necessary to wage an underground resistance struggle. Further, the state has grown more and more violent, with widespread torture and executions, prisons and maximum police controls, spying and deprivation of democratic rights, police brutality and murder. Clearly such governments-and all governments-must be overthrown. They will not fall due to internal economic or political problems, but must be defeated and dismantled. So we call for an international resistance movement to overthrow governments and the system of Capitalist world government.
But even in the Western imperialist countries, we must recognize the legitimacy of revolutionary violence. When such forms of revolutionary action are required, however, a clear difference should be seen among revolutionaries between simple terrorism without popular support and coherent political program and guerrilla warfare arising out of the collectively felt frustrations of the common people and workers. The use of military methods would be necessary in a case where the violence of the state made it imperative for Black revolutionaries to defend themselves by taking the armed offensive against the state and the ruling class, and to expropriate the wealth of the Capitalist class during the Social revolution.
The Black liberation movement needs an organization capable of international coordination of the Black liberation struggle, a world federation of African peoples. Although this would not just be an Anarchist movement, a federation like this would be made effective than any group of states, whether the United Nation or the Organization of African Unity, in freeing the Black masses. It would involve the masses of people themselves, not just national leaders or nation states.
The military dictators and government bureaucrats have only proven that they know how to spend money on pomp and circumstance, but not how to dismantle the last vestiges of colonialism in South Africa or defeat Western neocolonialist intrigues. Africa is still the poorest of the World's continents, while materially the richest. The contrast is clear: Millions of people are starving in much of Equatorial Africa, but the tribal chiefs, politicians and military dictators, are driving around in Mercedes and living in luxury villas, while they do the bidding of Western European and American bankers through the International Monetary Fund. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution!
Our ideas about the importance of inter-communalism are based on a firm belief that only a federation of free Autonomous peoples will bring true Black power to the masses "Power to the people" does not mean a government or political party to rule in their name, but social and political power in the hands of the people themselves. The only real "people's power" is the power to make their decisions on matters of importance, and to merely elect someone else to do so, or to have a dictatorship forced down their throats is not freedom. True freedom is to have full self-determination about one's social economic and cultural development. The future is Anarchist Communism and Autonomy, not the nation-state, bloody dictators, Capitalism or wage slavery.
By: Black Autonomy Federation
Originally Published on December 2, 2012
The Black Autonomy Federations / Anarchist ideals lead logically to internationalism or more precisely trans-nationalism, which means beyond the nation-state. Anarchists foresee a time when the nation-state will cease to have any positive value at all for most people, and will in fact be junked. But that time is not yet here, and until it is, we must organize for inter-communalism, or world relations between African people and their revolutionary social movements, instead of their governments and heads of state.
The Black Panther Party first put forward the concept of inter-communalism in the 1960s and, although slightly different, is very much a libertarian concept at its core. (This used to be called "Pan Africanism," but included mainly "revolutionary" governments and colonial or independence movements as allies). Because of the legacy of slavery and continuing economic neocolonialism, which has dispersed Blacks to every continent, it is feasible to speak of Black international revolutionary solidarity.
Here is how African / Black Anarchists see the world: the world is presently organized into competing nation-states, which through the Capitalist Western nations have been responsible for most of the world's famine, imperialism and exploitation of the non-white peoples of the earth. In fact, all states are instruments of oppression. Even though there are governments that claim to be "workers states," "Socialist countries" or so-called "Revolutionary governments," in essence they all have the same function: Dictatorship and oppression of the many over the few. The bankruptcy of the state is further proven when one looks at the millions of dead over two world wars, sparked by European Imperialism, (1914-198 and 1939-1945), and hundreds of "brush wars" incited by the superpowers of the West or Russia in the 1950s and continuing to this day. This includes "workers' states" like China-Russia, Vietnam-China, Vietnam-Cambodia. Somalia- Ethiopia, Russia-Czechoslovakia and others who have gone to war over border disputes, political intrigue, invasion or other hostile action. As long as there are nation-states, there will be war, tension and national enmity.
In fact, the sad part about the decolonization of Africa in the 1960s was that the countries were organized into the Euro-centric ideal of the nation-state, instead of some sort of other formation more applicable to the continent, such as a continental federation. This, of course, was a reflection of the fact that although the Africans were obtaining "flag independence" and all the trappings of the sovereign European state, they instead were not obtaining freedom. The Europeans still controlled the economies of the African continent, and the nationalist leaders who came to the fore were for the most part the most pliable and conservative possible.
Entire countries of Africa were like a dog with a leash around its neck; although the Europeans could no longer rule the continent directly thorough colonial rule, it now did so through puppets it controlled and defended, like Mobutu in the Congo, Mengistu Haile Mariam, leader of the Derg in Ethiopia, and Kenyatta in Kenya. Many of these men were dictators of the worst sort and their regimes existed strictly because of European finance capital In addition, there were white settler communities in the Portuguese colonies, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, who oppressed the African peoples even worse than the old colonial system. This is why the national liberation movements made their appearances in the 1960s and 70s.
Anarchists support national liberation movements to the degree that they struggle against a colonial or imperialist power; but also note that in almost every instance where such liberation front’s have assumed state power, they have become "State Communist" parties and new dictators over the masses of the people. These include some who had engaged in the mass epic struggles, but also include many based on the most obvious military dictatorship from the start.
They are not progressive and they tolerate no dissent For instance, no sooner had the MPLA government been in power in Angola, than it began to arrest all its left-wing ideological opponents (Maoists, Trotskyites, Anarchists, and others) and began to forcibly quell strikes by workers for higher pay and better working conditions, calling such job actions "blackmail" and 'economic sabotage." And with the Nito Alves affair and his alleged coup attempt, (Alves was a hero of the revolution and a popular military leader), theirs was the first party purge of opponents in the new government. Something similar to this also took place when the Sandinista National Liberation movement took over in Nicaragua in the 1980s. None of this should seem strange or uncharacteristic to Anarchists, when we consider that the Bolshevik party did the same thing when it consolidated state power during the Russian Revolution (1917-1921).
Countries such as Benin, Ethiopia, the People's Republic of the Congo and other "revolutionary" governments in Africa, are not in power as the result of a popular social revolution, but rather because of a military coup or being installed by one of the major world powers Further; many of the national liberation movements were not independent social movements, but were rather under the influence or control of Russia or China as part of their geopolitical struggle against Western imperialism and each other. This is not to say that revolutionary movements should not accept weapons and other material support from an outside power, as long as they remain independent politically and determine their own policies, without such aid being conditional on the political dictates and the "party line" of another country.
But even though we may differ with them politically and tactically in many areas, and even with all their flaws after assuming State power, the revolutionary liberation fighters are our comrades and allies in common struggle against the common enemy - the U.S. imperialist ruling class, while the fight goes on. Their struggle releases the death grip of U.S. and western imperialism or as Anarchists more precisely call it Capitalist world power), and while the fight goes on we are bound together in comradeship and solidarity.
Yet we still cannot overlook atrocities committed by movements like the Khmer Rouge, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement in Cambodia, which just massacred millions of people to carry out rigid Stalinist political policies and to consolidate the country. We must lay this butchery and other crimes committed by State Communism bare for all to see. We do not favor this kind of revolution, which is just sheer power seeking and terrorism against the people. This is why Anarchism has always disagreed with how the Bolsheviks seized power in Soviet Russia; and Stalin's butchery of the Russian people seems to have set a model for the State Communist movements to follow over the years.
The national liberation front’s made one basic mistake of many nationalist movements of oppressed peoples, and that is to organize in a fashion that class distinctions are obliterated. This happened in America, where in the fight for democratic rights, the civil rights movement included Black middle class preachers, teachers and others, and every Black persons was a "brother" or" sister," as long as they were Black. But this simplistic analysis and social reality did not hold for long, because when the Civil rights phase of the American Black struggle had spent itself, “class distinctions” and class struggle came to the fore. They have been getting sharper ever since. Although there are Black mayors and other bureaucrats, and now Obama; they merely serve as pacification agents of the State, "Black faces in high places."
This neocolonial system is similar to the type of neocolonialism which took place in the 3rd World, after many countries had obtained their "independence" in the 1960s. Europe still maintained control through puppet politicians and a command of the petty bourgeois class, who were willing to barter the freedom of the people for personal gains. These people merely preside over the misery of the masses. They are not a serious concession to our struggle. They are put in office to co-opt the struggle and deaden the people to their pain.
So while Black revolutionaries generally favor the ideas of African inter-communalism, they want principled revolutionary unity. Of course, the greatest service we can render the peoples of the so-called "Third World" of Africa, Asia and Latin America, is to make a revolution here in North America - in the belly of the beast. For in freeing ourselves, we get the U.S. imperialist ruling class off both our backs.
We wish to build an international Black organization against Capitalism, racism, colonialism, imperialism, and military dictatorship, which could more effectively fight the Capitalist powers and create a world federation of Black peoples. We want to unite a Brother or Sister in North America with the Black peoples of Australia and Oceania, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, Asia, the Middle East, and those millions of our people Living in Britain and other Western European countries. We want to unite tribes, nations and Black cultures into an international body of grassroots and struggling forces.
All over the world, Black people are being oppressed by their national governments. Some are colonial subjects in European countries, and one or another of the African States exploits some. Only a Social revolution will lead to Black unity and freedom. However this will only be possible when there exists an international Black revolutionary organization and social movement. An organization which can coordinate the resistance struggles everywhere of African peoples; actually a network of such organizations, resistance movements, which are spread all over the world based on a consensus for revolutionary struggle. This concept accepts any level of violence that will be necessary to enforce the demands of the people and workers.
In those countries where an open Black revolutionary movement would be subjected to fierce repression by the state, such as in South Africa and in same Black puppet dictatorships in other parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, it would be necessary to wage an underground resistance struggle. Further, the state has grown more and more violent, with widespread torture and executions, prisons and maximum police controls, spying and deprivation of democratic rights, police brutality and murder. Clearly such governments-and all governments-must be overthrown. They will not fall due to internal economic or political problems, but must be defeated and dismantled. So we call for an international resistance movement to overthrow governments and the system of Capitalist world government.
But even in the Western imperialist countries, we must recognize the legitimacy of revolutionary violence. When such forms of revolutionary action are required, however, a clear difference should be seen among revolutionaries between simple terrorism without popular support and coherent political program and guerrilla warfare arising out of the collectively felt frustrations of the common people and workers. The use of military methods would be necessary in a case where the violence of the state made it imperative for Black revolutionaries to defend themselves by taking the armed offensive against the state and the ruling class, and to expropriate the wealth of the Capitalist class during the Social revolution.
The Black liberation movement needs an organization capable of international coordination of the Black liberation struggle, a world federation of African peoples. Although this would not just be an Anarchist movement, a federation like this would be made effective than any group of states, whether the United Nation or the Organization of African Unity, in freeing the Black masses. It would involve the masses of people themselves, not just national leaders or nation states.
The military dictators and government bureaucrats have only proven that they know how to spend money on pomp and circumstance, but not how to dismantle the last vestiges of colonialism in South Africa or defeat Western neocolonialist intrigues. Africa is still the poorest of the World's continents, while materially the richest. The contrast is clear: Millions of people are starving in much of Equatorial Africa, but the tribal chiefs, politicians and military dictators, are driving around in Mercedes and living in luxury villas, while they do the bidding of Western European and American bankers through the International Monetary Fund. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution!
Our ideas about the importance of inter-communalism are based on a firm belief that only a federation of free Autonomous peoples will bring true Black power to the masses "Power to the people" does not mean a government or political party to rule in their name, but social and political power in the hands of the people themselves. The only real "people's power" is the power to make their decisions on matters of importance, and to merely elect someone else to do so, or to have a dictatorship forced down their throats is not freedom. True freedom is to have full self-determination about one's social economic and cultural development. The future is Anarchist Communism and Autonomy, not the nation-state, bloody dictators, Capitalism or wage slavery.
Black Autonomy Federation: Let's Organize the Hood!
Black Autonomy Federation: Let's Organize the Hood!
By: Black Autonomy Federation
Originally Published on June 9, 2013
Let’s Organize the ‘Hood: Inner City Organizing Projects.
By word or deed, we are being told that revolution is not possible, that we must accept whatever crumbs the white power structure gives us, or that we must join the power elite ourselves. Indeed, both the Left and large segments of the Black nationalist movements are joining the white government by becoming Mayors, U.S. Congressmen, and local politicians who work through the system for reforms. These “radical politicians” tell us that there is no longer any reason to struggle in the streets, that in fact we now can have power under the system itself. That their elections ensure that we are on the road to revolution.
Yet, even after the election of tens of thousands of Black and POC politicians since the 1964 Voting Rights Act, the inner city poor are still desperately poor, there is still substandard housing, police brutality is worse, and the quality of life for millions, even the Black middle class, is eroding. Poverty is at 25% and unemployment is rising in our communities to over 15%, even though it may be improving for the white middle class. Now there is mass imprisonment of millions and tens of thousands have been killed by the police just since the end of the Black Power era (1965-1975). So, in such an environment, running for political office is clearly mis-leadership, if not outright treachery. We will not get free under this system, and we must continue to organize for our survival and liberation. No politician can give you your freedom, even the President, you must take it!
We must rebuild inner city neighborhoods as a community survival program, even while we work to fight racism and capitalism, along with internal colonialism. We need to build a new society, but until then we need to organize and empower poor folks living in deteriorating inner city communities to rebuild substandard housing and create jobs, food and housing cooperatives. Capitalism is a social system with inherent economic inequalities. Not only do the poor pay more for basic amenities, but also they are made the scapegoat of this corrupt system. They are called a “criminal underclass”, “layabouts,” “welfare queens” and other garbage by the rich and their ideological agents; even part of the Black working class echoes this propaganda. Then after they have told their lies, the rich fashion new laws to ensure their unjust rule by starving, humiliating, killing, imprisoning, torturing, policing and otherwise keeping the pressure to survive on the poor themselves.
First, we must recognize that we need a new way of confronting our oppressed situation. How do we get started at this?
This period of widespread social repression is extremely dangerous: one of every three young Black men and almost 60 percent of all female prison inmates are in the so-called “American criminal justice system” (prison, jail, or on parole), high unemployment and social disinvestments are destroying the economic base of many inner city neighborhoods; chemical warfare (drugs) is being used to destabilize our communities and keep us from fighting back; and an epidemic of police violence takes place each day to beat, kill and torture Black men, woman and children and to intimidate the community into fearing white authority—all these and worse are the daily life experiences of poor Black people under this system.
The Poor People’s Survival Movement, (part of a broader program called “Let’s Organize The Hood”), which was first devised by the Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizers, is what is needed in this period for poor and working class Black people. With it as a component part of our Anarchist federation and our political program, we will ultimately build a sociopolitical infrastructure to intervene in every area of Black life: food and housing cooperatives, Black Liberation schools, people’s banks and community mutual aid funds, free medical clinics and hospitals, rodent control and pest extermination programs, cooperative factories, a Black Partisan militia to patrol our communities, the establishment of a Black inter-continental electronic communications network, land and building reclamation projects, public works brigades to rebuild the cities, youth projects, drug clinics, a Black alternate currency and many other programs can be made possible with a mass supported Poor Peoples’ Survival Movement, because it can potentially mobilize millions of our people around specific obtainable objectives, instead of pie in the sky rhetoric by national leaders.
All of these programs in part can satisfy the deep social needs of the Black community, but they are not solutions to our problems, because although we can build a survival economy now, we have to realize it will take a social revolution to overthrow capitalism and obtain full economic self-sufficiency. We will have to fight to obtain full freedom. For instance, we will have to demand money for rebuilding the cities at community and government expense. We will create community public works brigades to rebuild inner city areas, made up of community residents.
One way to raise money for such a project is to demand an end to taxes of workers and the poor, increased taxation of rich and major corporations to finance our social programs.
Even though that would be part of a mass program for the poor, the reality is that this will not happen right away. We just have to build a mass membership group to represent the poor and serve as their organization. Small amounts of donations and other fundraising can serve as the seed money. But then what?
We must begin to go into the poorest, most economically depressed Black and ethnic neighborhoods and not just begin to define the problems, but to feed, clothe and even house people to the limits of our resources, in other ways, build survival collectives as the grassroots basis of the PPSM. This means starting food co-ops, doing insurrectionary squatting to reclaim buildings for community cultural centers and for housing the poor and homeless, building local coalitions against police brutality, starting an underground newspaper or other grassroots media.
This also means that we must join with the people to fight their slumlords, local governments, unemployment and welfare offices, their employers and other exploiters who fleece and oppress the working poor. The particular neighborhood, the city and the region, means that the nature of the struggle in different parts of the country will be different, but what I want to emphasize is we must start out with a perspective from day one to be part of the people, on the very scale of their problems, instead of a middle class “revolutionary study society” like most Left wing and Black nationalist formations are today.
Working out a strategy and tactics that can realistically hasten a revolutionary showdown means it is necessary first to understand where the Black liberation struggle actually stands today. What stage is it in? The truth is that it is in a reactionary period, where opportunist national leaders and politicians still have a hold on the minds of the people. At best we can say that our revolutionary forces are a rebuilding stage and once this is understood, the solutions begin to fall in place for all its problems. Our task is to create a movement that will bring into the struggle large numbers of the most despised sectors of the Black working class.
In truth, before we can build an effective revolutionary movement, we must rebuild the foundations of a mass movement of the urban Black poor and their non-white allies in the barrios, reservations, prisons, ghettos and other poverty pits. This in turn has the effect of throwing other class sectors into battle; students, industrial workers, clerical workers, the unemployed generally and we can even split the white working class. This process actually started in the 1960s in the wake of the civil rights/Black Power and other ethnic liberation movements, but the conservatives have seized the agenda in recent years.
If we can mobilize the Black poor in the urban ghettos as a force against capitalist reaction and the mis-leadership of the Negrosie, we become a serious movement at an early stage of our organizational development. Otherwise, we get sucked into the trap of ‘navel gazing”, issuing grand proclamations, and manifestoes and so on that nobody pays attention to but group members. So the task is to clearly link struggles for the pressing immediate needs of Black people with the revolutionary goal of overturning the whole racist system.
That is why the ideas of the PPSM assume such great importance today. The solution lies in formulating and fighting for a program that can help transform the general discontent and militancy of the urban Black masses into an organized, cohesive, consciously revolutionary force. By presenting and fighting for such a program, a small movement can transform itself into an influential power among the masses of people. Although it is not possible to give an “operating manual” for how to organize the PPSM in each city, here is a simple way to look at it: the main strategic and tactical demand is for Black control of the Black community, (leading to a large scale social revolution in the future). This is nothing new, others have written about it and the demand for Black control has been raised spontaneously in thousands of struggles around the U.S. over the last 50 years. It is obviously a demand that speaks directly to the needs and present understanding of Black people: they want an end to white domination and control over their lives.
At the same time, the struggle for Black control is profoundly revolutionary, because it poses the question of who will have decision-making power over Black people; will we begin to rule ourselves or continue to be under the white capitalist rulers. The realization of this aim of Black autonomy can build the cities into Black fortresses that will be centers of Black counter-power to the entire white power structure of North America. Our aim has to be to make ourselves ungovernable to the white power structure. Make it impossible for the police to patrol our neighborhood, make it impossible for politicians to assume control on the local level and begin to take over the schools and other government resources and use them for the people. We can’t do as the nationalists do, just advocate for reparations or a future nation-state, or now just running for office and administering cities on behalf of the capitalist state.
As they develop within the Black communities, struggles targeted to win control over specific institutions and agencies can pave the way and prepare increasing numbers of people for the all- inclusive goal of total control of their community and of the existing political system. These partial struggles, carried out around issues such as Black control of neighborhood control of the schools, an end to police brutality, decent hospitals under community control and other issues, can be extremely important because through them encouraging victories can be won. We must realize that most Black people don’t belong to social or civic organizations, except for their church or union. They need to feel that they can now belong to something that can produce tangible victories now.
These victories, even if limited to specific areas and issues at first, can help raise the confidence of the community in its own power and lay the basis for broader future struggles. For instance, the following demands could help to promote this process generally:
End police brutality by replacing police occupation forces with a community controlled Black Partisan militia drawn from residents of the community. This Partisan Militia force would not just do “policing,” but deal with civil defense, fire safety, food distribution, youth training, community military preparedness, military communications and a host of other neighborhood safety issues. It would not be a colonial force, a repressive guard force for the downtown white merchants, or any other tool of the oppressor, it would be a true community defense guard made up of neighborhood residents.
The creation of a Black Partisan Militia, not only for purposes of dealing with our own internal oppression and crimes against the people, but to create conditions for defense of the community against racist cops and politicians, feeding and building houses for the poor, holding community meetings, training the community in military tactics, and patrolling the community.
Black grassroots control of all funds allocated to the Black community and control over all plans for renovating and constructing housing and other communal facilities and improvements. The Black community can only get decent housing, end urban homelessness, start to house families on project waiting lists when it gets access to massive capital.
Only the government and major corporations now have access to such resources, we must fight to win these funds for the people, rather than let the bureaucrats and “community development” poverty pimps decide what they want to do with the money to ‘help’ business people and real estate developers.
Beat back layoffs by the corporations who are cutting jobs, running to low wage areas of the world, by fighting budget cuts by politicians and rich capitalists. We have got to build local movements that educate the people to these economic crimes and mobilize them to fight back and stop it. We need to sit-in at the offices of corporation meetings, government hearings and other functions to disrupt local life and be willing to take any other action necessary to win our demands.
We should establish Black community General Assemblies to create dual power and start to make policy decisions and administer the affairs of the Black community. These assemblies should be composed of representatives elected by poor and working class Black people in various community institutions: such as hospitals, welfare centers, libraries, factories — as well as delegates elected on a block basis. They would then be federated into a local Community-wide Assembly for citywide or regional coordination. This would be the beginning of building dual power institutions to challenge and dismantle the government itself.
Educate, agitate and organize the Black community around the issues of the prisons and the mass lockup of Black youth. Show how police brutality, homelessness, poverty, unemployment and the drug economy are brought on by the exploitative system of capitalism is what’s causing the problems in our community. We must certainly down the idea that police and prisons exist in any way keep the Black community safe, or that the police are there to protect us from a criminal class of poor people. We need to show that this government is willing to spend more money to put our kids in prison than send them to college and that we are being confined at a rate ten times that of whites. We must create a mass coalition around this issue, which includes other peoples of color and progressives.
Establish a Black community controlled food system for self-sufficiency and as a way of fighting to end hunger and malnutrition, including a cooperative trucking network, food warehouses, communal farms, farmers’ cooperatives and agricultural unions, inner-city food cooperatives and neighborhood unions and other collective associations. However, this will also include a mass protest campaign challenging the theft of Black farmland by agribusiness corporations and rich white “land barons’ and reclaiming it for our projects This is especially important now that the U.S. government has entered an economic crisis during which it will not longer be able to provide for our needs. We must force the government and the corporations to provide the money for many of these projects, to be administered under our total control.
We must mobilize poor people to be a potent class force in this country and disrupt the system until our demands are met. We are not sectarian or vanguardist, and we may need to join with any authentic organization fighting for the poor to build a mass campaign, whether it’s the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Kensington Welfare Rights Organization, or the countless Black grassroots anti-poverty groups in every city and state, but the main thing is that we must build our own.
We must have an independent self-sustaining survival economy to guarantee full employment to our people, even while we fight the racist and exploitative government and its corporate backers. We demand that the government provide massive economic aid to rebuild the cities, under the control of the people of those communities and we will create public works and building brigades out of the inhabitants of the community. Ghetto housing has to be rebuilt and turned over to the occupants.
Adequate jobs and services must be provided to all community residents, including first preference for all construction jobs in the Black community, instead of the racist job trust system of white-dominated labor unions. We have to unite with progressive unions, poor people’s movements and others to build a broad coalition, but we have to push it beyond reformism and conventional politics. We have to demand reparations for the poor who have been ignored by the government and its rich backers, as well as the middle class Black nationalists.
As we have pointed out, being the victims of extreme inequality in the economy, Black and non-white workers have already begun to organize caucuses in the unions against discrimination against racist hiring and firing and also demanding upgrading and promotions. Also because of high unemployment in their communities and general poverty, they have had to create movements to demand basic services for the poor and homeless instead of on the job issues alone. History has proven that the government will not respond to either workers or the poor until they organize to demand a change and disrupt the system. That is certainly the case where a Black President ignores the distressing conditions of the Black community.
We need only to look at the severity of the problem: In the first six months of 2011, the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of labor Statistics listed official unemployment rates at just over 10 percent of the labor force, in the Black community it is 15-25% +. Under Capitalism, since the 1960’s, half that 10% figure is "normal" and nonsensically considered by Capitalist economists as "full employment" even though this is millions of people consigned to economic poverty of the worst sort. But the government figures are intentionally conservative and do not include those millions who have given up actively searching for jobs, the under-employed (who can't make enough to live on), the part-time workers (who can't find a full time or steady job) and the homeless (now between 4-5 million alone).
Of the millions of people that the government does count as jobless now, only about 5-7 million are now given any unemployment compensation or other federal or state aid; the rest are left to starve, steal or hustle for their survival, and many who are receiving benefits face the prospect of having them cut off at any time, due to government austerity policies.
A person without a job under the Capitalist system is counted as nothing. Yet, every worker has the human right to a job or an income benefit. It is only under Capitalism where workers are dismissed form employment in times of business crisis, overproduction, and depression or just to save labor costs through less workers and more speed-up. And some workers cannot find jobs in the Capitalist labor market because of lack of skills, or racial and other social discrimination.
But the government's official figures lie; private researchers state that the total number of people who want full time jobs and thus cannot find them, along with the officials statistics amounts to nearly 17.3 million persons, an even truer figure is 20 million unemployed people in the USA at this time. Clearly then this is a crisis situation of broad proportions, but all the government is doing is juggling and hiding figures. Yet the figures do show that Blacks, Latinos and women are bearing the brunt of the current depression The National Urban League in its "Hidden Unemployment Index" (included as part of its annual "State of Black America" report) reports levels of almost 17 percent for Black adults 25 and older and incredible levels of 25-30 percent for Black teens and young adults 17-24 years of age. In fact, Black youth unemployment has not declined much since the 1974-1975 recession.
It has stayed at an official level of 15-20 percent, but in some inner city neighborhoods of the major cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, the real unemployment rate for young people is more like 30-40 percent. For Black youth the unemployment rate is at least two to three times higher than that of white youth. Capitalism is making economic exiles of Black people as a whole. In fact, some researchers report that there are almost 2 million homeless youth, most of them Black and Latino. Conditions in the inner city are destabilizing whole neighborhoods and cities.
According to economic researchers, while making up 12-15 percent of the total population, Black America represents nearly 40 percent of the United States of America’s poorest population.
The fact is that unemployment is concentrated in the Black and Latino communities and is greatly responsible for the most destructive tendencies in human relations and deteriorating neighborhoods. Crime, prostitution, suicide, drug addiction, gang fighting, mental illness, alcoholism and the break-up of Black families and other social ills are rooted in the lack of jobs and the denial of essential social services in their communities. Since so many die in the streets or in prison, it is actually racial genocide in the form of social neglect.
Unemployment is profitable for the bosses because it drives down the wages of all workers and helps the employers to keep the workforce under control through this "reserve army of labor,” which are allegedly always ready to scab, according to union bureaucrats. Because of pervasive discrimination against Blacks, Latinos and other nationally oppressed workers, including higher levels of unemployment, the jobs they do get are generally on the bottom rung. This is also profitable for the boss and divides the working class to their benefit.
Homelessness is just the most intensified form of unemployment, where in addition to loss of jobs or income, there is loss of housing and lack of access to social services. There are now millions of people who are or have been homeless over the last 15-25 years, because of the deindustrialization of the economy, the Capitalist and government offensive to destroy the unions, to beat back the gains of the civil rights struggle and do away with the affordable housing sector in favor of yuppie gentrification in the cities.
You see the homeless sleeping on the streets in cities, big and small and what this reflects is a total breakdown in the Capitalist State's social services system, in addition to the absolute economic inequality is American society. This heating up of the class war waged by government and the major corporations shows, more than anything, that Capitalism worldwide is undergoing an international financial panic and is really in the beginning stages of a world depression.
Add to the 90 million persons who live below the poverty line and three to five million homeless in the U.S., another 3-5 million homeless in the 12 nations of the European community, along with some 80 million people living in poverty there, with millions more in the Capitalist countries of Japan, Korea and other parts of Asia barely surviving and this can only be accurately called a depression. This is on top of millions more in the Third World because of poverty, the legality of colonialism and unequal trade by the rich countries and financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization.
So although Black workers must organize and fight homeless and unemployment in the U.S., clearly there must be an international movement of workers and poor people to fight this economic deprivation, as part of the overall class struggle. It’s not enough to depend on the relatively privileged unions or the middle class civil rights organizations alone.
In every city in North America, the Black and POC poor communities should organize poor peoples’ organizations to fight for unemployment benefits and jobs for the jobless, the building of decent, affordable low-income housing and an end to homelessness, a universal living wage, as well as against racial discrimination in jobs and housing. Such groups would be democratic organizations, organized on a neighborhood basis, (to ensure that it would be under the control of the people and against infiltration and takeover by liberal or "radical" political parties, or co-optation by the government), which would be federated into a citywide, regional and national organization.
This is what the Poor People’s Survival Movement is designed to do.It would be that mass organization that would become a national Black unemployment league to create a mass fight back movement in this depression. It would be made up of poor peoples community-based groups from all over the country, with delegates elected from all the local groups. Such a national organization could meet to map out a large-scale attack on unemployment, as well as serve as a national clearinghouse on Black unemployment conditions.
On the local level in the Black and poor neighborhoods, Poor People Survival Movement would create the local community unemployment organizations which would establish food and housing cooperatives, lead rent strikes and squatting, initiate land and building reclamation projects, establish producer and consumer cooperatives, distribute food and clothing and provide for other services: they would establish neighborhood medical clinics for free treatment of the homeless and unemployed, rodent control programs, etc. and they would deal with community social problems ( brought on by unemployment ) and other issues of interest They would build hunger marches and other demonstrations and carry the people's wrath to various government offices and to the businesses of the rich.
Not only would the unemployment councils be a way of fighting for jobs and unemployment benefits, but also the local groups would be a way to a obtain community self-sufficiency and direct democracy, instead of depending on city hall, Congress or the President. This radical self-reliance organizing helps lead to the kind of confidence among the masses that makes a Black municipal commune a serious possibility.Politicians speak down to the people, the PPSM carries the voice of the people upward with the demands of the people, and then the organization can fight for it.
One of the most important functions of an unemployment movement is to obtain unity between the employed and unemployed or homeless, and workers solidarity across race lines.
It is important that although we are talking about uniting the poor generally, that we want to be sure that our own Black communities, suffering more than anybody, are in the lead. We will not accept arguments that the Black poor or homeless folks should follow behind white middle class radicals, who have never been poor a day in their lives. We want unity, but not exploitation of our people, as has happened too many times in the past by so-called white radicals claiming to organize Black people.
Finally, the employed and unemployed must work together to struggle against the Boss class if they are to obtain any serious gains against low wages and poverty during this period of economic crisis. The unemployed, who would even walk the picket lines with workers and refuse to scab just to get a job, could support workers who are on strike or protesting the boss. In turn, workers would form an unemployed caucus in their trade unions to allow union representation of these workers and also force such unions to provide food and other necessities, make funds and training available to the unemployed, as well as throw the weight of the unions into the fight for decent jobs and housing for all workers. The Capitalist bosses will not be moved otherwise. MAKE THE BOSSES PAY FOR THEIR ECONOMIC CRISIS!
Here is what a united movement of workers and homeless must demand:
1. Full employment (zero unemployment) for all workers at union wage.
2. Establishment of a shorter workweek, so that workers would be paid at the rate for 40 hours of work for 20 hours a week on the job, expansion of job sharing so that more can be employed.
3. End homelessness, build and make available decent affordable housing for all. Repeal all loitering, anti-panhandling and other laws against the homeless.
4. End the war budget and use those funds for decent, low-income housing, better schools, hospitals and clinics, libraries, parks and public transportation, and job creation.
5. End racism and sexism in job opportunities and relief benefits.
6. Jobs or a guaranteed income for all.
7. Full federal and state benefits for unemployed workers and their families, including corporate and government funds to pay the bills, rents and debts for any laid off worker and unemployment compensation at 100 percent of regular paid wage, lasting the full length of a worker's period of unemployment
8. Universal living wage and/or national minimum wage set at prevailing union entry wage, for all working people. Increase the government minimum wage to $15-20 an hour as mandated by the workers themselves.
9. We must demand and take away government and corporate funds by any means necessary to establish a massive non-government public works program to provide jobs (with full union rights and wage scale) to rebuild the inner cities and provide needed social services. The program and its funds should be under the control of committees democratically elected from poor and Black neighborhoods, to avoid "poverty pimps" and rip off job agencies, or government bureaucrats.
10. Free all persons in prison for crimes of economic survival; jail corrupt corporate insider traders, bankers and/or racketeer business people.
These and the demands previously mentioned are merely a survival program and agenda for unemployed workers; the real answer is a social revolution, the elimination of Capitalism and workers' ownership of the economy and society. This is a vital first step however. There would be no unemployment or social need for wage labor in an Libertarian socialist society. People could live a decent life without exploiting each other and they do not have to have money to receive decent medical care or housing, it is a human right for all.
Building A Memphis Poor People’s Survival Movement
Memphis, TN. was recently called the poorest big city in the nation by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is the ruling elite, with its long history of structural racism, malign neglect, and class oppression of the poor and low income workers, which has created this state of affairs which continues down to this day. As is always the case, it is the Black working class, immigrants, and the elderly that are suffering more than anyone in American society, whether it is unemployment, poverty, mass imprisonment, etc. Even with a so-called “recovery” from a depression or deep business recession, we can be sure that poor communities will remain poor and powerless. This is long-term economic apartheid, racial and economic segregation of Black people/POC, which has made our communities into a beggar class. Now, the rich ruling class is threatening to extend this same kind of impoverishment of the Black workers and poor to even more people, not just to “destroy the middle class”, but to create an economic dictatorship where only the rich will have financial resources, and social program money that would go to the working and poor people will be transferred directly to the rich class. This would be an outright corporate fascist state, where only those who own corporate and the means of production will have any rights.
“Government Austerity, Sequestration…corporate downsizing…”whatever we call it, this is now the greatest threat to the economic security of both poor and working peoples in this country. It is being unleashed right now by the Capitalist state and its government flunkies, on a scale greater than anything seen since the period before the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It threatens to plunge the people of the USA into the deepest poverty since before the even the “New Deal Policies” of the Roosevelt government that arose during the Great Depression to afford the people some relief, and produce Social Security as one of its lasting programs. The rich did not give in to creation of the program, it took a long fight by poor people’s movements to enact Social Security and all the social programs which followed over the years, and although they are government administered programs, we should find a way to subvert them and use them to make the rich pay for this economic crisis. We realize that some so-called “radical” and Anarchists oppose this posture, but we should not starve people on narrow political principles alone. In fact, we should make the take over these programs from government bureaucrats, put them in the hands of the people themselves to administer, and should make the government convert all its billions of dollars in military spending to provide for the social needs of the people.
Yet, the which radical Occupy Wall Street movement and its local affiliate, Occupy Memphis, which came together over about two years ago, was supposed to be that radical social movement which would take the rich on and defeat them, on behalf of all the people. However, this movement is clearly based on the white middle class, and is hostile to genuine radicals, peoples of color, and more militant political tendencies. It is stifled by its own internal racism and liberal reformism, it simply is not a true revolutionary tendency, even though the Left and even segments of the Black nationalist movement hailed its coming as “true liberation”. Black Autonomy saw through this, and raised serious criticisms, which have now been adopted by many others since the luster has worn off the new movement, and we can see it for what it is.
The Poor Peoples Survival Movement, created by Black Autonomy Federation, is a new radical social movement being organized that has to engage in confrontations with the city and local area governments, as well as with the economic elite, especially FedEX, (the largest employer in the city of Memphis), the Regions Bank and other investment banks, the Chamber of Commerce, and other ruling class institutions, who give orders to the gov’t administration and sets the real economic policies for this city, rather than politicians. Their city budget starves the Black community to death, while ensuring that white middle class area, tourist sites, and businesses are well take care of with corporate welfare and business contracts.
The Poor People’s Survival Movement has to challenge mass unemployment by building an activist unemployment movement of the thousands of out-of-work laborers and homeless in this area; it has to fight for more taxes on the rich and end its one-way class warfare; we have to fight to end taxation of food and the highest state sales taxes in the country, which are clearly socio-economic discrimination; we have to fight austerity measures by the gov’t to make poor and working people pay for this economic crisis by cutting their Social Security benefits and gouging Medicare and Medicaid. We have to challenge the local gov’t and mayor, who have let FedEx and other businesses get by with paying virtually no taxes, and by paying these companies hundreds of millions in corporate welfare. We have to bring a mass coalition of folks together, many of whom have never even been to a demonstration or joined a protest movement in their lives, but who have to protest now for sheer survival of themselves and their families.
Although we obviously will not turn away whites as members, we cannot get hung up with organizing the white middle class, but rather the Black working class and poor, that must be the base of our organizing, the very people who have been ignored by Occupy Memphis, and the Occupy Wall Street movement generally. Since Memphis is a majority Black city, we must put the majority of our efforts in the Black community.
So although we talk in terms of a broad sweep of organizing a people people’s movement, the truth is that you must begin very modestly in our hometowns, or the place where we are located now to create the PPSM. There are very important issues, effecting millions, but we must convince just a few people first, and with these few, we can begin to change the world. Actual poor people, as opposed to white middle class organizers in their name, are the force to change the world. We are suffering greatly in this period, but we are suffering more because we are not organized to resist the rich people and their government who are starving us. So how do we start?
This means that we must build a movement from scratch, and we must do it in a very simple fashion: bring together a small group of activists and connect with the poorest communities. We must build an organization of organizers, and plan our next steps carefully. We have already built a core group, now we must build an organization, educate our members, and then mobilize. We must hold marches, street demonstrations, and protests of our own to challenge the city government and the elite of this city. We need to examine how we can subvert local government and business meetings, whether city council meetings, that of the Mayor, or the Chamber of Commerce, and turn them into a rally for the people. We need to hold mass assemblies in recreation centers, libraries, and at other public locations, as well as at street corners. Our strategy has to be different from OWS’s long-term occupation, which might work in NYC, but does not appear to be the best strategy for Memphis, unless it is at the very offices of these corporations of gov’t officials, not outside on the streets sleeping in tents as the guest of the government.
How should we conduct each meeting of the Poor People’s Survival Movement?
1. We should have one internal strategy meeting, and one grassroots public meeting, each month for the Memphis PPSM. Each meeting should have a specific theme or focus so that we can stay grounded, not lose time to general discussions and endless debates. For, instance, power structure research, how poverty is structured in Memphis, the city budget, and other issues should dominate our discussions. We should argue over how to do it, rather than what we should do.
2. Each meeting should last no more than 2 hours, and after that we should stay in touch by email or phone calls between meetings.
3. Meetings should be held in a public library or other free space as first priority.
4. Each meeting should have a different moderator, who should be at the meeting.
5. We should respect each person’s right to speak.
If we start by holding these public meetings, which are both a study group as well as an action planning meeting, we can build a winning strategy with a variety of tactics. It will not be easy, because we are a new movement and there will be tremendous opposition from the rich and their agents, but if we persevere we will succeed over the long run.
This is only part of the issue, and this is not the entire program, which covers many other areas.
By: Black Autonomy Federation
Originally Published on June 9, 2013
Let’s Organize the ‘Hood: Inner City Organizing Projects.
By word or deed, we are being told that revolution is not possible, that we must accept whatever crumbs the white power structure gives us, or that we must join the power elite ourselves. Indeed, both the Left and large segments of the Black nationalist movements are joining the white government by becoming Mayors, U.S. Congressmen, and local politicians who work through the system for reforms. These “radical politicians” tell us that there is no longer any reason to struggle in the streets, that in fact we now can have power under the system itself. That their elections ensure that we are on the road to revolution.
Yet, even after the election of tens of thousands of Black and POC politicians since the 1964 Voting Rights Act, the inner city poor are still desperately poor, there is still substandard housing, police brutality is worse, and the quality of life for millions, even the Black middle class, is eroding. Poverty is at 25% and unemployment is rising in our communities to over 15%, even though it may be improving for the white middle class. Now there is mass imprisonment of millions and tens of thousands have been killed by the police just since the end of the Black Power era (1965-1975). So, in such an environment, running for political office is clearly mis-leadership, if not outright treachery. We will not get free under this system, and we must continue to organize for our survival and liberation. No politician can give you your freedom, even the President, you must take it!
We must rebuild inner city neighborhoods as a community survival program, even while we work to fight racism and capitalism, along with internal colonialism. We need to build a new society, but until then we need to organize and empower poor folks living in deteriorating inner city communities to rebuild substandard housing and create jobs, food and housing cooperatives. Capitalism is a social system with inherent economic inequalities. Not only do the poor pay more for basic amenities, but also they are made the scapegoat of this corrupt system. They are called a “criminal underclass”, “layabouts,” “welfare queens” and other garbage by the rich and their ideological agents; even part of the Black working class echoes this propaganda. Then after they have told their lies, the rich fashion new laws to ensure their unjust rule by starving, humiliating, killing, imprisoning, torturing, policing and otherwise keeping the pressure to survive on the poor themselves.
First, we must recognize that we need a new way of confronting our oppressed situation. How do we get started at this?
This period of widespread social repression is extremely dangerous: one of every three young Black men and almost 60 percent of all female prison inmates are in the so-called “American criminal justice system” (prison, jail, or on parole), high unemployment and social disinvestments are destroying the economic base of many inner city neighborhoods; chemical warfare (drugs) is being used to destabilize our communities and keep us from fighting back; and an epidemic of police violence takes place each day to beat, kill and torture Black men, woman and children and to intimidate the community into fearing white authority—all these and worse are the daily life experiences of poor Black people under this system.
The Poor People’s Survival Movement, (part of a broader program called “Let’s Organize The Hood”), which was first devised by the Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizers, is what is needed in this period for poor and working class Black people. With it as a component part of our Anarchist federation and our political program, we will ultimately build a sociopolitical infrastructure to intervene in every area of Black life: food and housing cooperatives, Black Liberation schools, people’s banks and community mutual aid funds, free medical clinics and hospitals, rodent control and pest extermination programs, cooperative factories, a Black Partisan militia to patrol our communities, the establishment of a Black inter-continental electronic communications network, land and building reclamation projects, public works brigades to rebuild the cities, youth projects, drug clinics, a Black alternate currency and many other programs can be made possible with a mass supported Poor Peoples’ Survival Movement, because it can potentially mobilize millions of our people around specific obtainable objectives, instead of pie in the sky rhetoric by national leaders.
All of these programs in part can satisfy the deep social needs of the Black community, but they are not solutions to our problems, because although we can build a survival economy now, we have to realize it will take a social revolution to overthrow capitalism and obtain full economic self-sufficiency. We will have to fight to obtain full freedom. For instance, we will have to demand money for rebuilding the cities at community and government expense. We will create community public works brigades to rebuild inner city areas, made up of community residents.
One way to raise money for such a project is to demand an end to taxes of workers and the poor, increased taxation of rich and major corporations to finance our social programs.
Even though that would be part of a mass program for the poor, the reality is that this will not happen right away. We just have to build a mass membership group to represent the poor and serve as their organization. Small amounts of donations and other fundraising can serve as the seed money. But then what?
We must begin to go into the poorest, most economically depressed Black and ethnic neighborhoods and not just begin to define the problems, but to feed, clothe and even house people to the limits of our resources, in other ways, build survival collectives as the grassroots basis of the PPSM. This means starting food co-ops, doing insurrectionary squatting to reclaim buildings for community cultural centers and for housing the poor and homeless, building local coalitions against police brutality, starting an underground newspaper or other grassroots media.
This also means that we must join with the people to fight their slumlords, local governments, unemployment and welfare offices, their employers and other exploiters who fleece and oppress the working poor. The particular neighborhood, the city and the region, means that the nature of the struggle in different parts of the country will be different, but what I want to emphasize is we must start out with a perspective from day one to be part of the people, on the very scale of their problems, instead of a middle class “revolutionary study society” like most Left wing and Black nationalist formations are today.
Working out a strategy and tactics that can realistically hasten a revolutionary showdown means it is necessary first to understand where the Black liberation struggle actually stands today. What stage is it in? The truth is that it is in a reactionary period, where opportunist national leaders and politicians still have a hold on the minds of the people. At best we can say that our revolutionary forces are a rebuilding stage and once this is understood, the solutions begin to fall in place for all its problems. Our task is to create a movement that will bring into the struggle large numbers of the most despised sectors of the Black working class.
In truth, before we can build an effective revolutionary movement, we must rebuild the foundations of a mass movement of the urban Black poor and their non-white allies in the barrios, reservations, prisons, ghettos and other poverty pits. This in turn has the effect of throwing other class sectors into battle; students, industrial workers, clerical workers, the unemployed generally and we can even split the white working class. This process actually started in the 1960s in the wake of the civil rights/Black Power and other ethnic liberation movements, but the conservatives have seized the agenda in recent years.
If we can mobilize the Black poor in the urban ghettos as a force against capitalist reaction and the mis-leadership of the Negrosie, we become a serious movement at an early stage of our organizational development. Otherwise, we get sucked into the trap of ‘navel gazing”, issuing grand proclamations, and manifestoes and so on that nobody pays attention to but group members. So the task is to clearly link struggles for the pressing immediate needs of Black people with the revolutionary goal of overturning the whole racist system.
That is why the ideas of the PPSM assume such great importance today. The solution lies in formulating and fighting for a program that can help transform the general discontent and militancy of the urban Black masses into an organized, cohesive, consciously revolutionary force. By presenting and fighting for such a program, a small movement can transform itself into an influential power among the masses of people. Although it is not possible to give an “operating manual” for how to organize the PPSM in each city, here is a simple way to look at it: the main strategic and tactical demand is for Black control of the Black community, (leading to a large scale social revolution in the future). This is nothing new, others have written about it and the demand for Black control has been raised spontaneously in thousands of struggles around the U.S. over the last 50 years. It is obviously a demand that speaks directly to the needs and present understanding of Black people: they want an end to white domination and control over their lives.
At the same time, the struggle for Black control is profoundly revolutionary, because it poses the question of who will have decision-making power over Black people; will we begin to rule ourselves or continue to be under the white capitalist rulers. The realization of this aim of Black autonomy can build the cities into Black fortresses that will be centers of Black counter-power to the entire white power structure of North America. Our aim has to be to make ourselves ungovernable to the white power structure. Make it impossible for the police to patrol our neighborhood, make it impossible for politicians to assume control on the local level and begin to take over the schools and other government resources and use them for the people. We can’t do as the nationalists do, just advocate for reparations or a future nation-state, or now just running for office and administering cities on behalf of the capitalist state.
As they develop within the Black communities, struggles targeted to win control over specific institutions and agencies can pave the way and prepare increasing numbers of people for the all- inclusive goal of total control of their community and of the existing political system. These partial struggles, carried out around issues such as Black control of neighborhood control of the schools, an end to police brutality, decent hospitals under community control and other issues, can be extremely important because through them encouraging victories can be won. We must realize that most Black people don’t belong to social or civic organizations, except for their church or union. They need to feel that they can now belong to something that can produce tangible victories now.
These victories, even if limited to specific areas and issues at first, can help raise the confidence of the community in its own power and lay the basis for broader future struggles. For instance, the following demands could help to promote this process generally:
End police brutality by replacing police occupation forces with a community controlled Black Partisan militia drawn from residents of the community. This Partisan Militia force would not just do “policing,” but deal with civil defense, fire safety, food distribution, youth training, community military preparedness, military communications and a host of other neighborhood safety issues. It would not be a colonial force, a repressive guard force for the downtown white merchants, or any other tool of the oppressor, it would be a true community defense guard made up of neighborhood residents.
The creation of a Black Partisan Militia, not only for purposes of dealing with our own internal oppression and crimes against the people, but to create conditions for defense of the community against racist cops and politicians, feeding and building houses for the poor, holding community meetings, training the community in military tactics, and patrolling the community.
Black grassroots control of all funds allocated to the Black community and control over all plans for renovating and constructing housing and other communal facilities and improvements. The Black community can only get decent housing, end urban homelessness, start to house families on project waiting lists when it gets access to massive capital.
Only the government and major corporations now have access to such resources, we must fight to win these funds for the people, rather than let the bureaucrats and “community development” poverty pimps decide what they want to do with the money to ‘help’ business people and real estate developers.
Beat back layoffs by the corporations who are cutting jobs, running to low wage areas of the world, by fighting budget cuts by politicians and rich capitalists. We have got to build local movements that educate the people to these economic crimes and mobilize them to fight back and stop it. We need to sit-in at the offices of corporation meetings, government hearings and other functions to disrupt local life and be willing to take any other action necessary to win our demands.
We should establish Black community General Assemblies to create dual power and start to make policy decisions and administer the affairs of the Black community. These assemblies should be composed of representatives elected by poor and working class Black people in various community institutions: such as hospitals, welfare centers, libraries, factories — as well as delegates elected on a block basis. They would then be federated into a local Community-wide Assembly for citywide or regional coordination. This would be the beginning of building dual power institutions to challenge and dismantle the government itself.
Educate, agitate and organize the Black community around the issues of the prisons and the mass lockup of Black youth. Show how police brutality, homelessness, poverty, unemployment and the drug economy are brought on by the exploitative system of capitalism is what’s causing the problems in our community. We must certainly down the idea that police and prisons exist in any way keep the Black community safe, or that the police are there to protect us from a criminal class of poor people. We need to show that this government is willing to spend more money to put our kids in prison than send them to college and that we are being confined at a rate ten times that of whites. We must create a mass coalition around this issue, which includes other peoples of color and progressives.
Establish a Black community controlled food system for self-sufficiency and as a way of fighting to end hunger and malnutrition, including a cooperative trucking network, food warehouses, communal farms, farmers’ cooperatives and agricultural unions, inner-city food cooperatives and neighborhood unions and other collective associations. However, this will also include a mass protest campaign challenging the theft of Black farmland by agribusiness corporations and rich white “land barons’ and reclaiming it for our projects This is especially important now that the U.S. government has entered an economic crisis during which it will not longer be able to provide for our needs. We must force the government and the corporations to provide the money for many of these projects, to be administered under our total control.
We must mobilize poor people to be a potent class force in this country and disrupt the system until our demands are met. We are not sectarian or vanguardist, and we may need to join with any authentic organization fighting for the poor to build a mass campaign, whether it’s the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Kensington Welfare Rights Organization, or the countless Black grassroots anti-poverty groups in every city and state, but the main thing is that we must build our own.
We must have an independent self-sustaining survival economy to guarantee full employment to our people, even while we fight the racist and exploitative government and its corporate backers. We demand that the government provide massive economic aid to rebuild the cities, under the control of the people of those communities and we will create public works and building brigades out of the inhabitants of the community. Ghetto housing has to be rebuilt and turned over to the occupants.
Adequate jobs and services must be provided to all community residents, including first preference for all construction jobs in the Black community, instead of the racist job trust system of white-dominated labor unions. We have to unite with progressive unions, poor people’s movements and others to build a broad coalition, but we have to push it beyond reformism and conventional politics. We have to demand reparations for the poor who have been ignored by the government and its rich backers, as well as the middle class Black nationalists.
As we have pointed out, being the victims of extreme inequality in the economy, Black and non-white workers have already begun to organize caucuses in the unions against discrimination against racist hiring and firing and also demanding upgrading and promotions. Also because of high unemployment in their communities and general poverty, they have had to create movements to demand basic services for the poor and homeless instead of on the job issues alone. History has proven that the government will not respond to either workers or the poor until they organize to demand a change and disrupt the system. That is certainly the case where a Black President ignores the distressing conditions of the Black community.
We need only to look at the severity of the problem: In the first six months of 2011, the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of labor Statistics listed official unemployment rates at just over 10 percent of the labor force, in the Black community it is 15-25% +. Under Capitalism, since the 1960’s, half that 10% figure is "normal" and nonsensically considered by Capitalist economists as "full employment" even though this is millions of people consigned to economic poverty of the worst sort. But the government figures are intentionally conservative and do not include those millions who have given up actively searching for jobs, the under-employed (who can't make enough to live on), the part-time workers (who can't find a full time or steady job) and the homeless (now between 4-5 million alone).
Of the millions of people that the government does count as jobless now, only about 5-7 million are now given any unemployment compensation or other federal or state aid; the rest are left to starve, steal or hustle for their survival, and many who are receiving benefits face the prospect of having them cut off at any time, due to government austerity policies.
A person without a job under the Capitalist system is counted as nothing. Yet, every worker has the human right to a job or an income benefit. It is only under Capitalism where workers are dismissed form employment in times of business crisis, overproduction, and depression or just to save labor costs through less workers and more speed-up. And some workers cannot find jobs in the Capitalist labor market because of lack of skills, or racial and other social discrimination.
But the government's official figures lie; private researchers state that the total number of people who want full time jobs and thus cannot find them, along with the officials statistics amounts to nearly 17.3 million persons, an even truer figure is 20 million unemployed people in the USA at this time. Clearly then this is a crisis situation of broad proportions, but all the government is doing is juggling and hiding figures. Yet the figures do show that Blacks, Latinos and women are bearing the brunt of the current depression The National Urban League in its "Hidden Unemployment Index" (included as part of its annual "State of Black America" report) reports levels of almost 17 percent for Black adults 25 and older and incredible levels of 25-30 percent for Black teens and young adults 17-24 years of age. In fact, Black youth unemployment has not declined much since the 1974-1975 recession.
It has stayed at an official level of 15-20 percent, but in some inner city neighborhoods of the major cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, the real unemployment rate for young people is more like 30-40 percent. For Black youth the unemployment rate is at least two to three times higher than that of white youth. Capitalism is making economic exiles of Black people as a whole. In fact, some researchers report that there are almost 2 million homeless youth, most of them Black and Latino. Conditions in the inner city are destabilizing whole neighborhoods and cities.
According to economic researchers, while making up 12-15 percent of the total population, Black America represents nearly 40 percent of the United States of America’s poorest population.
The fact is that unemployment is concentrated in the Black and Latino communities and is greatly responsible for the most destructive tendencies in human relations and deteriorating neighborhoods. Crime, prostitution, suicide, drug addiction, gang fighting, mental illness, alcoholism and the break-up of Black families and other social ills are rooted in the lack of jobs and the denial of essential social services in their communities. Since so many die in the streets or in prison, it is actually racial genocide in the form of social neglect.
Unemployment is profitable for the bosses because it drives down the wages of all workers and helps the employers to keep the workforce under control through this "reserve army of labor,” which are allegedly always ready to scab, according to union bureaucrats. Because of pervasive discrimination against Blacks, Latinos and other nationally oppressed workers, including higher levels of unemployment, the jobs they do get are generally on the bottom rung. This is also profitable for the boss and divides the working class to their benefit.
Homelessness is just the most intensified form of unemployment, where in addition to loss of jobs or income, there is loss of housing and lack of access to social services. There are now millions of people who are or have been homeless over the last 15-25 years, because of the deindustrialization of the economy, the Capitalist and government offensive to destroy the unions, to beat back the gains of the civil rights struggle and do away with the affordable housing sector in favor of yuppie gentrification in the cities.
You see the homeless sleeping on the streets in cities, big and small and what this reflects is a total breakdown in the Capitalist State's social services system, in addition to the absolute economic inequality is American society. This heating up of the class war waged by government and the major corporations shows, more than anything, that Capitalism worldwide is undergoing an international financial panic and is really in the beginning stages of a world depression.
Add to the 90 million persons who live below the poverty line and three to five million homeless in the U.S., another 3-5 million homeless in the 12 nations of the European community, along with some 80 million people living in poverty there, with millions more in the Capitalist countries of Japan, Korea and other parts of Asia barely surviving and this can only be accurately called a depression. This is on top of millions more in the Third World because of poverty, the legality of colonialism and unequal trade by the rich countries and financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization.
So although Black workers must organize and fight homeless and unemployment in the U.S., clearly there must be an international movement of workers and poor people to fight this economic deprivation, as part of the overall class struggle. It’s not enough to depend on the relatively privileged unions or the middle class civil rights organizations alone.
In every city in North America, the Black and POC poor communities should organize poor peoples’ organizations to fight for unemployment benefits and jobs for the jobless, the building of decent, affordable low-income housing and an end to homelessness, a universal living wage, as well as against racial discrimination in jobs and housing. Such groups would be democratic organizations, organized on a neighborhood basis, (to ensure that it would be under the control of the people and against infiltration and takeover by liberal or "radical" political parties, or co-optation by the government), which would be federated into a citywide, regional and national organization.
This is what the Poor People’s Survival Movement is designed to do.It would be that mass organization that would become a national Black unemployment league to create a mass fight back movement in this depression. It would be made up of poor peoples community-based groups from all over the country, with delegates elected from all the local groups. Such a national organization could meet to map out a large-scale attack on unemployment, as well as serve as a national clearinghouse on Black unemployment conditions.
On the local level in the Black and poor neighborhoods, Poor People Survival Movement would create the local community unemployment organizations which would establish food and housing cooperatives, lead rent strikes and squatting, initiate land and building reclamation projects, establish producer and consumer cooperatives, distribute food and clothing and provide for other services: they would establish neighborhood medical clinics for free treatment of the homeless and unemployed, rodent control programs, etc. and they would deal with community social problems ( brought on by unemployment ) and other issues of interest They would build hunger marches and other demonstrations and carry the people's wrath to various government offices and to the businesses of the rich.
Not only would the unemployment councils be a way of fighting for jobs and unemployment benefits, but also the local groups would be a way to a obtain community self-sufficiency and direct democracy, instead of depending on city hall, Congress or the President. This radical self-reliance organizing helps lead to the kind of confidence among the masses that makes a Black municipal commune a serious possibility.Politicians speak down to the people, the PPSM carries the voice of the people upward with the demands of the people, and then the organization can fight for it.
One of the most important functions of an unemployment movement is to obtain unity between the employed and unemployed or homeless, and workers solidarity across race lines.
It is important that although we are talking about uniting the poor generally, that we want to be sure that our own Black communities, suffering more than anybody, are in the lead. We will not accept arguments that the Black poor or homeless folks should follow behind white middle class radicals, who have never been poor a day in their lives. We want unity, but not exploitation of our people, as has happened too many times in the past by so-called white radicals claiming to organize Black people.
Finally, the employed and unemployed must work together to struggle against the Boss class if they are to obtain any serious gains against low wages and poverty during this period of economic crisis. The unemployed, who would even walk the picket lines with workers and refuse to scab just to get a job, could support workers who are on strike or protesting the boss. In turn, workers would form an unemployed caucus in their trade unions to allow union representation of these workers and also force such unions to provide food and other necessities, make funds and training available to the unemployed, as well as throw the weight of the unions into the fight for decent jobs and housing for all workers. The Capitalist bosses will not be moved otherwise. MAKE THE BOSSES PAY FOR THEIR ECONOMIC CRISIS!
Here is what a united movement of workers and homeless must demand:
1. Full employment (zero unemployment) for all workers at union wage.
2. Establishment of a shorter workweek, so that workers would be paid at the rate for 40 hours of work for 20 hours a week on the job, expansion of job sharing so that more can be employed.
3. End homelessness, build and make available decent affordable housing for all. Repeal all loitering, anti-panhandling and other laws against the homeless.
4. End the war budget and use those funds for decent, low-income housing, better schools, hospitals and clinics, libraries, parks and public transportation, and job creation.
5. End racism and sexism in job opportunities and relief benefits.
6. Jobs or a guaranteed income for all.
7. Full federal and state benefits for unemployed workers and their families, including corporate and government funds to pay the bills, rents and debts for any laid off worker and unemployment compensation at 100 percent of regular paid wage, lasting the full length of a worker's period of unemployment
8. Universal living wage and/or national minimum wage set at prevailing union entry wage, for all working people. Increase the government minimum wage to $15-20 an hour as mandated by the workers themselves.
9. We must demand and take away government and corporate funds by any means necessary to establish a massive non-government public works program to provide jobs (with full union rights and wage scale) to rebuild the inner cities and provide needed social services. The program and its funds should be under the control of committees democratically elected from poor and Black neighborhoods, to avoid "poverty pimps" and rip off job agencies, or government bureaucrats.
10. Free all persons in prison for crimes of economic survival; jail corrupt corporate insider traders, bankers and/or racketeer business people.
These and the demands previously mentioned are merely a survival program and agenda for unemployed workers; the real answer is a social revolution, the elimination of Capitalism and workers' ownership of the economy and society. This is a vital first step however. There would be no unemployment or social need for wage labor in an Libertarian socialist society. People could live a decent life without exploiting each other and they do not have to have money to receive decent medical care or housing, it is a human right for all.
Building A Memphis Poor People’s Survival Movement
Memphis, TN. was recently called the poorest big city in the nation by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is the ruling elite, with its long history of structural racism, malign neglect, and class oppression of the poor and low income workers, which has created this state of affairs which continues down to this day. As is always the case, it is the Black working class, immigrants, and the elderly that are suffering more than anyone in American society, whether it is unemployment, poverty, mass imprisonment, etc. Even with a so-called “recovery” from a depression or deep business recession, we can be sure that poor communities will remain poor and powerless. This is long-term economic apartheid, racial and economic segregation of Black people/POC, which has made our communities into a beggar class. Now, the rich ruling class is threatening to extend this same kind of impoverishment of the Black workers and poor to even more people, not just to “destroy the middle class”, but to create an economic dictatorship where only the rich will have financial resources, and social program money that would go to the working and poor people will be transferred directly to the rich class. This would be an outright corporate fascist state, where only those who own corporate and the means of production will have any rights.
“Government Austerity, Sequestration…corporate downsizing…”whatever we call it, this is now the greatest threat to the economic security of both poor and working peoples in this country. It is being unleashed right now by the Capitalist state and its government flunkies, on a scale greater than anything seen since the period before the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It threatens to plunge the people of the USA into the deepest poverty since before the even the “New Deal Policies” of the Roosevelt government that arose during the Great Depression to afford the people some relief, and produce Social Security as one of its lasting programs. The rich did not give in to creation of the program, it took a long fight by poor people’s movements to enact Social Security and all the social programs which followed over the years, and although they are government administered programs, we should find a way to subvert them and use them to make the rich pay for this economic crisis. We realize that some so-called “radical” and Anarchists oppose this posture, but we should not starve people on narrow political principles alone. In fact, we should make the take over these programs from government bureaucrats, put them in the hands of the people themselves to administer, and should make the government convert all its billions of dollars in military spending to provide for the social needs of the people.
Yet, the which radical Occupy Wall Street movement and its local affiliate, Occupy Memphis, which came together over about two years ago, was supposed to be that radical social movement which would take the rich on and defeat them, on behalf of all the people. However, this movement is clearly based on the white middle class, and is hostile to genuine radicals, peoples of color, and more militant political tendencies. It is stifled by its own internal racism and liberal reformism, it simply is not a true revolutionary tendency, even though the Left and even segments of the Black nationalist movement hailed its coming as “true liberation”. Black Autonomy saw through this, and raised serious criticisms, which have now been adopted by many others since the luster has worn off the new movement, and we can see it for what it is.
The Poor Peoples Survival Movement, created by Black Autonomy Federation, is a new radical social movement being organized that has to engage in confrontations with the city and local area governments, as well as with the economic elite, especially FedEX, (the largest employer in the city of Memphis), the Regions Bank and other investment banks, the Chamber of Commerce, and other ruling class institutions, who give orders to the gov’t administration and sets the real economic policies for this city, rather than politicians. Their city budget starves the Black community to death, while ensuring that white middle class area, tourist sites, and businesses are well take care of with corporate welfare and business contracts.
The Poor People’s Survival Movement has to challenge mass unemployment by building an activist unemployment movement of the thousands of out-of-work laborers and homeless in this area; it has to fight for more taxes on the rich and end its one-way class warfare; we have to fight to end taxation of food and the highest state sales taxes in the country, which are clearly socio-economic discrimination; we have to fight austerity measures by the gov’t to make poor and working people pay for this economic crisis by cutting their Social Security benefits and gouging Medicare and Medicaid. We have to challenge the local gov’t and mayor, who have let FedEx and other businesses get by with paying virtually no taxes, and by paying these companies hundreds of millions in corporate welfare. We have to bring a mass coalition of folks together, many of whom have never even been to a demonstration or joined a protest movement in their lives, but who have to protest now for sheer survival of themselves and their families.
Although we obviously will not turn away whites as members, we cannot get hung up with organizing the white middle class, but rather the Black working class and poor, that must be the base of our organizing, the very people who have been ignored by Occupy Memphis, and the Occupy Wall Street movement generally. Since Memphis is a majority Black city, we must put the majority of our efforts in the Black community.
So although we talk in terms of a broad sweep of organizing a people people’s movement, the truth is that you must begin very modestly in our hometowns, or the place where we are located now to create the PPSM. There are very important issues, effecting millions, but we must convince just a few people first, and with these few, we can begin to change the world. Actual poor people, as opposed to white middle class organizers in their name, are the force to change the world. We are suffering greatly in this period, but we are suffering more because we are not organized to resist the rich people and their government who are starving us. So how do we start?
This means that we must build a movement from scratch, and we must do it in a very simple fashion: bring together a small group of activists and connect with the poorest communities. We must build an organization of organizers, and plan our next steps carefully. We have already built a core group, now we must build an organization, educate our members, and then mobilize. We must hold marches, street demonstrations, and protests of our own to challenge the city government and the elite of this city. We need to examine how we can subvert local government and business meetings, whether city council meetings, that of the Mayor, or the Chamber of Commerce, and turn them into a rally for the people. We need to hold mass assemblies in recreation centers, libraries, and at other public locations, as well as at street corners. Our strategy has to be different from OWS’s long-term occupation, which might work in NYC, but does not appear to be the best strategy for Memphis, unless it is at the very offices of these corporations of gov’t officials, not outside on the streets sleeping in tents as the guest of the government.
How should we conduct each meeting of the Poor People’s Survival Movement?
1. We should have one internal strategy meeting, and one grassroots public meeting, each month for the Memphis PPSM. Each meeting should have a specific theme or focus so that we can stay grounded, not lose time to general discussions and endless debates. For, instance, power structure research, how poverty is structured in Memphis, the city budget, and other issues should dominate our discussions. We should argue over how to do it, rather than what we should do.
2. Each meeting should last no more than 2 hours, and after that we should stay in touch by email or phone calls between meetings.
3. Meetings should be held in a public library or other free space as first priority.
4. Each meeting should have a different moderator, who should be at the meeting.
5. We should respect each person’s right to speak.
If we start by holding these public meetings, which are both a study group as well as an action planning meeting, we can build a winning strategy with a variety of tactics. It will not be easy, because we are a new movement and there will be tremendous opposition from the rich and their agents, but if we persevere we will succeed over the long run.
This is only part of the issue, and this is not the entire program, which covers many other areas.
Vote for Me And I'll set you free!
Vote For Me And I'll Set You Free!
By: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin
Originally Published on May 9. 2013
The Left (including the Black nationalist movement) really is in a backward stage. Rather than building on the legacy of the 1960's protests, we are instead losing ground and taking reactionary positions. We have a so-called Black-faced President in office, and it is clear that he is an agent of the rich and their corporations. Millions of poor and working people voted for him, including records numbers of Black voters, and yet he has done nothing for the poor or working people of this country, and has especially ignored the Black community. There are still massive numbers of Black/POC poor in the prison system from the federal war on drugs, yet he has ignored these prisoners, their families and communities. In addition, Black people are being slaughtered in the streets under color of law, yet the Civil Rights Division of his Justice Department have brought a tiny number of cases against racist killer cops. We have depression levels of poverty and unemployment in the Black community, and he cannot be bothered to take any targeted action to ensure economic equality. He is waging war by armed CIA drones in Africa and other parts of the world as part of a “war against terrorism”, started by his predecessor, George W. Bush, and has increased the number of such killings from the Arabian Peninsula to the Continent of Africa. Thousands of civilians have been killed by these drone and missile strikes, and they are clearly nation-state terrorism.
Yet, neither the left nor civil rights/Black nationalist movements have held any mass street campaigns against his pro-corporate policies, which are destroying our communities and literally starving us to death. Even groups that just a little while ago were saying that they were working for a "Five state nation in the Blackbelt" have apparently given that up for an even worse pipe dream: electoral politics. Chokwe Lumumba, the long time leader of the New African movement, is running for Mayor of Jackson, MS., with a realistic prospect to win, and the movement has started a New African Political Party, with ambition of running for office all over the country. But what does this mean, when revolutionaries decide to “work through the system”? They just say; if you can beat 'em, join 'em. As Bro. Malcolm X once said, they: "...They ain't trying to build no nation, they're trying to climb back on the plantation." Capitalist Political Plantation, that is.
But how did this get started? There have been various Socialist, Communists, Black nationalists and other groups run for office since the 1950’s, with most being perennial candidates with no chance of being elected. But one must go back to passage of the 1964 Voting Rights Act to understand what this is about, in the years of 1964-1972 there were a thousand or so Black and POC politicians elected to office, some of whom were civil rights, Black power, and other activists. Yet the Democrats were still weak, and needed the Black vote in larger numbers to win national elections. So the federal government supported the Southern civil rights protests to make more Blacks eligible to vote.
During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Black activists were talking seriously about creating an independent Black political party in opposition to the Democrats. In 1972, at a Black Power political convention, thousands of these Black nationalist activists and many Democratic Party politicians came together at the Black Power Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. The event was hosted by Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, a prominent Black Democrat, and featured Jessie Jackson, who postured at the time as a Black civil right/Black power militant, and Leroy Jones/Amiri Baraka from Newark, N.J, who had national reputation as an artist, writer, and poet. The high point of this event was that the Black nationalists sold out to Richard Hatcher and the Democrats, who demanded their loyalty in creating an organization to groom and run Black Democrats, instead of the Black nationalists building an independent Black political group. That literally sealed the fate of the Black Power movement being a radical protest movement, in favor of electoralism and conformity. It was a defeat of massive proportions that still continues to resound to this day.
However, they did not fool everyone, and in the late 1970’s a significant number of Black activists came together and created the National Black Independent Political Party, a radical black political party, which was a grassroots activist movement more than an electoral party, but did not totally reject political campaigning. Main thing was it was an authentic expression of the masses for independent Black politics. It spread to cities all over the country, and had become a national movement in a very short period of time. But then along came Jessie Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition, and his runs for the Presidency in the 1980’s. The allure of his campaigns (1984 and1988) caused many to quit the NBIPP, and come back to the Democrats, and shortly thereafter the NBIPP collapsed entirely. It is interesting that along with many calls for “Run, Jessie, Run!, were some by Black nationalists screaming “Nation Time”, which is what Jackson himself was screaming in the 1972 at the Gary Black Power convention.”
Chokwe Lumumba is not the first and only radical who has run for political office, most have failed. But that is not the case here with Lumumba, just as it was not the case with Obama. They apparently have strong backers in the business and banking community, and he is being supported by them for the race in Mississippi. He is the front runner there. The question is what happens when he wins. He wants you to believe that he will be a “revolutionary in office working for the people”. However, if we look at the elections of other radicals like the late Mickey Leland of Texas and Bobby Rush of Chicago, both of whom were in the Black Panther Party, they became conventional liberal politicians, and more importantly nothing improved for the urban Black communities they represented. This has been the case for many other activists who became politicians. The system has the ability to mute protest by revolutionaries to at most liberalism, and then constitute no threat whatsoever to capitalist property relations or hope of Black liberation. We can expect no more from Lumumba, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary by he and his supporters in the New African movement.
All the Left and the Black Nationalist tendencies can offer us is *nothing but running Black/POC/white progressives for Mayor, Governor, or President to "take Obama's or some other politician's place", it is an utter failure. It makes no difference whatsoever if Socialists, Communist, Black nationalists and others are elected to high political because that is not how the rich run this country, that is just a democratic fig-leaf to cover for police state rule. If any candidate runs for office, they need significant financial backing from the business and political establishment if they are to win. Radio and TV ads require large numbers of contributions to any campaign, meaning that they must promise their affluent donors access and obedience. This is why so many are later caught accepting kickbacks and other payoffs from wealthy businessmen. These politicians are not independent actors; they are on the payroll of the rich. So, by adopting electoral politics, these radicals are selling out and admitting that they do not think revolution is possible except by joining the Democrats (because that is where this leads) against the Republicans, and misleading the people with false promises and direction. "Vote for me, and I'll set you free!”
Form Obama on down (*he claims that he was a grassroots community organizer) to Lumumba, these politicians are misleading the masses of people, who invest so much faith in them, to the degree that they do not criticize them or organize in the streets for their own interests. The activist-politicians are misleading the masses of people, just for their personal political gain or to push their pet politics.
They also are under the control of the rich with a hidden agenda. It is clear that we need to recognize that it is the people who make real revolutionary change, not radical or liberal politicians. We need to build an independent movement from the grassroots that has absolutely nothing to do with the establishment of political parties and are not under the control of any politician. Virtually nothing that politicians do is in our best interests anyway, rather than of their own, their donors or political party.
They want to be elected, and will do anything to get elected and stay in office. Politics is about money and power for them, not social justice. We have to go beyond conventional politics, and build a new society. We will not vote out the capitalist class or transform this racist society by electoral action, it is purely a myth. We have to struggle in the streets and communities to dismantle this entire system.
In contrast to this kind of political treachery and sellout, we call upon the people to join with us in building “Let’s Organize the Hood”, the mass program of Memphis Black Autonomy Federation. We are right now fighting in Memphis, TN. to drive out the Mayor and the current entrenched group of political scoundrels working for the white business elite, to force the government to provide more community development resources to the Black community (instead of white tourist sites or white businessmen), to end police brutality and murder by the MPD, and create a mass movement against poverty and unemployment in our community. If you want to join with us in Memphis or to help build a group in your city, then come to the Let’s Organize the ‘Hood: Memphis Black Power Conference on June 8, 2013, in the Little Theater, at Lemoyne-Owen College, 807 Walker Avenue, Memphis, TN., from 10:00 am to 6:00pm.
By: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin
Originally Published on May 9. 2013
The Left (including the Black nationalist movement) really is in a backward stage. Rather than building on the legacy of the 1960's protests, we are instead losing ground and taking reactionary positions. We have a so-called Black-faced President in office, and it is clear that he is an agent of the rich and their corporations. Millions of poor and working people voted for him, including records numbers of Black voters, and yet he has done nothing for the poor or working people of this country, and has especially ignored the Black community. There are still massive numbers of Black/POC poor in the prison system from the federal war on drugs, yet he has ignored these prisoners, their families and communities. In addition, Black people are being slaughtered in the streets under color of law, yet the Civil Rights Division of his Justice Department have brought a tiny number of cases against racist killer cops. We have depression levels of poverty and unemployment in the Black community, and he cannot be bothered to take any targeted action to ensure economic equality. He is waging war by armed CIA drones in Africa and other parts of the world as part of a “war against terrorism”, started by his predecessor, George W. Bush, and has increased the number of such killings from the Arabian Peninsula to the Continent of Africa. Thousands of civilians have been killed by these drone and missile strikes, and they are clearly nation-state terrorism.
Yet, neither the left nor civil rights/Black nationalist movements have held any mass street campaigns against his pro-corporate policies, which are destroying our communities and literally starving us to death. Even groups that just a little while ago were saying that they were working for a "Five state nation in the Blackbelt" have apparently given that up for an even worse pipe dream: electoral politics. Chokwe Lumumba, the long time leader of the New African movement, is running for Mayor of Jackson, MS., with a realistic prospect to win, and the movement has started a New African Political Party, with ambition of running for office all over the country. But what does this mean, when revolutionaries decide to “work through the system”? They just say; if you can beat 'em, join 'em. As Bro. Malcolm X once said, they: "...They ain't trying to build no nation, they're trying to climb back on the plantation." Capitalist Political Plantation, that is.
But how did this get started? There have been various Socialist, Communists, Black nationalists and other groups run for office since the 1950’s, with most being perennial candidates with no chance of being elected. But one must go back to passage of the 1964 Voting Rights Act to understand what this is about, in the years of 1964-1972 there were a thousand or so Black and POC politicians elected to office, some of whom were civil rights, Black power, and other activists. Yet the Democrats were still weak, and needed the Black vote in larger numbers to win national elections. So the federal government supported the Southern civil rights protests to make more Blacks eligible to vote.
During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Black activists were talking seriously about creating an independent Black political party in opposition to the Democrats. In 1972, at a Black Power political convention, thousands of these Black nationalist activists and many Democratic Party politicians came together at the Black Power Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. The event was hosted by Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, a prominent Black Democrat, and featured Jessie Jackson, who postured at the time as a Black civil right/Black power militant, and Leroy Jones/Amiri Baraka from Newark, N.J, who had national reputation as an artist, writer, and poet. The high point of this event was that the Black nationalists sold out to Richard Hatcher and the Democrats, who demanded their loyalty in creating an organization to groom and run Black Democrats, instead of the Black nationalists building an independent Black political group. That literally sealed the fate of the Black Power movement being a radical protest movement, in favor of electoralism and conformity. It was a defeat of massive proportions that still continues to resound to this day.
However, they did not fool everyone, and in the late 1970’s a significant number of Black activists came together and created the National Black Independent Political Party, a radical black political party, which was a grassroots activist movement more than an electoral party, but did not totally reject political campaigning. Main thing was it was an authentic expression of the masses for independent Black politics. It spread to cities all over the country, and had become a national movement in a very short period of time. But then along came Jessie Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition, and his runs for the Presidency in the 1980’s. The allure of his campaigns (1984 and1988) caused many to quit the NBIPP, and come back to the Democrats, and shortly thereafter the NBIPP collapsed entirely. It is interesting that along with many calls for “Run, Jessie, Run!, were some by Black nationalists screaming “Nation Time”, which is what Jackson himself was screaming in the 1972 at the Gary Black Power convention.”
Chokwe Lumumba is not the first and only radical who has run for political office, most have failed. But that is not the case here with Lumumba, just as it was not the case with Obama. They apparently have strong backers in the business and banking community, and he is being supported by them for the race in Mississippi. He is the front runner there. The question is what happens when he wins. He wants you to believe that he will be a “revolutionary in office working for the people”. However, if we look at the elections of other radicals like the late Mickey Leland of Texas and Bobby Rush of Chicago, both of whom were in the Black Panther Party, they became conventional liberal politicians, and more importantly nothing improved for the urban Black communities they represented. This has been the case for many other activists who became politicians. The system has the ability to mute protest by revolutionaries to at most liberalism, and then constitute no threat whatsoever to capitalist property relations or hope of Black liberation. We can expect no more from Lumumba, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary by he and his supporters in the New African movement.
All the Left and the Black Nationalist tendencies can offer us is *nothing but running Black/POC/white progressives for Mayor, Governor, or President to "take Obama's or some other politician's place", it is an utter failure. It makes no difference whatsoever if Socialists, Communist, Black nationalists and others are elected to high political because that is not how the rich run this country, that is just a democratic fig-leaf to cover for police state rule. If any candidate runs for office, they need significant financial backing from the business and political establishment if they are to win. Radio and TV ads require large numbers of contributions to any campaign, meaning that they must promise their affluent donors access and obedience. This is why so many are later caught accepting kickbacks and other payoffs from wealthy businessmen. These politicians are not independent actors; they are on the payroll of the rich. So, by adopting electoral politics, these radicals are selling out and admitting that they do not think revolution is possible except by joining the Democrats (because that is where this leads) against the Republicans, and misleading the people with false promises and direction. "Vote for me, and I'll set you free!”
Form Obama on down (*he claims that he was a grassroots community organizer) to Lumumba, these politicians are misleading the masses of people, who invest so much faith in them, to the degree that they do not criticize them or organize in the streets for their own interests. The activist-politicians are misleading the masses of people, just for their personal political gain or to push their pet politics.
They also are under the control of the rich with a hidden agenda. It is clear that we need to recognize that it is the people who make real revolutionary change, not radical or liberal politicians. We need to build an independent movement from the grassroots that has absolutely nothing to do with the establishment of political parties and are not under the control of any politician. Virtually nothing that politicians do is in our best interests anyway, rather than of their own, their donors or political party.
They want to be elected, and will do anything to get elected and stay in office. Politics is about money and power for them, not social justice. We have to go beyond conventional politics, and build a new society. We will not vote out the capitalist class or transform this racist society by electoral action, it is purely a myth. We have to struggle in the streets and communities to dismantle this entire system.
In contrast to this kind of political treachery and sellout, we call upon the people to join with us in building “Let’s Organize the Hood”, the mass program of Memphis Black Autonomy Federation. We are right now fighting in Memphis, TN. to drive out the Mayor and the current entrenched group of political scoundrels working for the white business elite, to force the government to provide more community development resources to the Black community (instead of white tourist sites or white businessmen), to end police brutality and murder by the MPD, and create a mass movement against poverty and unemployment in our community. If you want to join with us in Memphis or to help build a group in your city, then come to the Let’s Organize the ‘Hood: Memphis Black Power Conference on June 8, 2013, in the Little Theater, at Lemoyne-Owen College, 807 Walker Avenue, Memphis, TN., from 10:00 am to 6:00pm.
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