Internationalism Today: An Interview with Paweł Wargan

By Daniel Benson

Republished from Monthly Review.

What does a progressive foreign policy look like today? How should we understand imperialism? What is at stake in reclaiming an internationalist political horizon for the left? What forms of organization are best adapted for a new international? Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Paweł Wargan discusses these and other questions in the interview that follows. Researcher, activist, and coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International, Wargan is well suited to highlight the prospects for a new internationalism today. The interview is conducted by Daniel Benson, assistant professor of French and Global Studies at St. Francis College and the editor of Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021).

Daniel Benson: I’d like to begin with a discussion of your overall political perspective and development. What are some of the main events or intellectual influences that have impacted your current writing and activism?

Paweł Wargan: I worked in public policy when the last great wave of climate activism emerged. Every Friday, I would make my way through crowds of protesting schoolkids to get to work. Occasionally, some would block the roads. What struck me was that the ideas expressed in these spaces carried a clarity, a creativity, and an urgency that I never saw at work—where ideas were staid, unambitious, never coming close to addressing the urgency of the moment. So, I took to the streets.

You learn through struggle. You build confidence through struggle. You begin to articulate the reasons for your struggle and develop a feel for the possibilities it opens. The great challenge, I learned over time, is that it’s not enough to have good ideas. In large parts of our movements, demands for “system change” resolve into a politics of advocacy that focuses on appealing to existing institutions rather than building new ones. The very form of these protests—they are often held outside government buildings—speaks to that relationship of supplication. We entreat our ruling classes to deliver something that is not in their power to deliver. And we become despondent when we fail. This reflects a poverty of imagination, which has been carefully cultivated by the ideological machinery of capitalism.

Not long after, I had what you might call a eureka moment. I was working on a long report that envisioned what a green transition might look like in Europe. One day, I was editing a section submitted by an Italian architect. In it, he argued that to build sustainable cities Europe needed to shift to prefabricated, high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by parks and public amenities. I was living in Moscow at the time, on the fourteenth floor of a prefabricated high-rise apartment block surrounded by parks and public amenities. I looked out the kitchen window and wondered: What was this society that, many decades ago, began to build the future we are only now envisioning? That led me to study processes of socialist construction.

Fidel Castro once said that when he first read The Communist Manifesto, he began to find explanations for phenomena that are typically explained in terms of individual human failings—moral failings. He began to understand, he said, the historical processes and social processes that produce both great wealth and terrible immiseration. You don’t need a map or microscope to see class divisions, he said. I think about that often. What Castro meant—and what you learn from reading revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Walter Rodney, and others—is that there are observable processes of contradiction and class antagonism that shape the world. The job of the left is not to hover above these processes and preach progressive ideas. This is the domain of idealism, of liberalism. You can’t build the future with ideas. You can’t repair the environment with ideas. You can’t feed the hungry with ideas. Our job is to build power through struggle, at every step seeking to institutionalize that power, building structures that can realize the aspirations of the people. That is what the great processes of socialist construction—past and present—teach us.

DB: I agree that building institutions on the left is vital. I think there is an increasing consciousness among left-leaning thinkers, activists, and scholars of the need to focus on organizational issues, on strategy, on building power, and not merely on symbolic gestures or purely theoretical problems. But recent history has shown the difficulty of creating lasting institutional change: from the anti-World Trade Organization protests of 1999 in Seattle to the Iraq War protests of 2003 to the Occupy movements of 2011. Moreover, even when leftist parties can organize and achieve political power at the national level (for instance, Syriza in 2015), they have proven incapable of challenging dominant global institutions. Or, turning to the Global South, progressive projects have struggled to freely develop (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, among others) in large part due to U.S. imperialism.

I’d like to turn, then, to the question of internationalism and how it relates to building power on the left. I feel that many individuals, students, and even progressive activists see international politics as distant from their everyday life or local struggles. This is very different from, say, the long 1960s, where resistance to the Vietnam War, decolonization, and socialist construction were seen as interrelated and part of the same struggle. Could you explain, first, why internationalism is important to building progressive, leftist institutions? And, second, why you propose the Third International, or Communist International, as an important resource to rebuild internationalism in the contemporary moment?

PW: There is a story I have heard repeatedly—the cast changes, the setting changes, but the story stays roughly the same. Moved by the exploits of Che Guevara, an enthusiastic U.S. socialist travels to Nicaragua. He visits the encampments of the Sandinista movement, which is waging armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. “I want to join your struggle,” they say. “What can I do to help you?” The response is blunt: “Go home and make a revolution in the United States.”

The answer tells us two important things about internationalism.

First, the struggle of the Sandinista movement does not occur in isolation. It takes place against the backdrop of overwhelming U.S. imperial violence, which is the international extension of its oppressive, racist, and colonial politics at home. In the 1980s, Nicaragua was subjected to an economic and military blockade. Its harbors were mined. The Contras—a fascist force that massacred hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America—were covertly armed and trained to destroy the aspirations of the people. There was a very real need to sever the threads that bound Nicaragua’s brutal immiseration with the prosperity of the U.S. ruling classes—and that necessitated building a revolution in the United States.

Second, the construction of a revolutionary process is in itself an internationalist act. What can you do for the people of Haiti, or the people of Cuba, or the people of Western Sahara, or the people of Palestine, or the people of Venezuela as an individual, without first building power? Can you send them a tanker of oil? Can you send them a container of medical supplies? Can you help them build modern industrial capacities—or support their green transition? The degree of our collective power at home, and the political orientation of our movements, dictates the shape of our commitments abroad.

In 1918, Lenin wrote a piece railing against those who sided with their governments in the First World War. In privileging the “defense” of their countries over the overthrow of those responsible for the war, he wrote, these forces substituted internationalism with a petty nationalism—backing a predatory capitalist and imperialist leadership against the imperative of peace and social revolution. In the end, Lenin said, the position of the Bolsheviks was vindicated. The October Revolution generated the ideas, strategies, and theories that came to power a global revolutionary movement. Like messengers from the future, the Russian people pierced through the terrors of capitalism, and revealed a path forward.

Turning that path into a highway was, to a great degree, the mission of the Third International. Through it, Lenin said, the nascent USSR would lend a “helping hand” to peoples seeking emancipation from colonialism. That mission was born from a thesis that echoes in our story from Nicaragua. The thesis is that European capitalism draws its strength not from its industrial prowess, but from the systematic looting of its colonies. That same process both feeds and clothes the European working class, suppressing their revolutionary aspirations, and generates the material power that sustains their exploitation. The police forces, prisons, weapons, and tactics tested and honed in the colonies are always, after all, readily turned against workers back home. The primary duty of internationalism, then, is to strike at capitalism’s foundations: colonialism and imperialism.

These ideas carry great weight in our time. Whenever we—ensconced in the comforts of the imperial world—advance ideas for the reform of the capitalist system, we are effectively saying: “We don’t care that over two billion people go to bed hungry. We don’t care that hundreds of millions already live in a wrecked climate. We don’t care for the people who suffocate under the weight of our sanctions. Their plight doesn’t concern us.” The theories of the Third International teach us that the power of our ruling classes is the mirror image of the immiseration of the great planetary majority. Now, as countries and peoples begin to assert themselves against U.S. hegemony and its drive towards nuclear and environmental exterminism, our task is to build power with the grain of that historical process—not against it. Now, more than at any point in human history, is the time to build a revolutionary struggle grounded in clear anti-imperialist politics.

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DB: Let’s turn to concrete organizational questions of how to build such a revolutionary movement. The late Marxist scholar and activist Samir Amin was an active participate in organizing across borders and bridging the divide between the Global North and Global South. Amin called for launching a “Fifth International” in 2006 or a “New International” just before his death in 2018. The latter call generated important discussion among scholars, theorists, and activists about how best to “do” politics in the context of neoliberal globalization. Much of the debate revolves around two issues: (1) the longstanding debate on the left of finding the right balance between a “horizontalist” perspective (democratic, pluralist, non-hierarchical, open to various ideological tendencies) and a “verticalist” one (strict criteria of membership, centralized decision-making); and (2) what is the right or appropriate level (local, national, international, global) at which to organize.

What are some of the organizational challenges and successes you’ve encountered in your own experience building left internationalism today?

PW: Organization is simply the way in which we store and instantiate our collective capacity to act—coming into contact with others, forming communities, building confidence, and making the strategic and programmatic decisions about the future that we want to build.

How helpful is the distinction between the “horizontal” and the “vertical”? In my mind, those who reflexively privilege the “horizontal” over the “vertical” cling to the view—cultivated to a great extent in the anti-communist project—that the outcomes we want can spontaneously materialize without us actively pursuing them. That when things become bad enough, the anger of the masses will translate into change. Instead, as movements have repeatedly learned, a commitment to extreme “horizontalism” operates as an obstacle to unity and provides fertile ground for the emergence of invisible hierarchies that immobilize and breed discontent. Equally, organizations that are sometimes derided as “vertical” made tremendous leaps in what we might now call inclusivity. For the first time in history, Lenin’s Comintern brought the demands of women, anticolonial movements, national liberation movements, Black liberation movements, and others under its banner—translating diversity into collective power grounded in a shared analysis of the political situation.

We need to build institutions prepared to address the profound challenges that confront humanity. What are these challenges? In his proposal for a new international, Amin described the U.S.-led imperialist system as totalitarian. I side with Domenico Losurdo in questioning the integrity of that concept, but in this case it is perhaps uniquely appropriate. Capitalism and imperialism sever our connection to the productive process, to nature, to other human beings, and to our own imaginations. We become trapped in a world of imposed ideas, imposed structures. The history we learn, the clothes we wear, the possibilities that we ascribe to the future—these are not ours. They form through the operation of capital accumulation at the global scale, a process that we sometimes euphemistically describe as “globalization,” but which is more accurately understood as imperialism. Extreme violence has been wielded—and continues to be wielded—to preserve this system. Its primary function, as Amin reminds us, is to preserve the “historical privilege” of the colonizers to pillage the resources and exploit the workers of the Global South. But the system is not inevitable.

Marx and Engels devoted their lives to showing that historical processes are not arbitrary. They have motor forces that can be studied and whose movements can be charted. The interaction of these forces generates tensions, or contradictions, that manifest in different ways at different times in our history. Revolutionary processes that ended the enslavement of human beings gave way to a new system of economic organization in which the primary contradiction was between workers and factory owners, or, elsewhere, peasants and landlords. History has shown that these contradictions can be overcome, but only through the collective efforts of the people. This cannot happen spontaneously, and it cannot happen if we cling to the false belief that the previous system can be redeemed or reformed—that a fairer slavery is possible, or that a fairer imperialism is possible. So, one of the primary tasks—and challenges—of the internationalist is to break through the structures of alienation that imprison our minds, our bodies, and our societies.

What does that mean in practice? It means creating the conditions by which peoples and movements from disparate parts of the world can learn from one another and become aware of one another’s fundamental interconnection—overcoming, for example, the idea that the struggle of the Amazon warehouse worker in the United States is separate from the struggle of the garment worker in Bangladesh. When we buy a pair of jeans on Amazon, we wear the labor of the textile weaver in Dhaka. And in that labor, we find the sources both of our collective power and of Amazon’s monopoly power. Our power exists in the socialization of production, in the fact that manufacturing is a collective process and a set of social relations that can be disrupted or captured by the organized working class. Amazon’s power is born of the surplus value generated by its capacity to exploit, dispossess, and plunder, both at home and abroad—a “historical privilege” currently protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 800 U.S. military bases that circle the globe, a sanctions regime that suffocates states seeking to embark on paths of sovereign development, and other infrastructures of economic and military coercion.

But understanding is one part of the puzzle. Sloganeering, however radical, can only take us so far. How can we help build the trade unions in Bangladesh, who are resisting international capital and its agents in government? And how do we politicize the popular movements in the United States that hold the capacity to sever imperialism’s grip on the rest of the world, but largely eschew anti-imperialism as a political horizon? There is a dynamic interplay here between the local sites of organization and action, the transnational networks that seek to unite and coordinate that action in a programmatically coherent way, and the global horizon, where the framework of imperialist globalization reveals to us the threads by which our struggles are connected. The geographic scale of action must dynamically respond to the conditions it confronts. That is why, to me, an International must be a laboratory of political action—grounded in a comprehensive theory of the political and economic conjuncture, faithful to the historical tradition it builds upon, but not dogmatically wedded to this or that organizational template.

DB: I’d like to ask you a question about language and terminology. Specifically, the difficultly in effectively framing and articulating a left internationalist laboratory you describe. Since the rise of neoliberal globalization, which kicked into high gear after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the very vocabulary of internationalism itself has given way to terms like global justice, global citizenship, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. These terms are all palatable to a world in which nation-states have become subordinate to global finance. Such terms have seeped into progressive social movements, NGOs, institutions of higher education, and United Nations entities, at least in part to disengage and disassociate from, or simply reject, an entire history of internationalist struggle that you touched on earlier. What is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political horizon today?

PW: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński—among my earliest political influences— compared history to a river. On the surface, he said, the water moves quickly. Beneath the surface, the flow is steadier. Similarly, events pass us by quickly, but in their multitude we can observe stable structures and patterns of thought, which change over long historical epochs. I start here because internationalism carries within it concrete traditions of thought and action that we derive from Marxism, which contain within them a view of the river’s slow undercurrent.

The most important of these is dialectical and historical materialism, an analytical method that teaches us to train our eye not on individual events, but on the movement of history. The dominant philosophy of our time compels us to see only the surface of the river, only the quick succession of events. But these events pass us by with astonishing speed. We struggle to discern patterns, we become overwhelmed. Unable to situate developments in the world within their proper context, we begin to suffer from amnesia. We forget our history. Our creativity is imprisoned because we lose the ability to relate our actions to reality. And our politics resolve into idealism: we believe that a just world can be imagined into being; that our system can be transformed by gradual reform; or that nothing can really be done. Rodney outlined three features of this bourgeois perspective. First, it purports to speak for all of humanity rather than a particular class—the logic that says, “we are all in this together.” Second, it is highly subjective, claiming universal truths while concealing its ideological commitments—just look at the entire field of economics! Third, it refuses to acknowledge contradictions.

Marxism repudiates these notions. It teaches us that historical movement is a product of contradictions between and within things. You cannot have poverty without wealth, a proletariat without a bourgeoisie. The position of these classes reflects their relationship with the material world, with the means of production. The ideas that each group subscribes to also relate to their material environment, to their class position. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, while communism is the philosophy of the workers and oppressed peoples. And central to the communist tradition is the idea that collective human effort can resolve contradictions in favor of the oppressed. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Marx was not just a thinker. He founded the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, which emerged in part from textile workers’ opposition to British involvement in the U.S. Civil War. At the time, Lord Palmerston’s government was plotting to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. The workers of Britain saved Western Europe, Marx said in his inaugural speech to the First International, from plunging into “an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.” The conviction that we have the capacity to change the world—that it is our duty to change the world—is inseparable from the tradition of internationalism, which is a communist tradition.

Today, with their imaginations stymied by old, unchanging ways of thought, many organizations do not set out to change the world, because they do not exist in the world. They do not exist among children who struggle to eat, or the workers who struggle to make ends meet, or the peasants dispossessed from their land. They are bourgeois in their makeup. So, they subscribe to categories of thought that hold little relevance for the hungry, the poor, or the dispossessed—and the institutions they build do not serve the interests of those for whom the world must change. The language they use is a product of their class commitment, and one that has been carefully cultivated: the substitution of movements for liberation with NGOified sloganeers is an instrument of demobilization. It shields the status quo by institutionalizing bourgeois ideology.

In a sense, then, everything is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political tradition—and I have a very optimistic view of our prospects. Liberalism has not, cannot, and will not find answers to the complex crises facing humanity. But, from the violent, ceaseless flow of events that confront us, internationalism helps us recover sight of history’s laws of motion, and of the peoples and movements that are its engines. It reveals to us the ways in which our struggles and experiences are connected across borders, and the class dynamics that shape them. Even if they have yet to take hold, the ideas of internationalism, of socialism, are alluring to many precisely because the prevailing ideology is not ours. But, where bourgeois thought fails us, socialism shines a light through capitalism’s darkness, reclaims the past from its amnesia, and recovers hope from its futurelessness. These are our traditions, and we have nothing to fear in proclaiming them.

DB: My last question is on how to formulate a progressive, anti-imperialist foreign policy. At the end of Marx’s inaugural address you mentioned, Marx affirms that the working classes recognize “the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power.” Today, a lot of mystery, or deliberate mystification, swirls around international politics, not least the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Among the anti-imperialist left, the debate tends to turn on how to understand imperialism. Should imperialism be seen in the singular, as predominately U.S.-led; or are there multiple, competing imperialisms, such that Russia, China, and the United States would all be equally imperialist powers? How does this debate impact the development of a coherent foreign policy for the internationalist left today?

PW: What is imperialism? In the intellectual tradition of the left, it refers to a situation in which capitalist economies mature, the rate of profit falls, and corporations begin to look abroad for resources to extract and labor to exploit. This is the same dynamic that sees small “Main Street” businesses grow into chains, then regional conglomerates, and then into national and ultimately international monopolies. The laws of capitalism demand that expansion. Companies that fail to grow are pushed out of business or bought up by others. Then, state power is wielded to turn sovereign nations into export markets, sources of cheap resources and labor, and outlets for investment for these corporations.

Today, the United States has a degree of power that is incomparable to any empire in human history. This is a product of a particular historical moment that I situate at the end of the Second World War. Having lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazism, the Soviet Union was in tatters. Europe was ruined. China, having faced an even longer war at the heel of a century of colonial subjugation, faced a desperate situation. But the United States emerged not only unscathed, it emerged economically and militarily strengthened, cloaked beneath the terrible aura of the atomic bomb, giving it something resembling omnipotence in the international arena.

How has it wielded that power? From the very beginning, it has wielded it to suffocate humanity’s aspirations for sovereignty and democracy. In the late 1940s, the people of Korea rose up against feudalism and the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, which operated death camps for suspected communists. In response, the United States destroyed the north of Korea, killing roughly a quarter of its population and destroying 85 percent of its buildings. It threatened to use nuclear weapons on several occasions. This holocaust has largely been written out of history—and its victims are now the subject of vicious and routine derision by those who sought to erase them. If you ever wondered what the world might look like had fascism prevailed, look no further than the U.S. destruction of Korea.

Then came Iran in 1953, Vietnam in 1961, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1956, Vietnam in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s—the list goes on and on. Wherever the United States arrived, its parasitic capitalist model of globalization followed like a cancer, suffocating states’ capacities to respond to the needs of their people. Tens of millions of lives have been claimed by direct or proxy violence instigated by the United States, and many more from the effects of being subordinated to the U.S.-led imperial system. Roughly five million people die each year because they do not have access to adequate healthcare—a problem that socialist projects have largely eliminated. But socialism is not allowed in the U.S. template for humanity.

We may ask a counterfactual, then: How might the world look if the United States had not picked up imperialism’s mantle after the Second World War? The defeat of Japanese imperialism and the German colonial project in Eastern Europe—and we must insist on its recognition as a colonial project—severely weakened the colonial powers. It set off a process that saw the British and French empires shrink dramatically. It inaugurated a new, modern consensus for humanity, with the adoption of the UN Charter and the pursuit of decolonization. It gave great prestige to the project of state socialism. The United States pushed against these currents—against the movement of history—and built a global system through which it exerts, at the barrel of a gun, near-total financial, cultural, and political power over the vast majority of humanity. No country in history has a comparable military footprint or proven capacity for destruction.

Attempts to downplay or relativize this violence are an insidious form of apologia. More often than not, accusations of, say, “Chinese imperialism” are rooted entirely in the hypothetical: “China is building infrastructure that could allow it to become a new imperial power.” In this case, the “twin imperialisms” thesis serves to put on equal footing an unsubstantiated conjecture with the actual violence of imperialism—it puts a moral claim on equal footing with an empirical fact. As the historian Vijay Prashad has remarked, we are afraid of Huawei’s 5G towers because we are told they could be used to spy on us, but we are unconcerned by the actual spying that is carried out by the U.S. government, which Edward Snowden and others have revealed. What is this but another red scare, scaffolded in our culture by the increasingly virulent Sinophobia manufactured by the United States and its allies? There are also more surreptitious forms of this on the left: attempts to “redefine” imperialism and cleave it from its analytical tradition to make it more suitable to the particular moral commitments of the day.

This phenomenon—the denial of imperialism—is infantilizing. It confuses left strategy, because it severs our ability to relate to the actual processes of history. It immobilizes, because in a world where everything is bad, nothing is possible. And it risks producing a moment in which, as U.S. violence against China escalates, forces on the western left will side with their own blood-soaked ruling classes rather than build power against them. Guarding against these impulses is among the most important tasks of the day. The moment has arrived for us to heed Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war into a war on the bourgeoisie that suffocates us.

Note: A French version of this interview was published by the Association Nationale des Communistes on September 18, 2023.

Pan-Africanism, Palestine, and the Colors That Bind Struggle

By Shauntionne Mosley

I went to Europe for the first time this year. I stayed for 10 days. Mostly in Paris, but two of those days were spent in London. I took a train from Paris to London with the intention of going to the Notting Hill Festival - a festival I’ve heard about and had been planning on going to for some time now. While in London, I specifically chose my lodging in Brixton because it’s the city's Blackest neighborhood. It was also the location of the Brixton Uprising of 1981. If you know me, I love Black people, Black history, and revolutions. It’s a neighborhood I thought it would be easy for me to blend into, southern American accent or not. I wasn’t entirely wrong. I was surrounded by brown skin of every shade, 4c hair and natural styles, and various accents different from my own. This only increased when I went to the Notting Hill festival itself. Never have I been engulfed by so many people of the diaspora. The roads were barely walkable with the amount of people around me. And their flags: Trinidad & Tobago, Haiti, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica (Jamaicans run London, ok?) and more… all draped on people’s bodies, hanging from the windows of apartments, flying proudly on the tents of different vendors. I cursed myself for not bringing my own. I was going to bring the Pan-African flag I keep at home, but my luggage was already filled to the zippers the day before I left the states. Maybe I could find one there, I thought. 

I went to three different vendors who were selling flags and none of them had Pan-African ones. One man had never even heard of it. I showed him a picture of it on my phone, and he shook his head and shrugged. “We don’t have American flags at Notting Hill,” he said with a chuckle and a thick Jamaican accent. That stung a little. To me, I wasn’t talking about an American flag. I rapidly (and playfully) explained the history of the Pan-African flag, how it was designed by a Jamaican man, and although it has been known to represent Black people in America, it’s really a symbol for the Black diaspora worldwide The vendor listened, then shrugged at me again. He said, “sorry, I’ll remember next year. I promise!” Then he went on to another customer and I went and got some curry goat.  I wasn’t angry at him for not knowing. Can’t even say I was surprised. I don’t expect those abroad to know about Black American history. Lord knows I didn’t learn more about the Black diaspora until college. No, this is not the first time my Blackness was overshadowed by my nationality. However, I did feel stupid again for not bringing my own flag. For it is why the Pan-African flag was created in the first place: Every Race Has A Flag but the Coon. 

I can’t speak for all Black Americans, but personally, I’m Black first and American second. To me, I’m an American because of a clause in the US constitution. I’m American because the African in me was violently beaten and bred out of my people. The continuous genocide of Palestanians in the Gaza Strip has confirmed this for me. As if American slavery, the police shootings of Black lives, disproportionate birth mortality rate of Black mothers, and blatant underfunding of overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods weren’t enough. The horrific deaths and intentional erasure of generations of people, and the bombings of hospitals and churches in Gaza do not only make the miserable migraine of colonization and the Civil Rights movement in America throb in my temple. These savage atrocities carried out by Israel, and funded by the US, force me to pose this question to the US government: how could I possibly be a “fellow American” when I’m Black?

Something that is darkly ironic and sinister about being Black and American during a genocide is when the president speaks. President Biden recently visited Israel and delivered a speech upon his arrival back to the Oval Office. “Good evening, my fellow Americans,” he started with. Was he talking to me? He’s the oldest president to be elected in US history and, like most presidents, from a wealthy family. While I dream of having a president that matches the median age of current America, and is a president that knows what a syrup sandwich is, President Biden continued: 

“The terrorist group Hamas unleashed pure unadulterated evil in the world, but sadly, the Jewish people know, perhaps better than anyone, that there is no limit to the depravity of people when they want to inflict pain on others.”

Better than anyone, he said. After visiting Israel, a country that is responsible for a land, air, and sea blockade over the Gaza Strip, and has been since 2007, making those in Gaza almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. While upholding severe restrictions on the movement of goods, information, and people. Restrictions that leave Palestinians dependent upon another country that has wanted them dead for 75 years. The president of the United States, a country that violently kidnapped people from Africa with the intentions of enslavement and relentlessly halted these people’s progress for 400 plus years. He is the leader of a country that led Native Americans down a Trail of Tears, occupied and abandoned Puerto Rico, and allowed ICE to put Latinx children in cages. 

I must mention that, in America, we learn about the horrors of the Holocaust from middle school through high school in every history class, while the horror history of the other ethnic groups that reside here are “elective” courses. This is not an oppression competition, but America has made it very clear on whose oppression should be discussed and mourned the most. The Never Again Education Act was signed into law by the president on May 29, 2020. The commitment to Holocaust education is written into American law. Meanwhile, the country’s own Black history curriculum teaches how slaves “developed skills'' that could be applied towards their pursuit of happiness and subjects like Black queer studies have been eliminated, the Black Lives Matter movement has been demonized, and reparations for descendants of enslaved Black people are deemed unreasonable despite historical precedence suggesting otherwise. Something the US government might know better than anyone. I doubt The Never Again Education Act will be teaching American students about that though. Or about the concentration camp that is Gaza. Nor will lessons go into detail about a Zionist prime minister committing a genocide. 

It wasn’t done on purpose, I’m sure, but the Palestinian flag has the same colors (aside from white) as the Pan-African flag. The colors of Palestinian flag are the Pan-Arab colors. Each of which represents the successors of the Prophet Muhammad who acted as religious leaders/government officials in Arab history (called caliphate or خِلَافَة). It was also  inspired by a verse crafted by one of the most beloved and emotionally honest poets of the 13th century, Safi al-Din al-Hili, when he wrote: 

White are our deeds, 

black are our battles, 

Green are our fields, 

red are our swords.

The Pan-African flags colors are red, black, and green. Created by Marcus Garvey, Red represents the color of the blood which men must shed for their redemption and liberty, black is the color of the noble and distinguished race to which we belong, and green is the color of the luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland. Both flags stand for these two oppressed groups and their persecution. These flags encourage pride in one’s people, even when there are others telling you there’s nothing to be proud of. The strife for liberation has been never ending for me and mine, and is a strife that Palestanians understand too well. Flagless in Notting Hill, I still danced, ate, and admired faces that looked like kin. I care about all the strangers I met, and felt a sense of relief looking out onto the sea of Black lives. Wishing I had my flag. This fabric of belonging, existence, and claim. Rebel flags must be flown from the river to the sea because the blood of innocent Brown and Black people murks the water. 

If Americans are not on the side of those who are oppressed — and from President Biden’s remarks, they are not — then this man with the highest title in this carnage fertilized land isn’t speaking to me and could never speak for me. I’m mourning the Palestinian past, present, and future that is currently being obliterated, cringing at the fact that the descendants of those who survive this won’t be able to trace their family history. Like Black Americans. I’m also doomfully thinking, maybe even selfishly, about the consequences that must surely come after yet another tragedy funded by America. And how these consequences will be applied to every ethnic group in America that has also been wronged by America; The ones who are only considered Americans in times of war or when we’re abroad and our passports are navy blue. If the soil of Palestine could talk it would cough up blood first, then scream. We the People must not let their, and our, screams go unheard. And we must not let their flags — nor their bodies, belongings, lineage, and livelihoods — disappear under rubble.

Burkina Faso’s New President Condemns Imperialism, Quotes Che Guevara, and Allies with Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba

[Pictured: Burkina Faso’s Revolutionary President, Ibrahim Traoré (center), attends the closing ceremony of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou on March 4, 2023. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP]

By Ben Norton

Republished from Geopolitical Economy Report.

The new president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed to fight imperialism and neocolonialism, invoking his country’s past revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara and quoting Che Guevara.

The West African nation has also formed close diplomatic ties with the revolutionary governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, as well as with NATO’s arch-rival Russia.

In January 2022, a group of nationalist military officers in Burkina Faso toppled the president, Roch Kaboré, a wealthy banker who had fostered close ties with the country’s former colonizer, France, where he was educated.

The military officers declared a government run by what they call the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR), led by a new president, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.

They pledged to seek true independence from French hegemony, condemning the neocolonial policies and economic, political, and military control that Paris still exercises over Francophone West Africa.

Burkina Faso ended its decades-long military agreement with France, expelling the hundreds of French troops that had been in the country for years.

The new president, Damiba, was initially popular. But support waned as he was unable to defeat the deadly Salafi-jihadist insurgents that have destabilized the country.

In September 2022, discontent led to a subsequent coup in Burkina Faso, which brought to power another nationalist military leader named Ibrahim Traoré. He was just 34 at the time, making him one of the world’s youngest leaders.

Traoré has pledged to carry out a “refoundation of the nation” and comprehensive “modernization”, to quell violent extremism, fight corruption, and “totally reform our system of government”.

The charismatic Burkinabè leader frequently ends his speeches with the chant “La patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons!”, the French translation of the official motto of revolutionary Cuba: “Patria o muerte, venceremos!” – “Homeland or death, we will prevail!”

As president, Traoré has brought back some of the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Sankara.

Sankara was a Marxist Burkinabè military officer and committed pan-Africanist who ascended to power in a 1983 coup.

Sankara launched a socialist revolution, transforming the impoverished country through land reform, infrastructure development, and expansive public health and literacy programs.

Under Sankara’s leadership, Burkina Faso also challenged French neocolonialism and pursued an anti-imperialist foreign policy, forming alliances with revolutionary struggles across the Global South.

These leftist policies were reversed in 1987, when Sankara was overthrown and killed in another coup, led by his former ally Blaise Compaoré – who subsequently moved hard to the right and allied with the United States and France, ruling through rigged elections until 2014.

Today, Ibrahim Traoré is drawing heavily on the legacy of Sankara. He has made it clear that he wants West Africa, and the continent as a whole, to be free of Western neocolonialism.

This July, the Russian government held a Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg. Traoré was the first African leader to arrive to the conference. There, he delivered a fiery anti-imperialist speech.

“We are the forgotten peoples of the world. And we are here now to talk about the future of our countries, about how things will be tomorrow in the world that we are seeking to build, and in which there will be no interference in our internal affairs”, Traoré said, according to a partial transcript published by Russian state media outlet TASS.

TASS reported:

In his speech, the Burkinabe head of state also focused on sovereignty and the struggle against imperialism. “Why does resource-rich Africa remain the poorest region of the world? We ask these questions and get no answers. However, we have the opportunity to build new relationships that will help us build a better future for Burkina Faso,” the president said. African countries have suffered for decades from a barbaric and brutal form of colonialism and imperialism, which could be called a modern form of slavery, he stressed.

“However, a slave who does not fight [for his freedom] is not worthy of any indulgence. The heads of African states should not behave like puppets in the hands of the imperialists. We must ensure that our countries are self-sufficient, including as regards food supplies, and can meet all of the needs of our peoples. Glory and respect to our peoples; victory to our peoples! Homeland or death!” Traore summed up, quoting the words of legendary Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The 35-year-old president of Burkina Faso was attired in a camouflage uniform and red beret during the summit.

On July 29, Traoré had a private meeting in Saint Petersburgh with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In their talks, the Burkinabè leader praised the Soviet Union for defeating Nazism in World War II.

Burkina Faso strengthens ties with Latin American revolutionary movements

The new nationalist government in Burkina Faso has also sought to deepen its ties with revolutionary movements in Latin America.

In May, the West African nation’s prime minister, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, traveled to Venezuela.

Tambèla met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who pledged to “advance in cooperation, solidarity, and growth… building a solid fraternal relation”.

In July, the Burkinabè prime minister traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the 44th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution.

Tambèla attended the July 19 celebration of the revolution in Managua, at the invitation of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Following the September 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, the new president, Traoré, surprised many observers by choosing as his prime minister a longtime follower of Thomas Sankara, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla.

Tambèla was an ally of Sankara during the Burkinabè revolution. When Sankara came to power in the 1980s, Tambèla organized a solidarity movement and sought international support for the new leftist government.

Tambèla is a pan-Africanist and has been affiliated with communist and left-wing organizations.

Traoré said in a speech in December that Tambèla will help to oversee the process of the “refoundation of the nation“.

By appointing Tambèla as prime minister, Traoré tangibly showed his commitment to reviving the revolutionary legacy of Sankara.

In his remarks at the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Tambèla discussed the historical legacy of solidarity between the revolution in Burkina Faso and that of Nicaragua.

Burkina Faso’s President Thomas Sankara with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega in 1986.

Tambèla recalled that Sankara visited Nicaragua in 1986, and the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega visited Burkina Faso that same year.

When he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in 1984, Sankara declared,

I wish also to feel close to my comrades of Nicaragua, whose ports are being mined, whose towns are being bombed and who, despite all, face up with courage and lucidity to their fate. I suffer with all those in Latin America who are suffering from imperialist domination.

In 1984 and 1986, Sankara also visited Cuba, where he met with revolutionary President Fidel Castro.

“For people of my generation, there are things that unite us with Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and Commander Daniel Ortega”, Burkinabè Prime Minister Tambèla said in his speech in Managua on July 19, 2023.

“We have learned to know Nicaragua. When the liberation struggle began, I was small, but we followed, day by day, the context of Nicaragua’s liberation. I went in July of ’79, and when they entered Managua we were happy, people of my age celebrated that”, he recalled.

And then, when Thomas Sankara came to power, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Revolution was something happy for us; we as students studied a lot the history of Nicaragua, we followed its evolution.

Tambèla added that Burkina Faso supported Nicaragua in its International Court of Justice case against the United States. Washington was found guilty of illegally sponsoring far-right “Contra” death squads, which waged a terror war against the leftist government, as well as putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports. (Yet, although Nicaragua won the case in 1986, the U.S. government has still to this day refused to pay the Central American nation a single cent of the reparations that it legally owes it.)

“Nicaragua’s struggle is also that of our people”, Tambèla stressed.

In his July 19 speech, the Burkinabè prime minister also sent special greetings to the diplomatic delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

“We have very close relations with Cuba”, Tambèla added.

President Fidel Castro has been and was a very important person for the revolution in Africa; we have excellent memories, both of Cuba and of President Fidel Castro.

Ben Norton is an investigative journalist and analyst. He is the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report, and is based in Latin America. (Publicaciones en español aquí.)

Whose lessons? Which direction?

[Pictured: Poster, 1962, by Nina Vatolina. The text reads: 'Peace, Labor, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, Happiness.']

By Jodi Dean

Republished from Liberation School.

As obituaries for neoliberalism pile up on our nightstands and Antonio Gramsci’s adage that the old is dying and the new cannot be born appears newly profound, we turn to the past for direction. What successes should guide us? What can we learn from our failures? If we are to advance politically in the twenty-first century, we need to learn the correct lessons from the twentieth. But what are they?

For some on the left, the problems we face today are as they have ever been failures of organization and collective commitment. A disciplined and organized working class could do more than compel concessions from capital; it could transform society. What’s needed is the revolutionary party. Others on the left blame labor’s political weakness on refusals to compromise. Militant organizations aren’t solutions. They’re errors. Only when unions and left parties accept capitalist social property relations do workers earn their seat at the table and engage in the bargaining that increases their share. Communist parties hinder such acceptance.

Forty years of neoliberalism reveals the bankruptcy of the latter perspective. Capital makes concessions only when it has no other choice. Ruling classes across the Global North have dismantled public sectors and decimated middle classes rather than provide the tax support necessary for maintaining social democracy. They’ve rolled back hard-won political and social gains, treating basic democratic rights as threats to their power. While strong tendencies on the right recognize radicalization as necessary for politics in a period of uncertainty and double down on their various illiberalisms, opponents of revolution insist that the lesson of the twentieth century is the necessity of compromise. Presuming there’s no alternative to capitalism, left Thatcherites declare that progress depends on leaving behind our communist baggage.

One instance of this perspective is Jonah Birch’s “The Cold War Made it Harder for the Left to Win” [1]. Criticizing Gary Gerstle’s argument in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Birch rejects Gerstle’s claim that it was the communist threat that made significant reform possible in the twentieth century [2]. With homogeneous Sweden as his example of social democratic success, Birch asserts that conditions were worse for labor in countries with large communist parties. He concedes that the socio-economic context that led to economic growth after World War II is unlikely to reappear. Nevertheless, Birch advises the left to accept the lesson that communists hurt the working class.

The struggle against white supremacy and fascism is class struggle

Birch’s deeply conservative message moves to the right of mainstream liberal recognition of the impact of the court of world opinion during the Cold War. It is widely accepted that competition with the Soviet Union for hearts and minds pushed the U.S. to take steps toward the abolition of Jim Crow apartheid and institutionalized white supremacy. The denial of voting rights and violent repression of activists damaged the country’s reputation as democracy’s global defender. As soon as one acknowledges the multiracial and multinational character of the working class, one realizes how the Swedish fantasy operates (even in Sweden, as Tobias Hϋbinette demonstrates in a recent piece in the Boston Review) to make a small subset of struggles—the wage struggles of white workers—stand in for the broad array of struggles of the diverse multinational working class [3].

In the U.S., for example, communist involvement in the fight against lynching, segregation, and Jim Crow was more than a propaganda point in the Cold War’s great power conflict. From its early years, the Communist Party recognized that workers would only prevail if they were united. So long as Black workers were paid lower wages than white workers and so long as Black workers excluded from unions were available as strikebreakers, the position of all workers was insecure. The struggle against white supremacy was thus central to building the collective power to win the class struggle. This analysis of the national composition of the working class under conditions of white supremacy and racism committed communists to deepening engagement in “Negro work” in multiple arenas. These arenas included organizing agricultural and domestic workers, taking on legal campaigns on behalf of the falsely accused, and drawing out the connections between the conditions facing Black people in the U.S. and oppressed and colonized people all over the world. Even more broadly, the Party demonstrated how anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movements for peace were indispensable to class struggle insofar as they all took aim at U.S. monopoly capital [4].

Communists were at the forefront of the struggle against fascism and its doctrine of Aryan superiority. Birch treats the French and Italian Communist Parties as divisive organizations. He blames them for splitting the labor movement in their respective countries, thereby marginalizing the left and isolating the working class. On the one hand, Birch’s charges are belied by his own evidence: in both countries the communists regularly won around twenty percent of the national vote in elections, hardly an indication of marginalization and isolation. Multiple localities and municipalities had communist leaders. On the other hand, Birch’s myopic focus on the expansion of social programs as the single measure of political success leads him to neglect central communist contributions. The partisans who gave their lives in the war against European fascisms, the thousands who carried out a heroic resistance in occupied countries, are erased from view. Surely their achievements are as noteworthy as the collective bargaining institutions, and generous social services that preoccupy Birch. And since Birch concedes that the economic conditions that prevailed in the post-war heyday of social democracy are unlikely to appear again, what is the political cost today of failing to acknowledge and learn from the courage of communist resistance?

Internationalism as the ground of struggle

The significance of the communist contribution continues to expand as we zoom out from a narrow focus on Europe. No one can deny the role of communist-led national liberation movements in the colonized world. In virtually every liberation struggle Marxist-Leninists played an indispensable part. Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and China are not insignificant data points just because they are not from Europe.

For decades critics of colonialism and neocolonialism have pointed out that the capitalist class has been able to secure the political passivity or even support of a large layer of the working class in the imperialist core through benefits accrued from the global exploitation of Black and brown people. These critics continue a line of argument already prominent in Lenin’s analysis of the enormous super-profits generated by imperialism. That capital is international and the struggle against it must be as well is a lesson from communists in the twentieth century that remains indispensable in the twenty-first. Workers couldn’t afford nationalist myopia then and surely cannot in today’s setting of global supply chains, mass migration, and climate change.

In the U.S., Black women in and around the Communist Party in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated the practical implications of internationalism in their organizing. As early as 1928, Williana Burroughs emphasized concrete tasks related to engaging foreign-born Black workers in the U.S. (West Indies, South America, Cape Verde Islands, Africa) and using anti-imperialism as a point of connection (“Thousands of Negroes from Haiti, Cuba, British possessions, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have felt the iron heel of British or American Imperialism”) [5].

The Party took the view that Black workers in the U.S. were an oppressed national minority with a right to self-determination. While controversial within and without the Party, this line constituted a fundamental ground for unifying Black and white workers because it recognized the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation. Organizing Black workers meant organizing Black women because most Black women worked for wages to support their families. Organizing Black women meant organizing immigrants and farm workers and attending to the housing, education, and neighborhood conditions impacting workers’ lives. Organizing immigrants and farm workers meant building an understanding of the patterns of oppression and resistance facing all workers. Internationalism was more than an expression of solidarity. It was a principle with repercussions for domestic organizing.

Claudia Jones’s famous International Women’s Day speech from 1950 described the global peace movement and signature campaign against the A-bomb, Marshall Plan, and Atlantic war pact. Jones noted women’s organizations’ opposition to NATO, “which spells misery for the masses of American women and their families.” She advocated rousing the internationalism of American women in protest against “Wall Street’s puppets in Marshalized Italy, in fascist Greece and Spain.” And she linked the Justice Department’s attack on the Congress of American Women as “foreign agents” with the group’s long-standing advocacy of women’s equal rights, Negro-white unity, and child welfare and education [6].

The resolute internationalism of communists in the twentieth century was indispensable to confronting imperialism and colonialism. We build the power of the working class by emphasizing the patterns of oppression and resistance, linking struggles, and targeting capitalism as the system to be defeated.

Anti-communism is the enemy

Over the last decades of neoliberalism, the right has advanced. In the U.S., UK, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere, conservative parties use nationalism to reach out to those left behind by globalization. When socialists take as their measure of success the wages of an outmoded, masculinist, and Eurocentric image of the working class, they undermine their capacity to build mass unity, strengthening the hand of the right. Insistence on the multinational composition of the labor force of all the so-called developed countries gives the lie to nationalist and isolationist fantasies as well as to the patriarchal conceptions of the family that support them.

A component of right-wing advance has been its relentless assault on communism. Thirty years after the defeat of the Soviet Union, conservatives attack even the most common sense of public measures as communist plots. More subtle but no less reactionary are the epistemological dimensions of anti-communism, what Charisse Burden-Stelly theorizes as intellectual McCarthyism [7]. Anti-communism persists today in the suppression of knowledge of the continuities between anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggles. Instead of the site where those struggles were unified, communism is treated as a dangerous and alien ideology. Its role in the fight against white supremacy domestically and internationally is buried.

For anti-communists disorder is foreign—the refugee, the immigrant, the Black, the Muslim, the Jew. Anti-communists disavow the capitalist disorder of competition, markets, innovation, dispossession, foreclosure, debt, and imperialist war. Dramatic changes in the character of work, communities, and life that accompany disruptive and ubiquitous technology; urbanization and rural depopulation; shifts from industry and manufacture to services and servitude; the intensification of competition for decreasing numbers of affordable houses and adequately compensated jobs—these all congeal into a disorder to be dealt with by the assertion of police, family, church, and race. Anti-communism remains the lynchpin of this assertion.

The fear that anti-communism mobilizes is a fear of loss, a fear that what you have will be taken from you, what Slavoj Žižek refers to as the “theft of enjoyment” [8]. Marx and Engels call out this mobilization of fear in The Communist Manifesto when they address charges that communists want to take people’s property. They write, “in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths” [9]. The anti-communist mobilization of fear conceals the absence of property, wealth, job security, success, sovereignty, and freedom. It posits that we have them by positioning them as stolen. Communism is what prevents you from being rich, widely admired, having lots of sex, and so on. The “theft of enjoyment” fantasy obscures the fact that under capitalism a handful of billionaires have more wealth than half the planet. By positing communism as a source of deprivation, as an ideology based on taking something away, anti-communism conceals that we don’t have what is ostensibly being stolen.

Anti-communism is not confined to the political right. It often seeps into progressive and self-described socialist circles. Left anti-communists proceed as if communism were the barrier to workers’ success, as if we would all live in a Swedish social democratic paradise but for those damned communists. Not only does this deny the multiracial and international reality of the working class, but it conceals broader left political division and weakness. Virtually nowhere does the left face the choice of reform or revolution. Virtually nowhere is the left in a position where class compromise is on the table. Anti-communism obscures this basic fact.

Communism is that modern political ideology always and everywhere on the side of the oppressed. When labor begins to appear strong, when those who have been racially, sexually, ethnically, and colonially oppressed become more visible, more organized, and more militant, anti-communism intervenes to set up barriers. On the left as well as the right, anti-communism attempts to structure the political field by establishing the terrain of possibility: which political paths are available, which are unthinkable. Even in settings where communism is dismissed as itself impossible, anti-communism mobilizes social forces to oppose it. This fight against the impossible is an ideological signal: the discussion isn’t aimed toward seriously evaluating lessons and goals. It’s about shoring up the status quo, disciplining working-class imagination by preemptive arrest of any challengers to capitalist social property relations.

The political and economic situation that prevails today differs significantly from the postwar era. The U.S. has lost both its preeminent economic status and the moral position it assumed following the end of WWII (a position always fragile and contested given the U.S.’s use of atomic weapons, backing of dictatorships, imperialist and neocolonial foreign policy, and domestic police state). Unions have lost their prior bargaining power and workers their hard-won rights and benefits. Today the issue is building organizations and movements with power sufficient to compel the socialist reconstruction of the economy in the context of a rapidly changing climate. This fight is multinational and international or it is lost.

References

[1] Jonah Birch, “The Cold War May It Harder for the Left to Win Social Democratic Reforms,”Jacobin, 15 November 2022. Availablehere.
[2] Gary Gerstle,The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order(Oxford University Press, 2022).
[3] Tobias Hϋbinette, “Race and Sweden’s Fascist Turn,”Boston Review, 19 October 2022. Availablehere.
[4] See the contributions toOrganize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, ed. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean (London: Verso, 2022).
[5] Williana Burroughs, “Negro Work Has Not Been Entirely Successful,”  inOrganize, Fight, Win,21-25.
[6] Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” inOrganize, Fight, Win,181-197.
[7] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “OnBankers and Empire: Racial Capitalism, Antiblackness, and Antiradicalism,”Small Axe24, no. 2 (2020): 175-186.
[8] Slavoj Žižek,Tarrying With the Negative(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 200-237.
[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1988/1967), 237.

Black Nationalism Meets Proletarian Internationalism: Revisiting Robert F. Williams's 1966 Speech in China

[Pictured: Robert F. Williams meets with Mao Zedong in China]

During the 1960s, Robert F. Williams and his wife, Mabel, spent time in Cuba, North Vietnam, and China, setting up long-term residencies in both Cuba and China. Williams, who had made a name for himself as a proponent of black liberation via armed self-defense in the United States, spent this time abroad speaking about his experiences (and the experiences of all black people) within the US, as well as the broader topics of black liberation, internationalism, black nationalism, communism, imperialism, and racism. The following is the full text of a speech he gave in China's Great Hall of the People in 1966 on the third anniversary of Mao Zedong's speech against racial discrimination in the United States:

[beginning of speech]

Brothers, Sisters, Patriots, Revolutionaries….

Once again, I want to thank Chairman Mao Zedong and our brothers, the great Chinese people, for their support of our struggle. Commemorating the third anniversary of Chairman Mao Zedong’s statement calling upon the people of the world to unite against racial discrimination by U.S. imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination, the greatest tribute that can be paid to the correctness of his immortal words lie in a current analysis and assessment of the present development of struggle being waged by the Afro-American people.

Chairman Mao Zedong’s statement of August 8, 1963 gave inspiration to a people long and brutally oppressed and dehumanized, then laboring under the masochist-like philosophy of neo-Gandhism. His words gave impetus to a floundering and feeble movement of armed self-defence. And today all of the reactionary world is shocked and terrified by the turbulent winds of ever increasing armed resistance now sweeping the mighty fortress of savage imperialism and beastly racism. In racist America’s mighty northern cities, in the small towns, in the countryside, in the dark and deep jungle wilderness of the southland, from coast to coast, oppressed and dehumanized black people are meeting oppressive racist terrorist’s violence with revolutionary violence.

The thunder of BLACK POWER echoes throughout the land. A mighty firestorm sweeps through the ghettoes rife with rebellion. In their paradise of stolen wealth, ringed by massive arsenals of horrible death weapons, the tyrannical kings of imperialism tremble from the terrifying shock of a confrontation with wretched and angry slaves, armed with a common household match and a bottle of gasoline.

What is the meaning of this cry BLACK POWER in a land dominated by the unmerciful power of white intruders who murdered and all but exterminated the rightful owners, the American Indians? Black Power means that black men want to have some control over their own lives, to have a respected voice in public affairs that affect them. We resent being a colonial people, treated as third class citizens in our native land.

We resent being forbidden to speak for ourselves, even in black belts where we constitute as much as 85 percent of the population. We resent being deformed by a white man’s mold in a degenerate white supremacy society that derides and belittles our African heritage and make us ashamed of our ethnic characteristics. Black Power is the vehicle by which we hope to reach a stage wherein we can be proud black people without the necessity of an apology for our non-Anglo-Saxon features.

The dominant society in racist America is reactionary, imperialist, racist, and decadent and we wish to disassociate ourselves from it.

Black Power is a dissident force challenging the racist white power structure that is so heinously exterminating the people of Vietnam and threatening the world with nuclear destruction.

We have been victims of white racism for 400 years in the new world. We have been victims of racist barbarism for almost 200 years under the present form of government. Our people are slaughtered like swine on the main streets of racist America. Our churches and homes have been bombed. Our women raped with impunity. Our men have been emasculated. We are hated and murdered for no other reason than being born black and because we refuse to commend and love our savage oppressors, we are called racists.

We are oppressed people. Our objective is to destroy the hurtful stranglehold of our enemy oppressors. An opponent without the courage to designate his enemy by his true characteristics cannot expect to confront and defeat him. We propose to call our enemies what they are. We propose to rally our people and fight on this basis. We do not propose to mince our words for the sake of peaceful coexistence. It is a natural law that a humble lamb cannot peacefully coexist with a rabid wolf in close proximity.

Yes, we have some white Americans with us in our struggle. They are our true brothers. These revolutionaries understand and share our anger. They know it is justified. Their spirit is an extension of the glorious spirit of the great and noble antislavery fighter, John Brown. Yes, they too are a hated and persecuted minority people in Johnson’s majority mob rule Hitlerite jungle society. Yes, and like all other peoples we have enemies in our ranks. We have black traitors who practice treason for 30 pieces of silver. We have black Judases, insensate running dogs for the Johnson administration and its racist white power structure. Like their white puppet masters, these black puppets too have days that are numbered.

Our wrath is as intense against the black lackeys of our white oppressors as it is against the white supremacy oppressors themselves. These mercenary Uncle Toms are the most vocal nonviolent peace peddlers in the storm centers of racist America today. The ghettoes are ablaze but they advocate peaceful submission to continued tyranny and oppression.

Johnson, the great civil rights advocate, the former senator from the racist state of Texas, who as senator voted against every civil rights bill that came before the U.S. Senate, claimed to be a modern day Moses to black Americans so long as they passively allowed themselves to be mauled and maimed by white supremacy brutes and thugs. But now, with brutal white supremacy Federal Power, he threatens those who defend themselves, their homes, and their women and children. Mr. Johnson, the big daddy white supremacist, would remind our people that we are a minority and the brutal racist white savages are a majority. Like his fellow-traveling Ku Klux Klansmen, he endeavors to frighten and intimidate us by the mere numbers of our eternal oppressors.

In the same fashion that Mr. Johnson would like to intimidate the Chinese people with a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, he is endeavoring to intimidate the black American by alluding to great hordes of white supremacists who are ready and willing to exterminate our people. We say to Mr. Johnson that intimidation, violence, and brutality will not stop the raging fires in the people’s liberation struggle. The only force on earth powerful enough to halt the flames engulfing ghettoes and main streets of racist America consists of fair play, brotherhood, equality, and justice.

We serve notice on big daddy Texas Lyndon B. Johnson that he can no more intimidate the Afro-American people with his threat of unleashing his great hordes of mad-dog racists than he can intimidate the Chinese people with the threat of unleashing a nuclear attack. The day when brutal white racist oppressors and imperialists can frighten colored peoples into submission by threats of savage violence are gone forever!

We revolutionary Afro-Americans respond to Mr. Johnson and his Ku Klux Klan fraternity of white supremacy with the cry of BLACK POWER, FREEDOM NOW! JUSTICE! We proclaim our inalienable right to live as human beings and we shall implement our demand with blood and fire. Yes, Mr. Johnson, we are a minority but more than that we are an oppressed minority determined at all costs to be free, and we are resolved to pay any price, to perform any task, and to go to any length for our freedom.

Yes, we are a minority but we are a minority with the power of a righteous cause and justice on our side. We are a minority marching in the endless files of the great multiracial masses of the invincible anti-imperialist and antiracist forces of the world. For the benefit of Mr. Johnson, who puts so much stock in numbers, we remind him once again, in the words a great people’s leader a liberator whose words, thought, and teachings stand as impeccable in the turbulent winds of time as the mighty Rock of Gibraltar, yes, we remind him once again that our great leader and teacher, Chairman Mao Zedong has said:

“... We are in the majority and they are in the minority. At most, they make up less than ten percent of the three thousand million population of the world. I am firmly convinced that, with the support of more than ninety percent of the people of the world, the American Negroes will be victorious in their just struggle. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.”

Today, in the social jungle of racist America the rights of colored people are less respected than those of common street dogs. The law and the kangaroo courts of the so-called free world of “Christian” democracy protect the rights of common street dogs and other dumb animals but there is not a single court of law that dispenses even-handed justice and unbiased constitutional and human rights to colored Americans. The long, brutal, and miserable plight of our people throughout the history of barbaric America encompasses one of the most shameful and savage chapters in the history of slavery and man’s injustice to man.

The dominant class in racist America is one of the most hypocritical the world has ever seen. It captured the African in Africa, enslaved him, ripped his culture from him, raped him, reproduced from him, completely dehumanized him, and reduced him to the level of beast of burden and stamped him with the name Negro as a tribute to the white man’s creation and invention of a new implement of agriculture and an instrument of labor. And all the while, he promoted this brutal slavery, he proclaimed himself architect of democracy and a Christian society.

All the while, he brutally and savagely exterminated the American Indian and piously proclaimed Thanksgiving to his white god for being so generous in blessing him with the bounty of the Indian’s rich land and paradise. He built a brutal imperialist prison wall around the peoples of Latin America and piously named it the protective Monroe Doctrine. He stretched his bloody hand to Asia and arrogantly called it an “Open Door Policy.”

The Open Door Policy was the policy of an armed bandit at the door of a peaceful man. Today, the same bandit rapes and plunders the land the Vietnam, murders defenseless women and children and exterminates the people in the name of “free world Christian democracy”.

The same bandit who exterminated and starved the American Indian on his own native soil now piously proclaims to practice charity to the nation of India in a hypocritical effort to use them in his campaign to subdue and enslave the peoples of Asia. What is the nature of his democracy? What does such a beastly, imperialist, racist savage know about democracy? Should not democracy, like charity, start first at home, and then spread abroad? What is the democracy of the Black American captives in the miserable ghettoes, in the cotton fields of Mississippi, battered by the savage policeman’s club in Washington, D.C.? What is the democracy of the Puerto Ricans, of the Mexicans, and of the American Indians in racist America? Only the most naive can believe the empty words and promise of such a morally bankrupt charlatan.

Deceptive American white supremacy is personified by hypocrites like Bobby Kennedy, a sophisticated huckster and charlatan of the first magnitude who struts and sways into the hotbed of African white supremacy and colonialism, hugging and kissing black babies and masquerading as a great white father and savior of the black Africans. Mr. Kennedy’s actions in racist America are quite a contrast to his deceitful conduct in Africa. When Mr. Kennedy served as the attorney general of the U.S.A. he was sworn to uphold the right of equal protection under law, yet he collaborated with the most barbaric racists in the nation. He entered into a “white gentleman’s agreement” with the notorious racist governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett.

Defenseless and helpless black women and children were bombed, gassed, clubbed, raped, and murdered on the main streets of racist America and Mr. Kennedy is yet to punish a single white supremacist heathen transgressor. As attorney general he did nothing about the fact that Africans were being beaten in the United States, even the diplomats assigned to the United Nations.

It is strange indeed how Mr. Kennedy can perform in the racist chorus of those who chant slogans of hatred, vilification, and dehumanization for black people in America while proclaiming his pretended great love for black humanity in Africa. Such is the nature of a deceptive and barbaric Yankee.

In America, Mr. Kennedy publicly proclaims himself to be opposed to black nationalism. In his white supremacy logic, he calls it racism in reverse. Black nationalism is a survival reaction to white nationalism. White nationalism transcends religious, class, social, and political lines. The reason that no massive black-white unity on a national scale exists today is that the white supremacy ruling class has poisoned the minds of white workers. Most white workers identify with their white imperialist rulers. White liberals insist on paternalism. Even bourgeois minded so-called socialists are more and more identifying and grouping on a racial basis rather than on a class basis.

We Afro-American revolutionaries have discovered that some so-called socialists, we thought to be our comrades and class brothers have joined the international Ku Klux Klan fraternity for white supremacy and world domination. To our consternation, we have discovered that the bourgeois orientated power structure of some socialist states, even one with a black and white population, would prefer to preserve the white reactionary anti-communist power structure in racist America, their natural national enemy, than to see a just, democratic, fraternal socialist state brought about by the revolutionary action of oppressed blacks that would serve the best interests of all peoples and races. Like their Yankee counterparts that they love to ape so well, even to the point of emulating their racism, they are moving might and main to frustrate and defeat the revolutionary movements of the oppressed peoples throughout the world.

We of the Afro-American liberation movement resolutely condemn and oppose all counterrevolutionaries and purveyors of white supremacy whether they cloak their treachery in the garb of Marxist-Leninist phraseology or the hideous bed sheets of the Ku Klux Klan and its phoney Christian doctrine.

We who are engaged in the struggle for liberation and survival vehemently condemn the use of black dehumanized troops as cannon fodder in a white man’s war of imperialism in Vietnam. We oppose Johnson’s vicious crusade to dehumanize, emasculate, and enslave the great Vietnamese people.

Black boys — from the slum housing of black ghettoes, ill-educated in segregated schools, emasculated and dehumanized by police brutality and a savage white power structure — yes, black, boys who cannot find employment, black boys who are victims of white racists who hate them because of the color of their skin — black boys who mothers, sisters, and loved ones are being savagely clubbed, gassed, raped, maimed, lynched, and railroaded to prison in racist kangaroo courts simply for begging and praying for elementary justice are forced to share foxholes and and shed their blood alongside racist Negro haters in Vietnam, who like in racist America refuse to fraternize with them in places of amusement in Tokyo and Saigon.

Even out of proportion to the self-styled master race, vast numbers of black soldiers are forced to suffer and die in that vain effort to prolong and extend the brutal racist white man’s imperialism. They are forced to suffer and die in the cause of a racist power structure that is as much the enemy of black people in America as it is the people of peace and freedom loving Vietnam.

And why do we call the massive Ku Klux Klan type action in Vietnam a racist white man’s war of imperialism while many black men are fighting there? It is because in racist America no black man is part of Johnson’s policy-making clique. The United State is governed by white power. The Pentagon is a white-dominated repressive arm of a ruthless elite white power structure. Wall Street is an exclusive club of the great white chiefs of business and industry. Black Americans are resisting the racist and imperialist lily-white power structure. How can a people who are fighting and dying simply to wrest the most basic of human rights from an intransigent and tyrannical power structure be said to be partners of that power structure and willing participants in its racist and imperialist ventures and crimes against humanity?

The United States today is a fascist society more brutal than any the world has ever known. It has all but exterminated a whole people.

It has robbed and raped an entire continent with impunity. It has divided the peoples of the world into national factions and set them against themselves and their brothers. With no more authority than the wave of its bloody imperialist hand it has abrogated the right of self-determination of small nations. It has appointed and crowned itself both king and armored knight of the whole universe. It threatens the globe with annihilation. It is a super colonial power that is colonializing the colonials.

The world famed and brilliant philosopher, Lord Bertrand Russell has justifiably stated that racist America has exterminated more black people than Hitler exterminated Jews in Nazi Germany. Lord Russell and many other fair-minded humanists throughout the world have justifiably stated that the U.S. military aggression in Vietnam is executed in a more cruel and barbarous manner than even the horrible campaigns of aggression, genocide, and conquest carried out by Hitler’s fascist Germany.

Yet, there is a mighty tendency, promoted by the sinister American devil himself, to engender more sympathy and fraternalism for the so-called “good reasonable Americans” than for the wretched victims of vicious and brutal U.S. imperialism. The U.S. constitutes one of the greatest fascist threats ever to cast its ugly shadow across the face of the earth. When the butchers of Nazi Germany were on the plunder, the world cry was “Crush Nazism!” “Crush the Fascist Power Structure!” “Crush Germany!” Total war was unleashed without deference to any who may been considered “good Germans” inside Nazi Germany. No sane person opposed to fascism pleaded for a soft policy toward Nazi Germany or pleaded for victims to wait for deliverance through the benevolence of “good German workers and liberals.” Racist America didn’t give a damn about sparing the good Japanese people when they dropped their horrible and devastating atom bombs.

What is the motive of those who plead for the exemption of liberal Americans, whose feigned liberalism merely serves as a cloak and shield around the naked power of savage and racist U.S. imperialism? The time is fast approaching when the so-called good reasonable American must make a decision either to overtly side with American chauvinism and jingoism or to take a resolute anti-imperialist and anti-racist stand that will be a firm basis for a just and lasting world peace.

We who are brutally oppressed and victimized cannot forever afford to spare the fortress of social reaction and tyranny because there are allegedly silent dissenters within its gates. Those who are without righteous cause of the oppressed must be prepared to suffer the consequences of the gathering storm of the violent and turbulent winds of retribution. A good man who is silent and inactive in times of great injustice and oppression is no good man at all.

He is no ally to freedom and justice but is a silent partner to tyranny and condemnation. He does not deserve exemption from the condemnation and the vengeance of those whom his silence allows to be victimized. The myth of the good reasonable American who is yet to be heard is a ruse perpetrated by the psychological arm of the imperialist forces of tyranny. It is one minute to zero in racist America. Four hundred bloody and gruesome years have passed. For 400 years, our good silent partners have remained silent and inactive. Time is running out and they stand at the dividing line still beseeching patience, still beseeching the slave to leave his fate to his silent friends ever infected with inertia. They plead for deference on behalf of the good people who yet stand at one camp. We call to them to separate themselves from the devil’s legions. We inform them that they have not 400 more years to make a decision but one minute before the hour of zero, before the Armageddon between the slavemaster and the slave.

Once again, in closing, let me thank our great leader and teacher, the architect of people’s warfare, Chairman Mao Zedong, for his great and inspiring statement in support of our struggle. And to our great Chinese brothers and true revolutionaries throughout the world, we revolutionary Afro-Americans vow that we shall take the torch of freedom and justice into the streets of racist America and we shall set the last great stronghold of Yankee imperialism ablaze with our battle cry of Black Power!

FREEDOM! FREEDOM! FREEDOM! NOW OR DEATH!

For our people, for our country, and for our compatriots throughout the world, we shall reclaim the nobility of the American Revolution. We shall raise our flag in honor, true peace, and brotherhood to all the world!

Long live the People’s Republic of China!

Long live Chairman Mao Zedong!

Long live the people’s resistance to imperialism, racism, and tyranny!

Long live the militant friendship between the Chinese and revolutionary American people!

[end of speech]

The Real Dragon: George Jackson and the Black August Tradition

By Alieu Bah

Republished from This Is Africa.

“I don’t want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pollution, racism, nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of untruth and licentious, usurious economics.”

— George Jackson 

The dragon never physically flew out, but his thoughts, writings, and practice encircled the black globe in the fire-spitting style of a true and living dragon — the metaphor gains sharpness the deeper we delve in the many variants of the lives and afterlives of the man. George Jackson was the compañero who wasn’t afraid; a righteous brother who frightened and shook the empire whiles locked up in her deadly dungeons for all his adult life. What conditions create a man so beautiful, cold, calculated, and brilliant as George? Why was the system so afraid of a young black brother such as this? Why did he stand out and continue to do so after all this time? To look at George’s life is to see a body in motion, racked with questions of the impossible and a near denial that such a man really did walk amongst us; nay, caged amongst us.

Studying the life and times of brother George is to come to certain hard conclusions that are ever necessary in the grand scheme of things. It is to look at the prison system that kept him captive and see a slave plantation whose abolition has become an ever-important need in the age of mass-incarceration of black and African people in the US settler colony. The criminalization of black existence and the glaring contradictions of the capitalist dystopia as African lives continue to be in primitive accumulation. It is to see the enduring human spirit, despite captivity and slavery, flourishing and blossoming and yearning for nothing short of liberation and the human right to dignity. His life speaks across the times in a transhistorical encounter with our times when so many like him continue to suffer the privation of white supremacy and commodification of the human being.

At a personal, intimate level, to look at his life is to see a studious, steadfast and consistent life given to the liberation of black people, and all toiling people, under the yoke of capitalism-imperialism. A life lived in love of the people — a true ox for the people to ride. He laid no claims to grandeur or greatness, his preoccupation was with how we get free! How can the unconsoled be consoled and the last become first. But George comes from a tradition, a living lineage that inspired his whole life as a revolutionary black man in the hellhole of the imperial state. For we recognize that the individual is a social being who’s becoming and fullness is only realized through the people. He knew this too, hence his constant emphasis on taking Revolution back to the masses; the sufferer, the fella, the captured and the odds job man.

Black August started as a commemoration of George’s defiant spirit, but more than that, it is testimony to that radical, revolutionary tradition that never quenches. The August of our lives as a global African humanity stretches back to Touissant and the Haitian Revolution, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the birth of Garvey and Fred Hampton and many many more. August is indeed very august and replete with our glorious struggles for liberation and self-determination. In connecting George Jackson to this living and breathing tradition, we honor him truly as he would have wanted to be. Constantly in his letters we are reminded that he is with the progressive forces of the African world, that his sustained inspiration came from giants of the struggle the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Lumumba, Fanon, etc. What this means for us today is to go back to that source from whence he was drinking from and deduce lessons and learnings in advancing this unfinished project of national liberation.

Nkrumah, like many others from his time, emphasized in no uncertain terms the need for African unification under scientific socialism. This is an integral part of the tradition we have inherited today and is linked intimately with the just and righteous struggles of black people in America. The home of black people in the diaspora and at home remains in Africa, and until such a time when this homeland of blackness is liberated and free from the machinations of domination, black people everywhere will be powerless, disrespected, and oppressed at will. And today, as Africa grapples with failed neocolonial states, black people continue to be the skunk of the planet wherever you might go around the world.

This then calls for a shared internationalism that is grounded foremost in revolutionary Pan-Africanism in the continuity provided to us by the likes of Kwame Ture and the All African People’s Revolutionary Party. In times gone by, in the callings of Marcus Garvey and UNIA to rally Africans all over the world and to build alliances where needed to advance our cause.

Beyond Pan-Africanism, the struggle to dismantle the neocolonial conditions in which black folks continue to live in the United States, like George Jackson brilliantly told us decades ago, has to be linked to an international struggle of the oppressed, and as such it will be won when the global struggle, which Afro America is an integral part of, will see the end of the empire with her tentacles cut off from all over the oppressed world. Fascism in America is trained and perfected on black bodies, then transferred and expertly translated as policy around the world. At the same time, military killers in Iraq go home to terrorize black lives in the streets of Minneapolis. Many locations, one enemy. This too must be understood clearly and the lessons applied for our inevitable victory.

Ultimately, it’s a recognition of the sheer power and possibilities that lay in the hands of Afro America that will give Black August it’s due place as an institution for self-determination and radiant new beginnings. Those millions of beaten down, imprisoned, overworked and back-bent workers and peasants that make America’s machines run are the only true vanguard of the humane struggle to change the conditions of humanity and halt an empire whose barbarism has outshone all other empires before her.

Oppressed humanity continues to look to Africans in America as they lock horns with the devil. Knowing this contending class of people will determine the course of human history — the one who emerges victorious moves the old hands of the human story, either to prosperity for all, or perdition. But knowing the arc of history, in the end it’s the oppressed who win since they have nothing to protect and everything to gain in this glorious fight. A protracted and long struggle, but victory being assured for the long-suffering fella who embodies the truth in her very being.

To truly honor George Jackson and the Soledad brothers is to struggle for what they stood for; it is to study their bequeathal to this generation and make it come to life. To organize and study hard as they did, and never for once cower before the elemental forces of oppression. To never be counted amongst the broken — George died victorious and unbroken in the harshest of places, in the hands of the most vicious. To know that eventually the prison gates will open and the real dragon will fly out.

A Critique of Western Marxism's Purity Fetish

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Western Marxism suffers largely from the same symptom as Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby – each’s fixation on perfection and purity leaves perpetually unfulfilled all that it claims to desire. On one hand, Jay seeks a return to the purity of his first encounter with Daisy, and in the impossibility of this return to purity, the actual potential for a relationship is lost. On the other hand, western Marxists seek a pure form of socialism, but in the impossibility of such a purity arising, they lose the potential to actuate or defend any socialist revolution. The purity of each is met with the reality that reality itself is never pure – it always contains mistakes, negations, breaks and splits.

Jay Gatsby cannot officially reestablish himself with Daisy insofar as she admits to having loved Tom Buchanan – her husband – during the intermediate time before she re-connects with Jay. This imperfection, this negation of purity, is unacceptable – Daisy must tell Tom she never loved him to reestablish the purity of their first encounter. With no purity, there can be no relationship.

Similarly, for Western Marxists the triumphant socialist experiments of the 20th and 21st century, in their mistakes and ‘totalitarianisms’, desecrate the purity in the holiness of their conception of socialism. The USSR must be rejected, the Spanish civil war upheld; Cuban socialism must be condemned, but the 1959 revolution praised; Allende and Sankara are idols, Fidel and Kim Il-Sung tyrants, etc. What has died in purity can be supported, what has had to grapple with the mistakes and pressures that arise out of the complexities and contradictions of building socialism in the imperialist phase of capitalism, that must be denied.

As was diagnosed by Brazilian communist Jones Manoel’s essay, ‘Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution’,  western Marxists’ fetishization of purity, failures, and resistance as an end in itself creates “a kind of narcissistic orgasm of defeat and purity”. Comrade Manoel rightly points out the fact that western “Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth”. Western Marxists celebrate the emergence of a revolutionary movement; but, when this revolutionary movement is triumphant in taking power, and hence faced with making the difficult decisions the concrete reality of imperialism, a national bourgeoisie, economic backwardness, etc. force it into, the western Marxists flea with shouts of betrayal! For the western Marxists, all practical deviation from their purity is seen as a betrayal of the revolution, and thus, the cries of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ emerge.

Manoel, reflecting on the work of the late Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism, does a superb job in providing the meat for this thesis. Nonetheless, he (as well as Losurdo) conceives of this theoretical lapse as being “smuggled in as contraband from Christianity”. I will argue that although Christian mysticism may be present here, the root of the rot is not Christian contraband, but western metaphysics (which precedes Christian mysticism itself). The root, in essence, is found in the fixated categories that have permeated western philosophy; in the general conception that Truth is in the unchanging, in the permanent, in substance; and only indirectly in the mystical forms these have taken under the Christian tradition. The diagnosis Engels gave reductive Marxists in 1890 applies to today’s western Marxists  – “what all these gentlemen lack is dialectics”.

Parmenides Contra Heraclitus

Whereas Manoel and Losurdo see the root of this purity fixation in Christianity, it is in the classical Greek debates on the question of change – taking place 500 years or so before Christ – where this fixation emerges. It will be necessary to paint with a broad stroke the history of philosophy to explain this thesis.

The Heraclitan philosophy of universal flux, which posits that “everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed”, would lose its battle against the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.[1] Parmenides, who held that foolish is the mind who thinks “that everything is in a state of movement and countermovement”, would dominate the conceptions of truth in the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary world.[2] Although various aspects of Heraclitus’ thought would become influential in scattered minds, the dialectical aspect of his thought would never be centered by any philosophical era.

Plato, as the next best dialectician of the ancient world, attempted a reconciliation of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In the realm of Forms, the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence would reign; in the physical realm, the Heraclitan philosophy of flux would. In his Phaedo, Plato would note that the realm of the physical world is changing and composed of concrete opposites in an interpenetrative, i.e., dialectical, relationship to one another. In the realm of the “unchanging forms”, however, “essential opposites will never… admit of generation into or out of one another”.[3] Truth, ultimately, is in the realm of the Forms, where “purity, eternity, immortality, and unchangeableness” reign.[4] Hence, although attempting to provide a synthesis of Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ philosophy of permanence and change, the philosophy of purity and fixation found in Parmenides dominates Plato’s conception of the realm of the really real, that is, the realm of Forms or Idea.  

Aristotle, a student of Plato, would move a step further away from the Heraclitan philosophy of flux. In Aristotle we have a metaphysical system which considers the law of non-contradiction the most primary principle – “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect”.[5] In addition, in Aristotle we have the development of the world’s first logical system, an impressive feat, but nonetheless composed of abstract fixated categories completely indifferent to content. The fixation found in the logic would mirror the fixation and purity with which the eidos (essence) of things would be treated. Forms, although not existing in a separate realm as in Plato, nonetheless exist with the same rigidity. The thinking of essences, that is, the thinking of what makes a species, a type of thing, the type of thing it is, would remain in the realm of science within this fixated Aristotelian framework. Although the 16th century’s scientific revolution begins to tear away the Aristotelianism which dominated the prevalent scholastic philosophy, only with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species would Aristotelian essentialism be dealt its decisive blow. This essentialism, undeniably, is an inheritance of the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.

The philosophy of Plato, in the form of Neo-Platonists like Plotinus, would be incredibly influential in the formation of Christian thought – especially in Augustine of Hippo. Christianity would remain with a Platonic philosophical foundation up until the 12th-13th century’s rediscovery of Aristotle and the synthetization of his philosophy with Christian doctrine via Thomas Aquinas. Centuries later the protestant reformation’s rejection of Aristotelianism would mark the return of Plato to the Christian scene. All in all, the Christianity which Manoel and Losurdo see as the root of the fetishization of purity in every moment of its unfolding presupposes Greek philosophy. It is fair, then, to go beyond Christianity and ask the critical question – “what is presupposed here”? : what we find is that in every instance, whether mediated through Plato or Aristotle, there is a Parmenidean epistemic and ontological fixation which posits the eternal and unchanging as synonymous with truth, and the perishable and corporeal as synonymous with false.

Hegel Contra Parmenides

The spirit of the Heraclitan dialectic will be rekindled by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued philosophy came to finally see “land” with Heraclitus. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that “there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic”[6]. It is in Heraclitus, Hegel argues, where we “see the perfection of knowledge so far as it has gone”; for, Heraclitus “understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic”.[7] Heraclitus’ dialectics understood, as Hegel notes, that “truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and, indeed, of the pure opposition of being and non-being”.[8] This unity of pure being and non-being is the starting point for Hegel’s Science of Logic. Here, he argues:

[Pure] being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing… Pure being and nothing are, therefore, the same. What is truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being – does not pass over but has passed over – into nothing, and nothing into being.[9]

Insofar as being exists in a condition of purity, it is indistinguishable from nothingness. Being must take the risk of facing and tarrying with its opposite in order to be. Being only takes place within the impurity present in the oscillation and mediation from being and non-being, that is, being only takes place when sublated into becoming qua determinate being, as “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be”.[10] This is why, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel understands that “Substance is being which is in truth Subject”.[11] Substance, whose purity holds the crowning jewel of Truth for western philosophy, can be only insofar as it is “self-othering” itself.[12] Like Spirit, Substance, must look the “negative in the face, and tarry with it”.[13] Only insofar as something can self-otherize itself, which is to say, only insofar as a thing can immanently provide a negation for itself and desecrate its purity by wrestling with the impure, can conditions for the possibility of it actually being arise. Hence, the “truth of being” is “characterized as Becoming”; truth is won “only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself”.[14] Purity, the “[shrinking] from death [to] keep itself untouched by devastation”, is lifeless.[15] Jay cannot be with Daisy insofar as he wishes to retain the relationship in purity. Western Marxists will never build socialism, or find a socialism to support, insofar as they expect socialism to arise in the pure forms in which it exists in their heads.

The Paradox of Western Marxists

Having shifted our focus from Christianity to the purity fixated epistemology-ontology of western philosophy, we can now see the fundamental paradox in Western Marxism: on the one hand, in hopes of differentiating themselves from the ‘positivistic’ and ‘mechanistic’ Marxism that arose in the Soviet Union it seeks to return to Hegel in their fight against ‘orthodox dogma’; on the other hand, although producing phenomenal works on Hegel and dialectics, Western Marxist’s interpretive lens for looking at the world remains with a Parmenidean rigidity and Aristotelian form of binary thinking. Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.

They are unable to understand, as Hegel did, the necessary role apparent ‘failures’ play as a moment in the unfolding of truth. For Hegel, that which is seen as ‘false’ is part of “the process of distinguishing in general” and constitutes an “essential moment” of Truth.[16] The bud (one of Hegel’s favorite examples which consistently reappears in his work) is not proven ‘false’ when the blossom arises. Instead, Hegel notes, each sustains a “mutual necessity” as “moments of an organic unity”.[17] Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ when it, encountering the external and internal pressures of imperialism and a national bourgeois class, is forced to take more so-called ‘authoritarian’ positions to protect the revolution. Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ or transformed into ‘state capitalism’ (in the derogatory, non-Leninist sense) when faced with a backwards economy it takes the risk of tarrying with its opposite and engages a process of opening up to foreign capital to develop its productive forces.

The ‘authoritarian’ moment, or the moment of ‘opening up to foreign capital’, are not the absolute negation of socialism – as western Marxists would have you believe – but the partial negation, that is, the sublation of the idealistic conceptions of a socialist purity. These two moments present themselves where they appear as the historically necessary negations needed to develop socialism. A less ‘authoritarian’ treatment of the Batista goons after the Cuban revolution would have opened the window for imperialism and national counter-revolutionary forces to overthrow the popular revolution. A China which would not have taken the frightening risk of opening up would not have been able to lift 800 million out of poverty (eradicating extreme poverty) and be the beacon of socialist construction and anti-imperialist resistance in the world today.

Hegel understood that every leap towards a qualitatively new stage required a long process, consisting of various moments of ‘failures’ and ‘successes’, for this new stage to mature into its new shape. Using for Spirit the metaphor of a child he says,

But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth-there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born-so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms.[18]

Western Marxists ignore the necessity of the process. They expect socialism, as a qualitatively new stage of human history, to exist immediately in the pure form they conceived of in their minds. They expect a child to act like a grown up and find themselves angered when the child is unable to recite Shakespeare and solve algebraic equations. They forget to contextualize whatever deficiencies they might observe within the embryonic stage the global movement towards socialism is in. They forget the world is still dominated by capitalist imperialism and expect the pockets of socialist resistance to be purely cleansed from the corrupting influence of the old world. They forget, as Marx noted in his Critique of the Gotha Program, that socialist society exists “as it emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.[19]

Where is Hegel, in concrete analysis, for these Western Marxists? The answer is simple, he is dead. But Hegel does not die without a revenge, they too are dead in the eyes of Hegel. Their anti-dialectical lens of interpreting the material world in general, and the struggle for socialism in specific, leaves them in the lifeless position Hegel called Dogmatism. For Hegel,

Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowing or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the opinion that the True consists in a proposition which is a fixed result, or which is immediately known.[20]

Western Marxist dogmatist fetishize binaries, the immediate (either intuitive or empirical), and the pure. To them, something is either socialism (if it is pure) or not-socialism (if it is impure). They cannot grapple, in practice at least, with the concept of becoming, that is, with the reality of the construction of socialism. Socialism must be constructed, it is an active enterprise emersed necessarily in a world riddled by imperialist pressures, contradictions, and violence – both active and passive. Western Marxist will write splendid critiques of positivism’s fetish of the ‘fact’, but in their own practical analysis of socialist construction in the world they too castrate facts from the factors that allowed them to exist.

Hence Žižek, the most prominent Hegelian Marxists today, couches his anti-dialectical bourgeois critiques of socialism in Cuba (as well as China and pretty much every other socialist experiment) within a reified analysis that strips the Cuban reality from its context. It ignores the historical pressures of being a small island 90 miles away from the world’s largest empire; an empire which has spent the last 60+ years using a plethora of techniques – from internationally condemned blockades, to chemical attacks, terrorist fundings, and 600+ CIA led attempts on Fidel’s life – to overthrow the Cuban revolution. Only in ignoring this context and how it emerges can Žižek come to the purist and anti-dialectical conclusion that the revolution failed and that the daily life of Cubans is reducible to “inertia, misery, escapism in drugs, in sex, [and] pleasures”.

The Panacea to the Fetishes of Western Marxism

In sum, expanding upon the analysis of comrade Manoel, it can be seen that the purity fetish, and the subsequent infatuation with failed experiments and struggles which, although never achieving the conquest of power, stayed ‘pure’, can be traced back to a Parmenidean conception of Truth as Unchanging Permanence which has permeated, in different forms, all throughout the various moments of western philosophy’s history.

This interpretive phenomenon may be referred to as an intellectual rot because; 1) at some point, it might have been a fresh fruit, a genuine truth in a particular moment; 2) like all fruits which are not consumed, they outlive their moment of ripeness and rot. Hence, the various forms the Parmenidean conception of Truth took throughout the various moments it permeated might have been justified for those moments, but today, after achieving a proper scientific understanding of the dialectical movement in nature, species, human social formation and thought, Parmenidean purity has been overthrown – it has spoiled, and this death fertilizes the soil for dialectical self-consciousness.

Although all theorists are still class subjects, bound to the material and ideological conditioning of their class and geographical standpoint (in relation to imperialism specifically) – the panacea for Western Marxists’ purity fetish is dialectics. Dialectics must not be limited simply to the theoretical realm in which they engage with it. If it stays in this pure realm, it will suffer the same fate socialism has for them – nothingness, absolute negation. Dialectical logic must be brought beyond the textbook and used as the interpretive framework with which we analyze the world in general, and the construction of socialism in specific. Only then will Western Marxism gain the possibility of being something more than a ‘radical’ niche of Western academia, focused only on aesthetics and other trivialities where purity can be sustained without risk of desecration.   

Notes

[1] Wheelwright, Phillip. The Presocratics. (The Odyssey Press, 1975). pp. 70.

[2] Ibid., pp. 97.

[3] Plato. “Phaedo” in The Harvard Classics. (P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1937). pp. 70, 90.

[4] Ibid., pp. 71.

[5] Aristotle. “Metaphysics” In The Basic Works of Aristotle. (The Modern Library, 2001)., pp. 736.

[6] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol I. (K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Company, 1892)., pp. 278.

[7] Ibid., pp. 282, 278.

[8] Ibid., pp. 282.

[9] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. § 132-134.

[10] Ibid., § 187

[11] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. (Oxford University Press, 1977)., pp. 10.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., pp. 19.

[14] Hegel’s Lectures pp. 283 and Phenomenology pp. 19.

[15] Phenomenology., pp. 19.

[16] Ibid., pp. 23.

[17] Ibid., pp. 2.

[18] Ibid., pp. 6.

[19] Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program” In Robert C. Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton and Company, 1978)., pp. 529.

[20] Phenomenology., pp. 23.

Black Power in China: Mao’s Support for African American “Racial Struggle as Class Struggle”

By Ruodi Duan

Republished from Fairbanks Center.

With funding from the Fairbank Center this past summer [2017], I visited four archival and document centers in greater China: the Beijing and Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Guangdong Provincial Archives, and the University Services Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Through official state memos and event proceedings, my aim was to reach a more nuanced understanding of Third World internationalism as performed and construed in local, post-1949 Chinese contexts.

My earlier research of Chinese newspapers and other periodicals from the 1960s and early 1970s suggested that — contrary to Frank Dikötter’s argument — racial difference in Maoist China did not merely become subsumed under class categorization: it crystallized and defined it. As my research develops, however, I am beginning to see a more complex reality of rhetoric and action during the era.

The archival sources I examined this summer, for example, indicate that even as the Chinese state — in print, culture, and through performed acts of solidarity — fleshed out the dynamics of racial hierarchy within the U.S. and presented itself as a champion of anti-imperialism and racial nationalism, it ultimately threw its weight behind a strategy of “race struggle is class struggle.” In effect, the People’s Republic publicly acknowledged and denunciated the salience of race to world politics while attempting to harness that insight to a broader campaign for global socialism. The achievement of global socialism would therefore be the sole and inevitable path towards dissolving racial inequities.

The annotated itinerary of African American leftist leader Robert F. Williams’ 1964 trip to China most tellingly sheds light upon this dynamic; Chinese party officials kept detailed tabs on Williams’ “ideological progress,” remarking that a previous visit had first opened his mind to the correct notion that “[white] racial nationalism cannot be countered with [black] racial nationalism.”

“Proletariat of the world, unite,” propaganda poster by Chen Yanning, Lin Yong, Wu Qizhong, and Yang Xiaoming, 1968

At the Shanghai archives, the 144 pages of microfilm on a 1964 all-city conference to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Chairman Mao’s “Statement Supporting Black Americans in Their Just Struggle against Racial Discrimination”— featuring drafts of speeches from worker, student, and women leaders — also proved illuminating. This motley collection of speakers drew explicit parallels between Chinese historical experiences of semi-colonialism and contemporary black American movements; they decried race-based discrimination and lauded national liberation movements but nonetheless, frequently harkened back to Mao’s dictum that “racial struggle is fundamentally a matter of class struggle.”

This may not be as paradoxical as it might initially seem. Indeed, it was practical for China’s internationalist strategy to espouse deeply sensitive readings of racism in world affairs and history while advocating non-racial solutions. The inferences to racial semi-colonialism in pre-revolutionary China as a condition comparable to contemporary black America only heightened the desirability and efficacy of a certain political trajectory: working-class revolution as the antidote to the abuses of racial capitalism. It is precisely the yoke of racial oppression that would spur African Americans to take dominant roles in the anti-capitalist, anti-American campaign. The success of such an effort would allow for race to disappear in the U.S., just as it purportedly had in China. In effect, black nationalism would be refashioned into a weapon of international class struggle.

Robert F. Williams meeting Mao Zedong in 1964.

The Chinese endeavor to cultivate political alliance with the African American left was meticulous, targeted, and effective. In Inner Mongolia, Williams expressed his amazement as students and workers gathered to perform African American fight songs for him in factories and on the streets. At the National Minorities Institute in Beijing, he asked to be photographed with sacred Tibetan texts as testament that the Chinese way would continue to tolerate, if not honor, religious traditions. He and his wife made arrangements for their two children to study in China, and Robert carried on extensive political discussions with senior Chinese officials on the role of Cuba in the Sino-Soviet Split.

Members of the Black Panther Party hold up Mao’s “little red book.”

Huey P. Newton meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai in September 1971.

Moving forward, I plan to continue charting the depictions and functions of China in African American social movements for civil rights and Black Power, with sensitivity to the complexities and nuances within the Chinese receptions to black nationalism. This is a dynamic, ever-evolving story that roughly paralleled but did not absolutely correlate with either political currents within China (such as the Cultural Revolution) or African American civil movements. Teasing out these multi-faceted dimensions of black nationalism in China will expand our broader historical knowledge of racial nationalism as a force in the Cold War international arena, and especially of the civil rights movement as an event of truly global inspirations and consequences.

Ruodi Duan is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s History Department researching race and ethnic studies in the Cold War, with a focus on Chinese depictions of African American social movements. This article received an “honorable mention” in the Fairbank Centers 2016 Travel Essay Competition.

Black American Apathy and Internationalism

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

“…There is no “American dilemma” because Black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them. Black people are legal citizens of the United States with, for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects concerning the white society. Thus institutional racism has another name: colonialism.”

-Black Power: Politics of Liberation.

For those organizing African people towards Revolutionary Pan-African Socialism, a Joe Biden presidency is not a win. It’s a detriment. Understanding neoliberalism breeds fascism would mean that it is a mistake for anyone alleged to be of a “radical politic” to celebrate Biden becoming the president-elect and, by extension, celebrating his running mate, Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, many Africans in the US have strapped themselves in willingly for a presidency that will attempt to be even more hawkish than the Barack Obama administration in every warmongering, drone-dropping, coup-backing, militarized-policing way.

Much of the issues around internationalism stems from a communal lack of political maturity, which helps one analyze their material conditions as they are. Furthermore, a lack of political education obstructs international solidarity with Africans and oppressed people globally. African people in the US make up a colonized nation not dissimilar to colonized nations always under attack by the strongarm of US imperialism and their western allies.

The US military and its 400 bases worldwide serve as occupiers in the same way the (overt) police state does in our neighborhoods. What is the difference between the US African Command (AFRICOM), which is said to “combat the War on Terror,” and militarized policing units like Operation Relentless Pursuit and Operation LeGend, both used in multiple cities across the country to “combat crime and domestic terrorism”? What is the difference between the murderous Israeli occupation of Palestine and the occupation of a colonized neighborhood in the US using IDF trained police units?

There is no difference.

The primary contradictions of imperialism have been distorted by dishonest conversations around “anti- Blackness,” as well as a new sense of American ‘pride’ found in Black Americans that assists in framing all geopolitical issues from an ‘us vs. them’ lens. Global and domestic imperialism are counterparts. African people’s allegiance to the US, and military enlistment, has always existed as a contradiction within the community. While it may be true historically African people were the least favorable to war, Obama’s presidency set the stage for a bold backing of US imperialism by way of patriotism from ‘Black America.’

Although most unite under hating Trump, many earnestly believe the US is worth saving. Mass “get out the vote” mobilizations across the country ensued to “stop full-blown fascism” by asserting a false sense of power in electing a majority unfavorable democratic candidate. The mainstream media announcement of Biden as the 46th president has caused a mass reactionary hysteria and sighs “of relief” that things may return to normal.

As the celebrations have been going on, despite Donald Trump not formally conceding, Biden’s team has been busy, too. Names for potential cabinet members who range from the center to the right have been circling the internet. Jim Clyburn and other democratic centrist moderates are currently vowing to protect the country from going “socialist” by pushing back against the messaging of “defund the police.” 

Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi have congratulated the presumed  president-elect and madame vice president-elect, promising even closer ties and relations. Both Netanyahu and Modi are fascists, in their own right, and part of a more extensive global expansion of fascist leadership, yet neither Biden nor Harris find an issue in continuing the existing relationships despite the very real murderous actions of both men in their prospective countries against Muslims. Coincidentally, alleged crimes against Muslims is the same propaganda use to be actively aggressive towards China and President Xi Jinping that Biden intends to continue with through the Indo-Pacific Command. 

Reactionary Internationalism: Fascists Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu congratulate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on their presumed electoral victory.

With rumors of Dick Cheney potentially being an advisor to Biden on foreign policy, a majority conservative Supreme Court and a majority GOP senate would be a convenient cover for Biden’s actual geopolitics and non-plan for the poor working-class. Biden has built a career in the US government on criminalizing Africans and other colonized people in the US with the racialized “War on Drugs” through policy measures like the crime bill (domestically) and Plan Colombia (globally).

The “open-letter left,” which includes characters like Noam Chomsky and Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, has decided, as a predominately white and economically stable coalition of signatures, to ignore historical materialism for the sake of ousting Trump. They have agreed that any policies that will place colonized people the most at risk, here and abroad, would be worth it so long as it’s not policies signed off on by Trump. Just like during the Obama era, the US left is proving itself useless in not only helping the masses comprehend imperialism but fighting against it by not voting for the man who has never seen a war he disapproved.

“Imperialism, which is the highest stage of capitalism, will continue to flourish in different forms as long as conditions permit it.  Though its end is certain, it can only come about under pressure of nationalist awakening and an alliance of progressive forces which hasten its end and destroy its conditions of existence.”  

- Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism

‘Black American’ apathy through American exceptionalism creates that “sigh of relief” people express now. The indifference to wars and occupation is the result of a rupture in the ability for African people to make the connections between a man promising more policing as a campaign strategy during the height of mass uprisings against the police to his aggressive rhetoric towards nations like Venezuela, China, Iran, etc. Nor the US’ role in establishing brutal neocolonial leadership in the Global South and on the Continent.

It is becoming more and more evident that despite the strengthening calls to ‘Free Palestine’ and more recent actions to ‘End Sars,’ internationalism will again become a backburner issue. How will Africans in the US combat this and re-establish the anti-war internationalism politics that cemented the Black Radical Tradition and politics of the past?

First, we must ruthlessly attack the aversion to political education. The lack of understanding of the Third World struggles adjacent to the struggles of Africans in the US has resulted in liberal reactionary responses to anti-imperialism. Imperialism can not continue to be a vacuum issue by Africans living within the empire of the US. This isolated framing of the world prevents the practice of revolutionary internationalism – international solidarity against the same white supremacist forces that oppress Africans domestically. We are witnessing the frantic reactionary calls to “let people enjoy things” for the sake of identity reductionism.

A #BlackLivesMatter solidarity action in occupied Palestine drawing connections between the murders of George Floyd and autistic Palestinian youth, Eyad Al-Hallaq

Online discourse centered around anti-imperialism is met with push back primarily because people do not possess the political maturity to comprehend the ways imperialism materially affects their everyday lives and the importance of internationalism. Once Africans in the US understand themselves as colonized people on stolen land, there will be a more precise analysis of how liberation is sought and gained through tactics not tied to revolutionary internationalism – not to continuously voting for one’s demise.

For colonized people within the imperial core, there should be no allegiance to America.

Black Lives Matter UK Revives the Anti-Imperialist Spirit of British Black Power

[PHOTO CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES]

By Alfie Hancox

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that have erupted in multiple British cities including London, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol, under the political direction of independent groups such as BLM UK* and BLM LDN, have typically been portrayed in the media as displays of solidarity with the movement in America. Black American movements have certainly always exerted a powerful influence in Britain, as Paul Gilroy’s concept of ‘The Black Atlantic’ has underscored – but British black radical politics should not be narrowly construed as just a US import.

In post-war Britain, Black Power took on a specific trajectory, based on the intertwined legacy of British colonialism in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Black radicals in Britain drew inspiration from anti-colonial struggles, and their uncompromising internationalism put them at odds with the parochialism of the left-wing mainstream. The expansive anti-imperialism of British Black Power has strong resonances today, in the way that the BLM protestors have targeted monuments to slavery and colonialism in Britain’s historic port cities, and also in the identification of BLM UK with emergent anti-capitalist and indigenous movements in the Global South. BLM UK has especially revived the intersectional anti-imperialism of the original black women’s movement in Britain.

British Black Power’s internationalist origins

Black radical politics in Britain have a long history extending well before the ‘Windrush moment’ (when the HMT Empire Windrush carrying workers from the Caribbean docked at Tilbury, Essex in 1948). From the eighteenth century, black Jacobins in England like Robert Wedderburn preached slavery abolition and working-class rebellion, and in 1900 the inaugurating conference of Pan-Africanism was held in London. However, British black radicalism entered a new stage in the decades following the Second World War. Due to racist employment and housing discrimination, economic stagnation hit black and Asian immigrant communities particularly hard, and their insecurity was compounded by police harassment and the fascistic terror meted out by National Front thugs.

Most of the Black Power groups established in Britain in the 1960s-70s, including the British Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Front, contained both African Caribbean and Asian members. British Black Power was based on an expansive political black identity, which grew organically out of post-war ‘New Commonwealth’ immigrant resistance in Britain. Trinidad-born communist Claudia Jones, who founded the Notting Hill carnival in 1959, should be recognised as a significant progenitor of political blackness. Jones was inspired by the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference in 1955, and in her essay “The Caribbean Community in Britain” she observed that “the common experience of Afro-Asian-Caribbean peoples in Britain is leading to a growing unison among these communities as they increasingly identify an injury to one as being an injury to all”.[1] Afro-Asian unity in Britain was also partially mediated via Black Power movements in Trinidad and Guyana, both former British colonies, where political solidarities were built up between the descendants of slaves from Africa and indentured servants from India.

Black self-organising came in response to intensifying racism. After Conservative MP Enoch Powell gave his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in Birmingham in 1968, several black political organisations met in a pub in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire to form a radical Black People’s Alliance. Among the attendant groups was the local Indian Workers Association, which had liaised with Malcolm X during his 1965 tour of England. In January 1969, the Alliance led an enormous march of some 5,000 Asian and black people on Downing Street, demanding the repeal of the latest Immigration Act, and condemning white-minority rule in southern Africa. During the march, an effigy was burnt to chants of “Disembowel Enoch Powell”. The day was reported on enthusiastically by Darcus Howe, a prominent member of the British Black Panther movement:

It was a truly beautiful sight to witness some ten thousand MILITANT black people – Africans, Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians – come out on to the streets and place themselves firmly upon the stage of REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL ACTIVITY here in Britain … The march moved off from Speakers Corner with deafning roars of “WE WANT BLACK POWER”, and as our people became conscious of their numbers and solidarity, the slogan became, “We ARE BLACK POWER” (Black Dimension, February 1969).

The Black People’s Alliance march was also significant for the appearance of open tensions between black radicals and the white-majority socialist groups in attendance. The sixties are often associated with a heightened socialist internationalism, and there is an element of truth to this – the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was launched by Marxist activists in Britain in 1966. However, this campaign represented a somewhat abstract identification with a movement against US imperialism. Additionally, while the British Anti-Apartheid Movement was critical of the government’s support for white-minority rule, during the 1960s it retained a neo-imperial vision of the Commonwealth as “a multiracial group of equals”, ignoring Britain’s exploitative economic relations with its ex-colonies.[2] Howe recorded the nuisance of what might be called ‘vicarious internationalism’ at the Black People’s Alliance demonstration:

When some white demonstrators attempted to dilute these [Black Power] war cries with such meaningless shouts of “Black and white unite and fight”, they were completely phased out, and the Vietnam contingent who wanted to inject the “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” chant, were reminded that the issues involved were right here in England.

There are parallels here with the reductionist framing of BLM protests in Britain as an exclusive response to racist violence in America. This narrative is based on a pervasive idea of British benevolence, stemming from the country’s failure to address the monstrous realities of its empire. Such denialism further subsumes a lengthy history of overt racism within Britain, including the racist pogroms in 1919 and 1958 in which colonial violence was turned inward, and the perpetual terrorising of black communities by the police, often under the pretext of ‘mugging panics’. In fact, as was highlighted by the Lammy Review, there is currently a greater disproportionality in the number of black people imprisoned in England and Wales than in America. As BLM protestors across Britain insist, in spite of prime minister Boris Johnson’s claims to the contrary, “the UK is not innocent”.

Bringing the Third World into the British metropole

Black Power developed in a global context of international political projects committed to Third World unity. The term ‘Third World’ was first used in the 1950s to designate countries outside either Cold War camp, but its meaning was soon transformed into a progressive organising principle, culminating in the New International Economic Order demanded by ‘developing’ nations at the UN in the mid-1970s.

The British Black Power movement argued that the imperialist strangulation of the Third World survived the demise of formal colonialism, through processes of capitalist unequal exchange – enforced by neo-colonial militarism, such as Britain’s post-war counterinsurgency in Malaya (initially overseen by a Labour government) – that ensured permanent underdevelopment for the ex-colonies.[3] Black radicals used the anti-imperialist concept of a global ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ to highlight a material reality of neo-colonial exploitation, but they did not perceive this as a mechanical geographical divide. In an editorial in Howe’s journal Race Today, the Third World was shown to have leaked into the metropolitan British core: “Handsworth, Notting Hill, Brixton, Southall are colonies and the struggles which emerge from within these enclaves are clearly anti-colonial in content” (Race Today, February 1976). Black Power activists thus denaturalised global economic polarisation as a political division – one that needed to be dismantled.

Internationalist connections were sometimes direct. Some Third World revolutionaries, including Walter Rodney, studied in London during the 1960s, while a number of British black radicals travelled to revolutionary nodal centres like Havana, Algiers and Dar es Salaam. After its revolutionary pilgrimage in 1978, the London-based Black Liberation Front celebrated Cuba as an example of socialism working to erode racism: “One of the most impressive sights of Havana is the people: they are composed of Afrikans, Latins, Indians, Chinese and those of mixed races. They all combine and live together as one united Cuba, without the fear of racial animosity” (Grassroots, September/October 1978). Some black radicals even interpreted Irish Republicanism as a neighbouring struggle against British imperialism.

For British Black Power militants, identification with the black and Asian working-class struggle in Britain was inseparable from their identification with developments in Third World socialist and anti-colonial movements, be they in Africa, Latin America, Asia or Australasia. As the Sri Lanka-born black radical theorist Ambalavaner Sivanandan emphasised, “the heart is where the battle is”.

Challenging nativist social democracy

Much of the appeal of Black Power in Britain stemmed from disillusionment with the Labour Party, which on taking power in 1964 enforced the Tories’ Commonwealth Immigrants Act, targeting primary immigration from Britain’s former empire. Labour’s capitulation to racist sentiments became even more apparent in March 1968 (one month before Powell’s speech in Birmingham), with its rushed updated immigration bill barring free entry to Britain’s Asian citizens in Kenya trying to flee the ‘Africanization’ campaign. Harold Wilson’s 1974 Labour government again gifted official legitimacy to anti-immigrant attitudes, enforcing the 1971 Immigration Act despite its initial opposition, and overseeing a steady increase in deportations.[4]

Gilroy’s influential critique of the mainstream left’s implicitly-racialised nationalism in There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack was prefigured in the black radical movement, which pinpointed the British labour movement’s historical imbrication in colonialism. The Fabians, for instance, who provided the intellectual underpinning of the Labour Party, were staunch imperialists. In the 1970s the Asian Youth Movement, which took up the symbolism and rhetoric of Black Power, coined the slogan “Labour, Tory both the same, both play the racist game!”[5] As sociologist John Narayan explains, British Black Power groups identified “how race and racism had infected the British labour movement and its confusion of social democracy for socialism … Britain’s (white) working class had been bound to the neo-imperial social democratic state and its outward racism and hostility to the non-white members of the British working class served as a denial of the multi-racial nature of the global working class”.[6]

This black radical critique can be extended to the contemporary phenomenon of Corbynism, which never managed to shake off the rationale of ‘nativist social democracy’. Under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party continued to support hard border controls, while its 2019 Manifesto upheld the ‘national security’ framing that associates migrants with criminality. As Narayan argues, the Corbyn project tacitly repeated “the racialized and methodological nationalist idea of justice that underpinned previous forms of social democracy through a neutral [i.e. ‘race’-blind] focus on British class injustice”.[7]

As British black radicals recognised, left-wing patriotism (recently reformulated as ‘progressive patriotism’) is predicated on the whitewashing of the country’s working-class history, perhaps most notably the post-war construction of the National Health Service. While the NHS partly represented a working-class gain – or, more accurately, a ruling-class concession to stem the rising tide of trade union militancy – this is just one side of the story. To service the NHS, the Colonial Office recruited hospital staff from West Africa, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Immigrant workers were funnelled into the lowest-grade qualifications, and often held at permanent risk of deportation. Indeed, as the Windrush scandal recently exposed, that risk never went away. There was for instance the case of Gretel Gocan, an 81-year-old Windrush-generation nurse kept out of Britain, and separated from her children for nine years, after taking a holiday to Jamaica. Meanwhile racist abuse, often compounded by sexism, continues to be routinely hurled at NHS staff. The whitewashing of the NHS further entails the erasure of a sustained history of radical resistance by women of colour workers, including nurses from the Caribbean, to gendered-racist discrimination. Women in the Race Today Collective suggested that black and Asian healthcare workers “brought the tradition of rebellion and resistance they had fashioned in the womb of colonial society” (Race Today, May 1975).

Intersectional anti-imperialism

Anti-imperialism was also the organisational pivot of the original black women’s movement in Britain, formed in opposition to the Eurocentrism of the white feminist mainstream, which posited patriarchy as a universal and monolithic system of oppression, ignoring how, for example, the history of colonialism and slavery meant that the black family was frequently a source of refuge for black women. The formation in 1978 of the national black and Asian women’s umbrella group, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), was inspired by the self-organising of women in African national liberation movements, some of which had representatives in Britain. OWAAD’s founding statement, currently held in the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, paid homage to how “the increased scale and higher level of the women’s participation in the anti-imperialist struggle have been achieved through the successes in combatting the reaction of male domination be it in Namibia, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Mozambique etc.” The organisation also explained how political blackness “provides us with a distinct, united identity based on our relationship to Imperialism, a system which uses the ideology of racism to rationalise its continued exploitation of our people both here and abroad” (“Afro-Asian Unity – Rhetoric or Reality?”, undated).

OWAAD members underlined how, on a global scale, capitalist-imperialism simultaneously mobilises sexism and racism within a global hierarchy of wages – including the unpaid domestic labour of especially Third World women – to capture imperialist ‘superprofits’. They also emphasised how the post-Keynesian, neo-imperialist strategy of outsourcing production to take advantage of cheap female labour in the Third World was accompanied by renewed racially-gendered discourses to naturalise the subordination of this new workforce, as in this widely-circulated Malaysian government advert: “The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous world over. Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care; who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the oriental girl”.[8]

Several British black women’s groups sent delegations to the UN World Conferences on Women in Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995), joining international calls for the recognition of Third World women’s unremunerated labour.[9] Their intersectional understanding of how class exploitation is heavily shaped by race and gender has sustained relevance today, as the enormous profits accrued by Global North-based multinational corporations are often predicated on the hyper-exploitation of women of colour workers in factories and sweatshops located in places like Bangladesh, Mexico and the Philippines.

The new return to black radicalism in Britain

Immediately, the Black Lives Matter movement developed as a response to anti-black police violence in the US, and direct parallels were drawn by BLM UK to the institutional police racism and black deaths in custody in Britain. But BLM has also articulated a broader transnational political project, drawing connections with global anti-capitalist revolts over the last year including in Chile, Lebanon, Kenya and Haiti, particularly directed against the economic austerity caused by neo-colonial ‘structural adjustment programmes’ imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

A return to political blackness in its original form in Britain is unlikely, especially as it has come under retrospective criticism for flattening cultural differences, but the same process of constructing political coalitions against racism and imperialism, while simultaneously asserting specific national or ethnic positionalities, which took place in the 1960s-70s continues today. In the context of continued core-periphery polarisation, for emerging anti-imperialist forces internationally, including BLM, the ‘Global South’ has become a political term that harkens back to Black Power-era Third Worldism. BLM UK has resurrected the discerning anti-imperialist consciousness that relates local injustices to global structural inequality. Although Britain’s protracted imperial decline has not relented, British capitalism still plays a directly neo-colonial role, which was luridly underscored when, in 2017, Whitehall officials described a post-Brexit project for trade expansion with former colonies as “Empire 2.0”. A 2016 report by War on Want revealed that “101 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange — most of them British — have mining operations in 37 sub-Saharan African countries. They collectively control over one trillion dollars’ worth of Africa’s most valuable resources.” Black activists have pinpointed how Britain’s imperialism abroad, and the oppression facing migrants and communities of colour under the domestic ‘hostile environment’, are two facets of the same centralising logic of racial capitalism.

This (re)articulation of British black radicalism was seen in a speech by the 2016 NUS National Black Students’ Officer, Malia Bouattia, during Black History Month: “With many Black communities in Britain formed of recent migrants, and against the backdrop of widespread anticolonial movements in the Global South, there was also a strong, vocal support for movements for the liberation of Black people worldwide, from what for many was the heartland of empire: ‘Great Britain’.” The identification with the political Global South is reminiscent of black radicals’ dynamic conception of the core-periphery relationship, which had entailed an empowering seeping of the Third World into the British metropole. As Leah Cowan explains, “BLM UK made important connections between Britain’s colonial history and its capitalist present, in which profits are prioritised over black lives.” This new return to expansive anti-imperialist solidarities among racialised minorities thoroughly undermines the essentialising ethnic absolutism that accompanied state-driven ‘multiculturalism’ under New Labour.

The tearing down of colonial monuments by BLM protestors, continuing in the tradition of the transnational Rhodes Must Fall movement, is inherently political: directing attention towards how neo-colonial and anti-black violence remains ever present in the metropole. The well-worn criticism that colonial-era statues should instead be moved to museums has little bearing given that, as historian Louis Allday explains, the state-sponsored heritage sector often “shamelessly celebrates Britain’s imperial violence and provides little or no historical context to it”. The real outrage should be that the British government has purposefully destroyed the records of its colonial crimes. The protesters are directly confronting the colonial legacy, not only through symbolic de-colonialism – for instance, by casting the figure of slaver Edward Colston into the depths of the same Bristolian river that was once used to transport slaves – but also by forcing a much-needed conversation about racism in Britain today. The indignation expressed by liberal and conservative pundits alike when some black activists set their crosshairs on statues of Winston Churchill (the admirer of Mussolini who was responsible for a genocidal famine in India) shows just how far the country still has to go to come to terms with the inglorious underside of Britishness.

BLM has also built on the strategic intersectionalism of post-war black radicalism – the BLM movement itself was initiated by queer black feminists. BLM UK argues that “until trans, working-class, disabled, sex-worker, queer (and more) black people are free, we will all be unfree.” The foregrounding of these linkages is particularly commensurate to the political challenges posed by the intersections of homophobia and neo-imperialism. For instance, a report released in September 2019 found that, from 2016-2018, the UK Home Office refused at least 3,100 LGBT+ asylum seekers from countries where ‘same-sex acts’ are criminalised. Many of those countries had homophobic legislation imposed under British colonial rule, and some still have significant economic ties with Britain.[10]

BLM UK has made an additional crucial connection between racial-imperialism and environmental destruction. While rich nations like Britain are the main polluters, those worst impacted by climate change live in the ‘developing’ world. In 2016, during its protest to stop flights at London City airport, BLM UK pointed out how air pollution in Britain disproportionately affects working-class black communities, while again relating this local situation to a global imperialist reality:

The inequalities that turn an extreme weather event into a disaster or human catastrophe mirror the inequalities that cause the disproportionate loss of black and poor life globally – and the exact systems that Black Lives Matter fights against. … [And] due to rising global inequality – that remains part of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, and part of the present reality of globalisation and capitalism – we also know that the resources required to respond to climate change’s impact are often not placed in the hands of the people who need them most.

The revived anti-imperialism of BLM UK poses a vital corrective to the narrow nationalism of the British left-wing mainstream. As black radicals themselves pointed out in the sixties and seventies, the parochialism of the British labour movement came at a price. While white workers immediately benefit from relative privileges vis-à-vis workers of colour (and have often been complicit in reproducing structural racism), they are still exploited, and have been negatively impacted by the diversion of intensifying class-based grievances into the imperial nostalgia that suffused the Brexit referendum. There is a particular need for the left to champion the incisive politics of intersectional anti-imperialism, pioneered by the black women’s movement, in order to understand how global capital circuits overdetermine the racially-gendered contours of anti-blackness, Islamophobia and ‘xenoracism’ in Britain today.

* While BLM UK itself did not call for protests due to the context of the COVID-19 viral pandemic, it has stated that it stands in solidarity with them, and is working to help BLM demonstrators “to protest in a way that is safe for them, as well as for our communities”.

Alfie Hancox writes about socialist and anti-imperialist movements. This article is based on his MA(Res) thesis on British Black Power.

Endnotes

[1] Claudia Jones, “The Caribbean Community in Britain”, in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.), Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays and Poems (Banbury, Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd, 2011): 175.

[2] Jodi Burkett, Constructing Post-Imperial Britain: Britishness, ‘Race’ and the Radical Left in the 1960s (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 70.

[3] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018).

[4] Ambalavaner Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1991): 39-40.

[5] Anandi Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2013): 103.

[6] John Narayan, “British Black Power: The Anti-Imperialism of Political Blackness and the Problem of Nativist Socialism”, The Sociological Review 67, no. 5 (September 2019): 956.

[7] Ibid.: 961.

[8] Quoted in Hazel Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood”, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70’s Britain (London: Routledge, 1994): 219-20.

[9] Julia Sudbury, ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (London: Routledge, 1998): 79.

[10] Douglas E. Sanders, “377 And the Unnatural Afterlife of British Colonialism in Asia”, Asian Journal of Comparative Law 4 (2009): 1–49.