We're All Living in a Future Created by Slavery

[Art by Alex Williamson]

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, composed of 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

When I was 19 years old, I was arrested.

Instead of a dungeon, I was held in an overcrowded holding cell. Instead of being shackled and transported across the ocean on a floating prison, I was handcuffed, sitting shoulder to shoulder with another young Black male being hauled across the county on a prison bus.

During intake, I was stripped of my clothes, forced to stand naked as officers stripped me of both my pride and my dignity. I tried to cover my genitals. It was my last grasp at holding onto my humanity. I was commanded by officers to remove my hands. They had guns. I had nothing. I complied. The officer barked, “Lift up your nut sack.” I had no choice. I was ordered to “squat down and cough.” When I was finally handed a pair of state-issued boxer shorts, I was so desperate to have on anything to cover my exposed body that I did not give a damn that the underwear had been passed down, circulated among others who had been stripped naked before me.

Author and scholar Saidiya Hartman once wrote, “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship.” I echo her pain as I think about — and live through — the ongoing crisis of carcerality and those affected most by its existence.

I think about the African diaspora. I think about my family. I think about myself.

In the summer of 2017, I visited the continent of Africa. While there, I basked in the beauty of the lively Ramadan nights in Morocco. I stood in the searing sun of Egypt. I took pictures with the great pyramids as my backdrop, mimicking Malcolm X during his visit in 1964. When I made it to Ghana, I visited the final resting place of Kwame Nkrumah. While standing at his tomb, I thought about Nkrumah writing, “All people of African descent whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African Nation.” I stood there thinking about the divide between being identified as African and being of African descent. I was in the homeland of my ancestors, and yet I knew none of their names or faces.

But I did know why they were forced to leave. I had reached a point where I could not return home to the United States without experiencing the carceral castles on Ghana’s Gold Coast.

My feet were firmly planted, affixed to the weather-beaten ground of the Castle of St. George in Elmina. I stood in front of a cell, designated for incarcerated Ashanti, Mandinka, Hausa, Wolof, Fula, and Susu from various kingdoms who had been deemed as deserving of death because they fought to live in freedom. I stood there in front of a thick black wooden door hauntingly marked by a human skull and a set of crossbones carved into stone.

Behind that door was a darkness I never experienced.

In the 7x10 prison cell, there was a total absence of light. There was also an abject emotional darkness that came with knowing folks, wrapped in the same skin that I’m in, were left there to starve and rot in death.

The captives imprisoned at the Castle of St. George were a part of what I call the carceral class. I am a member of this class.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent who are systematically stigmatized as unfit for freedom and deserving of the dehumanization that comes with being incarcerated. It is essential to the idea of Black people being framed as the locus of crime and Blackness as being synonymous with criminality. As a classification, the carceral class denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

Although he didn’t name it, Malcolm X knew about the carceral class too.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent. It denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be systemically ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

In Malcolm X’s blistering 1963 speech, “Message to the Grassroots,” he spoke of the systemic condemnation of Black folks in the United States. He lasered in on the uncomfortable common bond of being Black in America. Malcolm made it plain and uncompromising. “We are all Black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves,” he said. “You are nothing but a ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

I wrestle with what Brother Malcolm said. Not because I disagree with the troublesome truths that he spoke, but because I feel his analysis can be built upon.

His words still ring in my mind on a loop.

“You are nothing but a ex-slave.”

You are nothing but a slave.

You are nothing.

You are a thing.

Malcom’s speech takes me back to Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony. In it, Mbembe lays bare his views on what it means to be branded, burned with the mark of being a slave. He viewed slave as the “forename” one must “give to a man or woman whose body can be degraded, whose life can be mutilated, and whose work and resources can be squandered — with impunity.”

I think about a time before enslavement. Before Africans were ensnared in the wretchedness of having both their labor and their lives exploited from can’t see in the morning to can’t see in the evening, they were prisoners of a particular kind.

Those who were captured and eventually enslaved were regular folks: commoners, farmers, wage workers, domestic servants, and artisans who worked with their hands. Two-thirds of those held captive were young African men. As Marcus Rediker recounts in The Slave Ship: A Human History, slave raiders targeted “‘the roughest and most hardy,’ and avoided the privileged ‘smooth negroes.’” The class-based vulnerability of the common folks figured centrally in their capture and confinement. Rediker continues:

Second to war as a source of slaves were the judicial processes in and through which African societies convicted people of crimes ranging from murder to theft, adultery, witchcraft, and debt; condemned them to slavery; and sold them to African traders or directly to the slave-ship captains… Many Africans and (abolitionist) Europeans felt that judicial processes in West Africa had been corrupted and that thousands had been falsely accused and convicted in order to produce as many tradeworthy bodies as possible.

A judicial system of injustice had waged war on African commoners, criminalizing them into a world of carcerality.

Malcolm’s raspy tone echoes again in my mind. I hear him saying, “You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

And again, Brother Malcolm was correct.

We did not willingly travel to the Americas on the Mayflower. We were forced here on the White Lion and the Clotilda. It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

The largest wave of forced African diasporic movement was anchored to punishment and carcerality. Everywhere the descendants of the Middle Passage were forced to find footing, carceral-class status and the struggle for liberation followed.

Malcolm knew the global connectedness of Black folks’ oppression. He knew that in the West, the African diaspora’s carceral-class status is still branded to our being.

Forty percent of the 10 million incarcerated Africans brought to the Americas and sold into chattel slavery ended up in Brazil. Today, it is estimated that 75% of Brazil’s prison population are Brazilians of African descent. In the country’s capital Brasília, Afro-Brazilians make up 82% of those incarcerated. Although only 11% of the country’s total population is between eight and 24 years of age, this age group represents approximately one-third of those imprisoned.

In the United States, Black adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than white adults. As of 2001, one out of every three Black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime. While 14% of all youth under 18 in the United States are Black, 42% of boys and 35% of girls in juvenile detention facilities are Black. Among Black trans folks, 47% have been incarcerated at some point in their lives.

The criminalization of Black folks in the United States is both a pathologizing and totalizing practice. No group is spared. No group is left unvictimized. These are progeny of the commoners, prisoners of war, and freedom fighters who made up the original carceral class.

Malcolm also knew that as a Muslim, “There is nothing in our book, the Quran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully.”

On Christmas Day in 1522, 20 enslaved Muslims, wielding machetes, attacked their Christian masters on the island of Hispaniola. It was the first recorded enslaved African revolt in the Western Hemisphere.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

Four years later, enslaved African Muslims rebelled against the Spanish on the coast of present-day South Carolina. It was the first rebellion by enslaved folks in the history of North America.

In 1729, Granny Nanny, a self-liberated African Muslim leader and warrior, led her army of Maroons in Jamaica into the battle with the British — and crushed them in combat. On August 14, 1791, an enslaved African Muslim named Dutty Boukman led other enslaved folks in an uprising against the French. This rebellion and the death of Boukman are marked as being one of the sparks that lead to the Haitian Revolution. On the 27th night of Ramadan in January 1835, a group of enslaved African Muslims in Salvador of Bahía, Brazil, organized one of the largest slave rebellions in the history of the Americas. After being forced aboard on June 28, 1839, Sengbe Pieh, an enslaved African Muslim, led the aquatic revolt on the Amistad.

For members of the carceral class, resistance is in our blood. Resistance is a binding component of our collective experience. Resistance is in our history. This is the history of Black folks like Safiya Bukhari, Iya Fulani Sunni-Ali, Kamau Sadiki, Jamil Al-Amin, Mutulu Shakur, and Russell “Maroon” Shoatz.

This is why we resist to this day.

In the end, I return to where I started, thinking about Saidiya Hartman’s words. We live in a time created by the original mass incarceration — the transatlantic slave trade. The “peculiar institution” that is rooted in carcerality. Malcolm X knew this. Political prisoners in the United States today, who need to be freed, know this. I, too, know this. There has not been a point in my life where I have not been intimately impacted by the carceral state. We know this because we have all been subject to and subjugated by the carceral state. It is this experience of knowing that informs my fight to abolish the carceral state.

"It is Totally Naive to Want to Humanize Capitalism": An Interview with Frei Betto

[Photo: Frei Betto meets with Fidel Castro in the 1990s]

By Barbara Schijman

Originally published at Internationalist 360.

Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, better known as Frei Betto, is a recognized Latin American progressive reference and one of the main figures of the Theology of Liberation. A writer, journalist and Dominican friar, he was imprisoned for four years during the military dictatorship in Brazil, which he opposed with body and soul. During his work as a friar he met, in the favelas of Sao Paulo, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of whom he was an advisor, and in whose government he participated in the Zero Hunger program. He has written more than 60 books, including Fidel and Religion. Conversations with Frei Betto (1985); Mysticism and Spirituality (1997); The Artist’s Work. A Holistic Vision of the Universe (1999); and The Lost Gold of the Arienim (2016).

What thoughts does this pandemic world open up for you?

I believe that the pandemic is nature’s revenge, resulting from years of human domination and devastation. Absolutely everything that we have been doing for the last 200 years, the search for profit and the maximum exploitation of nature’s resources without any care for environmental preservation, results in a lack of control of the chain of nature, which is completely disrupted by human intervention. Many speak of the “anthropocene”, that is, the era of total human intervention in nature; but I prefer to call this situation “capitalocene”. In other words, the total hegemony of capital, of the search for profit, for gain; all of which causes a total imbalance in the natural environment.

This whole process of environmental devastation is the fruit of private capital gain. The problem is not the human being; the problem is neoliberal capitalism. And we must remember that nature can live without our uncomfortable presence; we cannot, we do need nature.

How do you analyze the situation in Brazil?

In my country, the situation is catastrophic because we have a neo-fascist government. I call President Jair Bolsonaro, the “Bagman”, I even gave him this nickname before the Economist Magazine did. Brazil is in a total fire, in the Amazon, and in other areas, and the president has no interest in improving the situation or changing the course of what we are experiencing. Everything that means death suits him. We are living under a genocidal and lying government.

He is so brazen that in his last speech at the UN he said that the culprits for the fires in the Amazon are the peasants, the small farmers of the area and the indigenous people. For this reason there is no doubt that here in Brazil we are living a catastrophic situation managed by a neo-fascist government, which is using more and more religious fundamentalism to legitimize itself. Health matters as little as education. Bolsonaro knows very well that an educated people is a people that has a minimum of critical consciousness. And so it is better for him that the people have no education at all so that they can continue as guides to an ignorant mass. Of course not because of the masses themselves, but because of the conditions of education that are not properly offered to the people. As if all this were not enough, we are now back on a map of hunger, with a tremendous number of people who do not have the minimum necessary of the nutrients provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In short, we are in a tremendous situation. We’ll see what happens in the municipal elections in November.

What scenario do you envision?

I think the elections will be an interesting thermometer to evaluate how our people look at it. But the truth is that, in this, I am not very optimistic. The pandemic has helped a lot so that Bolsonaro has the hegemony of the narrative, because public demonstrations do not exist, they are prohibited, or they are not convenient, so only the voice of the government is heard.

By voting in favor of the political trial against former President Dilma Rousseff, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to the memory of the Army torturer, Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra. His behavior should not be surprising. But what explains that he still maintains a considerable level of popular support?

I have two explanations for this situation. First, the right wing has mastered the electronic system of digital networks, which I prefer not to call “social” because they do not necessarily create sociability. I believe that many people on the left, progressive, have not yet mastered this mechanism. And also, since the owners of these platforms are favorable to sectors close to the government, many use algorithms and other devices to disseminate fake news and all kinds of lies. This has a lot of force because today people find out much more about the news and facts through the digital networks than through the traditional press. This is the first factor. The second factor is related to the mobilization of the poorest people by conservative evangelical churches. And then there are people who have abdicated their freedom to seek safety. That is the proposal of the global right: that each person should abdicate his freedom in exchange for his security.

In the face of the latter, and the hegemonic narrative it describes, what about the voices of the left?

On this we, these who feel part of the left, have a certain responsibility because we have abandoned the work of the base. We have abandoned work with the poorest people in this country. In the thirteen years that we have been in government we have not increased that base work, and this space has been occupied by those evangelical churches and some conservative fundamentalist Catholic sectors. These churches have made a lot of progress. And this also has to do with a project of the United States intelligence since the 1970s. In two conferences that took place in Mexico, the CIA and the State Department already said that the Liberation Theology was more dangerous than Marxism in Latin America and that a counteroffensive had to be made. This counteroffensive comes from the appearance of these electronic churches that were exported to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other places.

Religion is the first system of meaning invented by the human being. There is no other sense more powerful and globalizing than religion. That is why so many people today are seeking to master this system. And we, who are progressives of the Theology of Liberation, have done here in Brazil an intense and very positive work at the base between the 70’s during the military dictatorship and also during the 90’s, but after that have come two very conservative pontificates, those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. These were 34 years of demobilization of the basic church, of that church of the basic ecclesial communities; they were 34 years of prejudice against the Theology of Liberation. All of this opened space for this counteroffensive by the evangelical right.

Do you argue that “there is no future for humanity outside of socialism?” How do you build socialism at this juncture?

We must not wait for the end of capitalism to build socialism. We have to build socialism within the capitalist system, that is, to begin popular initiatives of economic solidarity, of sharing goods, of strengthening popular bases. That is where we are starting, there is no other way. We cannot return to the Leninist concept of an assault on the Winter Palace. We have to denounce the capitalist system but create effective alternatives to this system, as far as possible from the popular bases. In that way I believe that we can manage to break this system in the long term, but we have to have initiative and pressure and political forces. This is a long-term, essential task, and I don’t see any other way out at this juncture.

What examples of these initiatives do you claim?

There are many initiatives from popular sectors in different places. In Brazil, the Landless Movement has initiatives that are typically socialist. Recently, with the tremendous rise in the price of rice in Brazil, the MST, which is a big rice producer, has not raised its prices and had a terrible sale. Many people were able to discover the advantages of their family farming, where services and profits are shared among the families that are settled or camped. They are small initiatives that we have to strengthen, and look for spaces in the governments again, because it is very important and immense to work from the government, as we have done during the presidencies of Lula and Dilma.

Unfortunately, we have not taken advantage of all the possibilities, and above all, we have not done work, which for me is fundamental, that has to do with the political literacy of the people. We should have invested much more in that. If we have another opportunity to return to the government we will have to face that work, which is fundamental. If on the one hand the thirteen years of the Workers’ Party government promoted many social advances in Brazil – and they are the best in our republican history – but on the other hand, we have not worked on the political literacy of the people, the strengthening of the popular movements, and the democratization of the media.

There are those who argue that capitalism must be humanized. Is that possible?

It’s a totally contradictory idea. Humanizing capitalism is the same as taking the teeth out of the tiger, thinking that this will take away its aggressiveness; it is totally naive to want to humanize capitalism. There is no possibility of that; capitalism is intrinsically evil. Its own endogenous mechanism is a necrophiliac mechanism. It is a system that feeds on those who work, on those who consume, on the poor. It is a question of arithmetic: if there is not so much wealth there is not so much poverty; if there is not so much poverty there is not so much wealth. It is impossible to humanize capitalism; it is a very naive postulation and unfortunately there are still people who believe in this myth.

How do you generate democratic awareness? How do you work on the democratization of society in times like these?

By means of communication systems -digital, printed, audiovisual, etc.-, translating into popular language many of the concepts disseminated in the mass media. Simple people often do not understand concepts such as public debt, foreign investment, exchange rate fluctuations, and market mechanisms. This requires methodology – which Paulo Freire teaches – and popular education teams.

Can you imagine Lula being the president of Brazil again?

Maybe he will have the opportunity because they are reviewing his judgments and convictions, filled with so many prejudices. Hopefully, he will have the possibility to be a candidate again; it is our hope here.

Can you imagine a less conservative Catholic Church, attentive in fact to the proclamations it defends?

As I said, the Catholic Church has spent 34 years of conservative pontificates that have demobilized much of that popular work of the ecclesial base communities, the raw material of Liberation Theology. This does not come from the heads of theologians, it comes from the bases. All of this has been demobilized. It may be different times since the changes proposed by Pope Francis, but still the intermediate hierarchy between the bases and the people who have power in the church has not been totally changed. We still have a large number of bishops and priests who are very conservative and who do not want to get involved in the popular struggles, are afraid or in search of their comfort, their convenience, and do not want to put themselves at risk. There is a lot of work to be done, but there are sectors of the Catholic Church and of Latin America that are very committed to these struggles for the defense of the rights of the poorest, of human rights; this is very strong in many sectors.

How do you think about the immediate future?

I believe that in the immediate future there is going to be an exacerbation of individualism. The pandemic has required cutting off face-to-face relationships, so people are going to be increasingly isolated, with fewer opportunities to connect with each other and to come together in the streets, in the unions, in the social movements, at least until a vaccine comes to take us out of this situation. And here again the importance of knowing how to manage the digital networks appears. We, the progressive left, have to learn more and more to manage these networks and to change them, because we know that many of them are there only to favor consumption or even linked to services of espionage, intelligence, control of the people. There is a lot of struggle to be done around this because it is a factor that came to stay. Many people are informed through these digital networks. We have to create groups with the ability to dominate these networks, to disprove the fake news and disseminate the truth, the real facts. This is the only way we can do a virtual job of political education.

Is there a Liberation Theology today?

Yes, of course. Liberation Theology has opened its range to other topics that are not only social struggles, but also addresses the issue of ecology, questions of nanotechnology, astrophysics, cosmology, and bioethics. The problem is that we have rather lost the popular foundations, which were the basis of the Theory of Liberation. These foundations have been lost during these 34 years of conservative pontificates. Our main task is to return to the bases, to return to the slums, to return to the peripheries, to return to the poor people, to the oppressed, to the excluded, like black people, the indigenous, the LGBT. We all have to be in this struggle; that’s where we have to walk.

Are you optimistic?

I have a principle and that is we have to save pessimism for better days. We can’t play into the hands of a system that wants us to be quiet, depressed, discouraged; we have to keep fighting. History has many twists and turns. I have been through a lot of things, some very tremendous, others positive. The prison under the Vargas dictatorship, the strength of the popular movements, the election of Lula, the election of Dilma… I am optimistic, yes. We cannot consider any historical moment as definitive.

Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America Bureau

On the Anti-Racist Economy

By Joshua Briond

In the aftermath of the state-sanctioned executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we have witnessed arguably the largest and most sustained mobilization of protests and political demonstrations across the country in the movement for Black lives. In the midst of an era of drastically increased performative and opportunistic "activism," where "spreading awareness" is prioritized over human lives and dignity—which was helped ushered in by the Shaun King’s of the world—where capital(ism) does what it has done to everything: commodify, celebritize, and corporatize any and everything, by any means necessary. Such has been done for “social justice" rhetoric and activism. We have seen, in real time, Black Lives Matter be co-opted, commodified, watered down, and flat-out defanged in the face of capital, as the simple passivity of the hashtag and movement demands—if you can call it such—has become socially acceptable in the mainstream arena, specifically so in the post-Kaepernick era.

With increasing pressure for bourgeois public figures to “speak out” and “spread awareness” from fans, the sociopolitical moment has forced historically apolitical figures and brands alike to momentarily step outside their bubble of privilege, power, and wealth to release uninspired and bland political statements vaguely condemning violence and pledging their rhetorical support for the Black lives matter movement. Such acts are met with comment sections filled with bleak and dystopian undue and unjust adulation for bare minimum performances of intellectually insulting public political theater—that is yet typical for the celebrity worship present here in the US. As the limits of neoliberal political imagination have once again depicted, in this crucial sociopolitical climate, the best the professional liberal class could offer as a solution to the prevalence of racialized state violence—was not the political interrogation of the white power structure we live under and its constant terror and antagonization to non-white life—but to vote for uninspired Democratic candidates, donate to NGOs and non-profits with zero ties to communities most largely affected by said violence, and read “ally” self-help books, written largely but not exclusively by and for white people.

One of the books in question is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Published the summer of 2018, it went viral during the rise of the protests (stated to have sold at least a million copies in the matter of a few months). Others have grappled with the glaring contradictions and violence inherent to the act of a white person raking in millions under the guise of “anti-racism” and “anti-bias training”—that has been largely proven ineffective; while also charging anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 on public speaking gigs for corporate conglomerates like Bill Gates and Amazon. So I’m not here to speak on that. Yet, DiAngelo’s public persona and prominence is arguably the perfect depiction of the co-optation of the politics of “anti-racism” into its own industry for corporate diversity initiatives without addressing structural root causes. The issue with books, panels, infographics, and the discourse surrounding race that centers and targets “allies” is that so many of them still fundamentally misunderstand rac[e/ism], whiteness, and anti-Blackness as just a matter of individual feelings, ignorance, and morality—instead of what it is: a structural organizing tool that the US political economy—built on and inseparable from slavery and genocide—necessitates.

“We who were not black before we got here, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a long time & have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about our­selves, survived & triumphed over it."

—James Baldwin

How can one be an anti-racist if the historical precedence of race and racialization as a colonial society organizing device and regime isn’t widely understood amongst those who proclaimed to identify or align with anti-racist values? And when the vast majority of this country’s population—including self-proclaimed anti-racists’ understanding of race is wrongly and harmfully understood as that of a biological marking, rather than a sociopolitical tool meticulously and conveniently constructed and manipulated through legislation? As W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst other historians and critical race thinkers have noted: Whiteness, as stated since its historicized legislation, marks power and dominance. Blackness marks the powerless, slave, and dispossessed.

The United States of America, as we know of it, cannot function or exist without the racial regime: whiteness and anti-blackness. The entire economy, politically and otherwise—going all the way back to the cotton industry; which introduced the world to the US as a global imperial-capitalist project—is predicated & sustained through racial violence. The subjugation of imperialized nations and peoples, the dispossessed, and the enslaved, is how America and therefore the American knows that they are free. The coloniality of American freedom and the subjugation of those racialized and colonized nations and peoples cannot be divorced from one another. The entire concept of freedom and democracy—as espoused as principle by the American project—is predicated on the denial of such, of the Other(s).

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed & powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

—Toni Morrison

I want to say that when I speak of the “America(n),” I am referring to that of the white. America(n) means white. I would like to also infer that the American, and white identity, ideology, and structure, is founded upon not just the systemic exploitation of the Other, namely the Black or otherwise the slave, the native, the dispossessed, and the colonized—and the moral and political justification of it—but also defined entirely by said positionality of the subjugated. As Toni Morrison has written, “Black slavery enriched the country’s [creative] possibilities. for in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not—me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize extemal exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."

The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. Racism is not just a matter of individual ignorance or feelings that can be changed or eradicated via “understanding,” “diversity and anti-bias training,” “tough conversations,” or a quick fix in morality and finally seeing subjects of its violence as human; as so many prominent “anti-racists” would like to have us believe. The ‘antiracist’ economy, lucrative as may be, is incapable of birthing white ‘anti-racists’ because it refuses to grapple with the inherent racism of the project, or rather regime of race, racialization, capital(ism), and whiteness-as-power, in and of itself. You cannot manufacture solidarity—which a radical anti-racist movement necessitates—on the simple passivity of moral posturing. Solidarity must be built on, not just through shared struggle or basic figurations of empathy, but also on recognizing the humanity of those in which it has been historically denied to and ultimately coming to an understanding and agreement that we are worth fighting for.

“As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” —James Baldwin

To teach white people to be ‘antiracist’ is to teach white people to betray everything that they have ever known about their very existence, the world order, and life itself; it is to quite literally antagonize everything that they are and sense empowerment from. Therefore, you cannot ‘teach’ white people to be ‘antiracist’ through moral and virtue signaling—especially when whiteness itself, as politically constructed, is, has always been, and will always be, immoral. It is why becoming an anti-racist is, or at least should be, a choice one makes through rigorous study of the history of race, racialization, whiteness, and liberation movements, etc. White people cannot be guilted into antiracism—this is why the “spreading awareness” tactic—deployed by Shaun King and his ilk—that bombards people with pornographic visualizations of black terror and death have been largely ineffective but on the contrary quite in fact, historically libidinal—a source of entertainment and collective joy. The politics of moralism has proven futile. You cannot moralize oppression—especially when the source and basis of said oppression is that of capital and whiteness—both of which are categorically immoral.

In a sociopolitical moment where we have seen Donald Trump’s violence exceptionalized; making it out to be unlike anything we have ever seen before—despite his political crimes largely (and simply) being an extension of the order and requirements of the US presidency—by the liberal media apparatus; terroristic political legacies resuscitated, war criminals, regime changers, and COINTELPRO state agents become faces of resistance. All of which depict a moment in which the standard for “good doers,” “morality,” and human rights and social justice advocate is deeper in the gutter than ever before. I’m afraid that the anti-racist economy, the ally industrial complex—as a result of commodification of social justice has ushered in an “anti-racism” and a human right advocacy that is inseparable from the social, political, and economic capital that it often leads to.

I’m afraid the anti-racist economy has, ironically enough, failed to create any substantial “allies” or “anti-racists.” But instead created a culture of unadulterated and uncontested political performativity, groomed more benevolent self-aggrandizing white people—who are smarter, more clever than their forebears at disguising such racism; to avoid backlash, consequences, or even the mildest forms of confrontation; just enough to navigate situations with and around subjects of racial oppression without exposing the psychopathy and immorality of structural and ideological whiteness—but not enough to materially and substantially dedicate themselves to and sacrifice their own power and capital towards an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggle.

I’m afraid that there has been little to no progress, remorse or lessons learned—on the part of individual whites or the white power structure at-large as evidenced by the continuation of the legacy of colonialism, slavery and historicized violence—as the tactics and acts wielded against the initial racially marked and subjugated would serve as a template of what would occur in the centuries to follow—being exported to other racialized and colonized people domestically and across the globe; while still being enacted on the initially marked, i.e., African, Black, and Indigenous subjects.

I’m afraid with the consequences of slavery, which is that of whiteness-as-power, the racial regime and racism that is inherent to it depict white remorselessness on the part of the perpetuators and continued beneficiaries of the historicized economic industry; to paraphrase one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from 1970: the very sight of black people in white chains and cages—both proverbial or otherwise—houseless, neglected, and structurally subjugated, and terrorized; would struck such anger, such intolerable rage, in the eyes, minds, and bodies of the American people, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But instead, as we know of it all too well, the existence of said chains, cages, and racial subjugation, is how the American measures their own safety and sense of comfort. It is how they know they are free.

The Internationalist Lenin: Self-Determination and Anti-Colonialism

By Vijay Prashad

Republished from Monthly Review.

In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.(1) The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled. The character of advancement and backwardness for Lenin does not only rest on the question of technological and economic development; it rests, essentially, on the nature of the mass struggle.

In Europe, Lenin wrote, the bourgeoisie was exhausted. It no longer had any of the revolutionary capacity with which it once fought off the feudal order; although even here, the bourgeoisie was pushed along reluctantly by the rising of the masses–as in the French Revolution of 1789–and it was the bourgeoisie that betrayed the mass struggle and opted for the return of authoritarian power as long as its class interests were upheld. By 1913, the European bourgeoisie had been corrupted by the gains of imperialism; the rule of the European bourgeoisie had to be overthrown by the workers.

In Asia, meanwhile, Lenin identified the dynamism of the national liberation movements. ‘Everywhere in Asia’, he wrote, ‘a mighty democratic movement is growing, spreading, and gaining in strength…Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light, and freedom’. Until this period, Lenin had focused his attention on the revolutionary developments in Russia, with a detailed study of agrarian conditions and capitalism in his country and with debates over the nature of organisation in the revolutionary camp. The breakthroughs in 1911 that took place in China, Iran, and Mexico with their variegated and complex revolutionary processes, nonetheless struck him. In 1912, Lenin would write on numerous occasions of the peoples of Asia–such as Persia and Mongolia–who ‘are waging a revolutionary struggle for freedom’, and he would push his party to condemn Tsarist imperialist attacks on Persia and the ‘revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people, which is bringing emancipation to Asia and is undermining the rule of the European bourgeoisie’.(2)

Lenin had tracked developed in eastern Asia ever since the Tsarist empire opened hostilities against China by invading Manchuria in 1900 and then against Japan in 1904-05 in Manchuria and Korea. In 1900, Lenin took a strong anti-war position, arguing that even though the Tsar had not declared war in 1900, ‘war is being waged nonetheless’.(3) ‘The autocratic tsarist government’, Lenin wrote, ‘has proved itself to be a government of irresponsible bureaucrats serviley cringing before the capitalist magnates and nobles’; meanwhile, the war resulted in ‘thousands of ruined families, whose breadwinners have been sent to war; an enormous increase in the national debt and the national expenditure; mounting taxation; greater power for the capitalists, the exploiters of the workers; worse conditions for the workers; still greater mortality among the peasantry; famine in Siberia’. ‘The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from which the Russian people suffer’, argued Lenin in an early demonstration of his internationalism.

The Tsarist empire, along with the European imperialists, had developed a ‘counterrevolutionary coalition’, Lenin wrote in 1908 in his reflection on the Balkans, Turkey, and Persia. How should the socialists react to this policy of imperialism? ‘The very essence of proletarian policy at this stage’, he wrote in Proletary, ‘should be to tear the mask from these bourgeois hypocrites and to reveal to the broadest masses of the people the reactionary character of the European governments who, out of fear of the proletarian struggle at home, are playing, and helping others play, the part of gendarme in relation to the revolution in Asia’.(4)
Within Europe, the oppressed nationalities–such as the Polish and the Irish–demonstrated the important spirit of democracy that Lenin had detected from Mexico to China. Unlike many other Marxists–such as Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky–Lenin fully supported the Easter Rising in English-occupied Ireland in 1916. It was in this context that Lenin wrote in July 1916, ‘The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.’(5) As he studied these movements with more care, the national liberation struggles no longer were seen as mere ‘bacilli’ and not ‘real’, but these movements were themselves partners in a global struggle. Lenin began to conceptualise a strategic unity between the nationalism of the oppressed and the proletariat in the imperialist states. ‘The social revolution’, he wrote in October 1916, ‘can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movements in the underdeveloped, backward, oppressed nations’.(6)

Lenin’s great advance over Second International Marxism is clarified by the centrality he placed of anti-colonial national liberation, of the struggles of oppressed nationalities by the jackboot of imperialism. For Lenin, the democratic struggles of anti-colonialism were lifted to parity with the proletariat struggles inside the advanced industrial states; it was the international cognate of his theory of the worker-peasant alliance.(7)

In 1914, Lenin published a long series of articles on the theme of ‘national self-determination’ in the journal Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment).(8) These were his longest statements on the topic, even though Lenin was to return to the idea over the next decade. Like much of Lenin’s work, this essay was not written to elaborate on the idea of national self-determination in itself; Lenin wrote the article to answer a position initially taken by the Rosa Luxemburg in 1908-09. In that article, ‘The National Question and Autonomy’, published in Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny (Panorama Social Democracy), Luxemburg argued against the right of self-determination for the Polish people.(9) Initially, Stalin responded to Luxemburg (in Prosveshcheniye, March-May 1913), but Stalin’s essay did not directly confront Luxemburg’s theses (he was more content to take on Karl Renner and Otto Bauer).(10) It was left to Lenin, the following year, to offer a full critique of Luxemburg.

Lenin argued that an oppressed nation must be allowed its freedom to secede from an oppressor state. Tsarism and colonialism not only crushed the ability of the people of its peripheral states and its colonial dominions to live full lives, but it also contorted the lives of those who seemed to benefit from colonial rule (including workers at the core of the empire). Secession, for Lenin, was a democratic right. If later, because of economic pressures, the proletariat of an independent state would like to freely unite with the proletariat of their previous colonial state that would be acceptable; their unity would now be premised upon freedom not oppression. Over the course of the next decade, Lenin would develop this argument in a series of short essays. Most of the essays, written in German, were translated into Russian in the 1920s by N. K. Krupskaya and published in the Lenin Miscellany volumes, later in the Collected Works. In 1967, Moscow’s Progress Publishers put these essays into a small book under the title, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (it is available in volume 20 of Lenin’s Collected Works). Their appearance in a book, then, was not intentional since Lenin had never written a book on the subject. This was a collection of interventions and articles that had the gist of his analysis on the question.(11) It is these interventions, however, that allow us to see the richness of Lenin’s argument about anti-colonialism and self-determination.(12)

Bourgeois Nationalism

The question of self-determination came to the fore because of the social forces unleashed by the 1905 Russian Revolution and because of Tsarist expansion into Manchuria and Korea. Different social groups within the Tsarist Empire began to make their own claims for freedom, which had to be represented in the new political parties that emerged on the partly freed up civil arena. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) had to, therefore, address the question of national self-determination frontally: how should the various people within the Tsarist empire struggle for their freedom? Must they remain under the yoke of the State, even as this State would be at some point be free from Tsarism? Luxemburg was specially involved in this debate because of her roots in the Polish Social Democratic movement, which had since the 19th century been involved in questions of freedom for Poland from the tentacles of Tsarist power. In the world of international socialism, it was often the Polish parties that made the strongest application of the idea of the right to self-determination. That was the case in 1896, when it was the Polish Socialist Party that called for the independence of Poland at the International Socialist Congress in London. At that Congress, the delegates passed a resolution in favor of ‘the complete right of all nations to self-determination and expresses its sympathy for the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of military, national, or other despotism’.(13)

Polish social democrats at their own Congress (1903) and at the Congress of the RSDLP (1906) agitated to sharpen Social Democracy’s view on self-determination. Little seemed to divide the position of Luxemburg from Lenin at this time, except that in the hallways of the meetings the Poles did express their reservations against the idea of a right to self-determination. It was the working-class that had rights, Luxemburg wrote in her 1908 pamphlet, not nations. The nub of Luxemburg’s unease with the theory of the ‘right to self-determination’ is captured in a long quotation from her 1908 pamphlet,

The formula of the ‘right of nations’ is inadequate to justify the position of socialists on the nationality question, not only because it fails to take into account the wide range of historical conditions (place and time) existing in each given case and does not reckon with the general current of the development of global conditions, but also because it ignores completely the fundamental theory of modern socialists – the theory of social classes.

When we speak of the ‘right of nations to self-determination,’ we are using the concept of the ‘nation’ as a homogeneous social and political entity. But actually, such a concept of the ‘nation’ is one of those categories of bourgeois ideology which Marxist theory submitted to a radical re-vision, showing how that misty veil, like the concepts of the ‘freedom of citizens,’ ‘equality before the law,’ etc., conceals in every case a definite historical content.

In a class society, ‘the nation’ as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and ‘rights.’ There literally is not one social area, from the coarsest material relationships to the most subtle moral ones, in which the possessing class and the class-conscious proletariat hold the same attitude, and in which they appear as a consolidated ‘national’ entity. In the sphere of economic relations, the bourgeois classes represent the interests of exploitation–the proletariat the interests of work. In the sphere of legal relations, the cornerstone of bourgeois society is private property; the interest of the proletariat demands the emancipation of the propertyless man from the domination of property. In the area of the judiciary, bourgeois society represents class ‘justice,’ the justice of the well fed and the rulers; the proletariat defends the principle of taking into account social influences on the individual, of humaneness. In international relations, the bourgeoisie represent the politics of war and partition, and at the present stage, a system of trade war; the proletariat demands a politics of universal peace and free trade. In the sphere of the social sciences and philosophy, bourgeois schools of thought and the school representing the proletariat stand in diametric opposition to each other.

The possessing classes have their worldview; it is represented by idealism, metaphysics, mysticism, eclecticism; the modern proletariat has its theory–dialectic materialism. Even in the sphere of so-called ‘universal’ conditions–in ethics, views on art, on behavior–the interests, world view, and ideals of the bourgeoisie and those of the enlightened proletariat represent two camps, separated from each other by an abyss. And whenever the formal strivings and the interests of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie (as a whole or in its most progressive part) seem identical–for example, in the field of democratic aspirations – there, under the identity of forms and slogans, is hidden the most complete divergence of contents and essential politics.

There can be no talk of a collective and uniform will, of the self-determination of the ‘nation’ in a society formed in such a manner. If we find in the history of modern societies ‘national’ movements, and struggles for ‘national interests,’ these are usually class movements of the ruling strata of the bourgeoisie, which can in any given case represent the interest of the other strata of the population only insofar as under the form of ‘national interests’ it defends progressive forms of historical development, and insofar as the working class has not yet distinguished itself from the mass of the ‘nation’ (led by the bourgeoisie) into an independent, enlightened political class.(14)

For Luxemburg, the idea of the nation is an ideological smokescreen utilised by the bourgeoisie to create horizontal linkages against the vertical hierarchies of social life. It is a useful mechanism to build national economies and national polities that benefit the class rule of the bourgeoisie. That is the reason why the idea of the right to national self-determination had to be defeated.

Lenin did not disagree with the spirit of Luxemburg’s analysis. He agreed with her that the bourgeoisie’s own class power is most efficiently wielded through the national container. ‘The economic basis of [nationalist] movements’, he wrote in his 1914 reply, ‘is the fact that in order to achieve complete victory for commodity production the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a population speaking the same language, and all obstacles to the development of this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed’.(15) Therefore, Lenin notes, ‘the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The profoundest economic factors drive towards this goal, and therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the typical, normal state for the capitalist period is the national state’. Here there is no difference between Lenin and Luxemburg, with both in agreement that national movements are along the grain of capitalist development, and that the advantages of nationalism in the European experience are first garnered by the bourgeoisie.

Equal Rights of Nations and International Solidarity of Workers

If this analysis is all that there is to it, and if it is correct, then Luxemburg’s antipathy to nationalism seems more coherent than Lenin’s ambivalence. But this is not all there is to it, at least as far as Lenin is concerned. Luxemburg’s approach to the idea of nationalism, Lenin suggested, reduced the national question to economics and to economic independence. It was not interested in the political question, in the hunger for freedom among people who had been colonised. Capitalism’s tendency to expansion out of the national container contained the seeds of imperialism; at a certain stage of its economic development, the national bourgeoisie sought the advantages of the nation-state; but as its dynamism pushed outwards, this bourgeoisie’s ambitions mimicked the imperial exertions of its aristocratic ancestors. It is to this end that Lenin made a distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors (the Great Russians and the English) and the nationalism of the oppressed (the Poles and the Irish). This distinction, Lenin wrote in 1915, ‘is the essence of imperialism’.(16) The nationalism of the oppressor, of the Great Russians and the English for example, is always to be fought against. There is nothing in the character of its nationalism that is worthy of support. Its chauvinism leads it to world conquest, a dynamic that not only shatters the well being of the oppressed but also corrupts its own citizenry.

On December 10, 1869, Marx wrote to Engels on the Irish question. ‘The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland’, he wrote. ‘English reaction in England has its roots in the subjugation of Ireland’ (Lenin quotes part of this in his 1914 pamphlet).(17) Drawing from Marx, Lenin wrote in his 1915 essay on self-determination, ‘The freedom of [the English] was cramped and mutilated by the fact that it oppressed another nation. The internationalism of the English proletariat would have remained a hypothetical phrase were it not to demand the separation of Ireland’.(18) Much the same kind of logic applied to Russia, whose Social Democrats were urged by Lenin to demand freedom for its oppressed nations. ‘Carried away by the struggle against nationalism in Poland’, Lenin wrote, ‘Rosa Luxemburg has forgotten the nationalism of the Great Russians, although this nationalism is the most formidable at the present time, it is the nationalism that is less bourgeois and more feudal, and it is the principle obstacle to democracy and to the proletarian struggle’.(19) It had to be confronted. Neither Lenin nor Luxemburg thought otherwise.

Their difference was sharp in the second half of Lenin’s distinction. The Great powers not only annex the economies of their subjects, but they also drain their political power. National self-determination of the oppressed contains both the oppressed bourgeoisie’s plans to suborn the economic to their own ends, but also that of the oppressed proletariat’s hope to fight their bourgeoisie over how to organize their nation. ‘The bourgeois nationalism of every oppressed nation’, Lenin argued, ‘has a general democratic content which is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we support unconditionally, while strictly distinguishing it from the tendency towards national exceptionalism, while fighting against the tendency of the Polish bourgeoisie to oppress the Jews, etc., etc’. Lenin carefully worked out the formula for this unconditional support. If the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation ‘fights against the oppressing one’, then the Social Democrats would support them wholeheartedly. If, however, ‘the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism’, then the Social Democrats stand opposed to them. ‘We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressing nation, but we do not condone the strivings for the privileges on the part of the oppressed nation’.(20)

To ‘not condone the strivings’ of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations sets the Social Democrats and their class allies the crucial task that separates them from the liberals and their class allies. The Social Democrats both stand against the nationalism of the oppressed nation and against the strivings of the bourgeoisie of the oppressor nation to supplant that of the oppressor nation. Workers in the oppressed nation are not to submit to the rule of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, but to confront it with as much determination as they would fight against the imperial bourgeoisie. The fight for national self-determination must not divide workers in the imperial core and in the imperial periphery. Those in the core must fight against imperial nationalism, and those in the periphery must fight against both imperial nationalism and the nationalism of their bourgeoisie. The latter have a double task, formidable for the complexity of strategy and tactics demanded of them. They are to fight both for ‘the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination’, and for ‘the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle’.(21) In other words, Social Democrats are not invested in nationalism as an end in itself. The final goal is internationalism of the proletariat, but it must go through the nationalism of the oppressed. The twin tasks of Social Democracy are then to fight for ‘the equal rights of nations and international solidarity of the workers’.(22)

A Free Union

What are the practical means by which this nationalism of the oppressed manifests itself? Lenin argued that the oppressed regions should secede from the oppressor nations, or, in other words, they need to win their independence. If Social Democracy does not call for the right to secession, its politics would ‘empty phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy’.(23) Plainly, the ‘self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, the formation of an independent national state’. But an independent national state is not the end of the process. It is here that Lenin carved out new terrain in the Marxist theory of nationalities and self-determination (although once more drawing from insights in Marx’s letters to Engels on the Irish question). Marxists and Social Democracy recognize the economic and political advantages of bigger geographical entities: they are both able to command more resources and larger markets, and they are less vulnerable to military conquest. The end goal is to form vibrant and genuine unions of large, non-homogenous areas,

We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.(24)

In his March 1916, Nine Theses on Self-Determination, Lenin wrote, ‘a free union is a false phrase without right to secession’.(25) Drawing from Marx on Ireland, Lenin wrote, ‘the demand for the right of secession for the sake of splitting and isolated countries’ is not an end in itself; it is towards a process ‘to create more durable and democratic ties’.(26) Further, Lenin wrote, ‘only in this way could Marx maintain—in contradiction to the apologists of capital who shout that the freedom of small nations to secede is utopian and impracticable and that not only economic but also political concentration is progressive—that this concentration is progressive when it is non-imperialist, and that nations should not be brought together by force, but by a free union of the proletarians of all countries.’(27)

To defend this right to secession, Lenin wrote in August 1915, ‘does in no way mean to encourage the formation of small states, but on the contrary it leads to a freer, more fearless and therefore wider and more universal formation of larger governments and unions of governments–a phenomenon more advantageous for the masses and more in accord with economic development’.(28) Capitalism dynamically grew to encompass the planet, and it sought out larger and larger areas of operation. This is the tendency not only for firms to agglomerate toward monopoly control over markets, but also for states to enlarge through imperial or colonial policies (this is the general dynamic identified by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism). ‘Imperialism means that capital has outgrown the framework of national states’, Lenin wrote in 1915; ‘it means that national oppression has been extended and heightened on a new historical foundation’.(29) Monopoly capital flourished in large, imperial states. Imperialism was rooted in the political economy of the time. It had to be confronted not by morality but by the growth of political movements that undermined its power, in other words, by a combination of proletarian movements and movements of the oppressed nationalities. ‘It follows from this’, Lenin argued, ‘that we must connect the revolutionary struggle for socialism with a revolutionary program on the national question’.

Luxemburg fought for the ‘freedom from national oppression’ and not for ‘the right of self-determination of nations’. For her, national oppression was just another form of oppression, and it should be confronted as just another oppressive force. For Lenin, national oppression played a specific role in the operation of imperialism, and it had to be confronted in a specific way, by encouragement of secession of the oppressed nationalities in order not to petrify their national culture as separate from that of other cultures, but to work toward a proletarian internationalist unity of the future. Lenin’s approach was not a moral approach, therefore, but one that emerged out of his analysis of imperialism and the national movements that had emerged in opposition to it. His endorsement of nationalism was not premised on the assumption that the small states would somehow undermine imperialism; it was understood that democratic states, with the proletariat in each making links with each other, would be able to take advantage of the new economic scale to forge a genuine unity.

Nationalism would not, as Luxemburg acidly put it, mean ‘the right to eat off gold plates’.(30) But it would mean, as Lenin noted, part of a three-point agenda:

• Complete equality for all nations.

• The right of nations to self-determination.

• The amalgamation of the workers of all nations.

This is ‘the national program that Marxism…teaches the workers’.

Karl Radek, the Austrian Marxist, waded into the debate in 1915 to argue that the struggle for national self-determination is ‘illusionary’ (‘Annexations and Social Democracy’, Berner Tagwacht, October 28-29).(31) One of Radek’s objections that rankled Lenin was that a truly class project would abjure democratic political demands that do not threaten capitalism. There are some democratic demands that can be won in the era of capitalism and there are others that must be struggled with even in a socialist society, Lenin argued. ‘We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and revolutionary tactics relative to all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, official elected by the people, equal rights for women, self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, all these demands are realizable only as an exception, and in an incomplete, distorted form’.(32) Social Democracy has to ‘formulate in a consistently revolutionary manner every one of our democratic demands’ because the proletariat must be ‘educated in the spirit of the most consistent and determined revolutionary democracy’. To contest the right of national self-determination for oppressed nations is to deny them their democratic rights and to undermined revolutionary democracy.

In the USSR and in the Comintern

Lenin’s formulation from 1914-1916 enabled a clear position in practice after the Soviet revolution (1917). Two tasks presented themselves along the grain of national self-determination.

• How should the new Soviet state deal with the question of its own nationalities?

• How should the newly created Communist International (1919) confront the nationalist movements in the colonies?

On January 3, 1918, Lenin, as part of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee drafted the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People. It was subsequently adopted by the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets as the 1918 Constitution (the essence remained in the 1924 Constitution). The second article establishes that the Soviet Republic is based ‘on the principle of a free union of free nations, as a federation of Soviet national republics’. The Council of People’s Commissars had already proclaimed the independence of Finland, removed Russian troops from Persia and committed itself to self-determination for Armenia. On paper, this was unassailable. The problem is that counter-revolutionary forces in its border states, the very states that had been promised the right to secession, attacked the new Soviet state. The Soviets hastily sought alliances with these states (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia for instance), in which pro-Bolshevik forces were supported by the Soviets and counterrevolutionaries were defeated. Self-determination of the nation was a formula by which the states were afforded nominal independence if they were not hostile to the Soviets. When Bolsheviks (such as Georgy Pyatakov) in these states did argue for full dissolution into Russia, Lenin called them Great Russians and opposed them. The principle of self-determination was sacrosanct, even when the counter-revolution threatened the new Soviet state (Luxemburg, in her essay on the Russian Revolution identified this weakness, ‘While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of ‘separation’, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used their freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself’).(33) In 1922, Stalin wished to curtail the rights of the new border-states through a policy called ‘autonomisation’, namely that these states would dissolve themselves into the USSR by gaining nominal autonomy. Lenin was adamantly opposed to this policy. ‘We consider ourselves, the Ukrainian SSR and others, equal, and enter with them, on an equal basis, into a new union, a new federation’.(34) This federation was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. This principle was already there in the 1918 draft, and in the first Soviet Constitution,

At the same time, endeavoring to create a really free and voluntary, and therefore all the more firm and stable, union of the working classes of all the nations of Russia, the Constituent Assembly confines its own task to setting up the fundamental principles of a federation of Soviet Republics of Russia, while leaving it to the workers and peasants of each nation to decide independently at their own authoritative Congress of Soviets whether they wish to participate in the federal government and in the other federal Soviet institutions, and on what terms.(35)

The logic of the federation within the USSR applied similarly to the colonial question. In the 1918 declaration, Lenin had written that the new state must have a ‘complete break with the barbarous policy of bourgeois civilization, which has built the prosperity of the exploiters belonging to a few chosen nations on the enslavement of hundreds of millions of working people in Asia, in the colonies in general, and in the small countries’.(36)

When the Communist International (Comintern) met for its first meeting in 1919, the jubilation of the Soviet experience combined with the potential revolution in Europe (particularly Germany) and the emergence of working-class and peasant movements in Asia defined its outcome. The Comintern addressed the ‘proletariat of the entire world’, telling them,

‘The emancipation of the colonies is possible only in conjunction with the emancipation of the metropolitan working class. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain their opportunity of independent existence only when the workers of England and France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken state power into their own hands’.(37) Nationalism of the oppressed nations barely earned a mention. The defeat of the German revolution and the setbacks in the colonies provoked a more sober tone at the second Comintern meeting (1920). Lenin’s views on the colonial (Eastern) question drew from his more capacious attitude toward nationalisms of the oppressed. It was the presence of the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy that stayed Lenin’s hand and curtailed his more ebullient support for anti-colonial nationalism. The second thesis of the Comintern emerged out of a compromise formulation between Lenin’s own draft and Roy’s emendations (with the Dutch Marxist Henk Sneevliet holding their hands to the same pen),

As the conscious express of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national question on abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly it should emphasize the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly it must emphasize the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, privileged nations, as a counter to the bourgeois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s total population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capitalist countries, that is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism.(38)

Nothing in this thesis contradictions the spirit of Lenin’s own view on self-determination, expect in so far as this makes explicit Lenin’s hesitancy over the character of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations. The 9th thesis said that the Comintern ‘must directly support the revolutionary movement among the nations that are dependent and do not have equal rights (for example Ireland, the Blacks in America, and so forth) and in the colonies’.(39) At the same time, the Comintern, in the 11th Thesis noted that it must engaged in a ‘resolute struggle’ against the attempt to ‘portray as communist the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries that are not truly communist’.(40) The Comintern supports the revolutionary movements in the colonies ‘only on condition that the components are gathered in all backward countries for future proletarian parties–communist in fact and not only in name–and that they are educated to be conscious of their particular tasks, that is, the tasks of struggling against the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nation’. What the Comintern ‘must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo’.(41) Lenin’s general principles articulated in his essays from 1914 onwards were enshrined in the Soviet Constitution and in the Comintern, with some alterations to fit the new situations and the new class configurations.

No surprise that radicals from the colonised world–such as Ho Chi Minh and José Carlos Mariategui–found Leninism to be the heart and soul of their political outlook. It was this anti-colonial Marxism that drew radical nationalists from the Dutch colonies of Indonesia to the French colonies of West Africa, and it was this strong theory of anti-colonial national self-determination that forged ties for the Marxist left across these worlds.(42) Little wonder then that the tradition of ‘Western Marxism’ tends to ignore Lenin, to jump from Marx to Lukacs and Gramsci, evading the fact that Lukacs wrote a book on Lenin and that Gramsci developed his own thought with Lenin in mind; the leap over Lenin is a leap not only over the experience of the October Revolution but it is a leap past the Marxism that then develops in the Third World, a leap into abstract philosophy with little engagement with praxis and with the socialism that develops–not in the advanced industrial states–but in the realm of necessity, in the former colonised world from China to Cuba. In those outer reaches, where revolutions have been successful, it is the anti-colonial Lenin that guides the way.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

Notes

1. Lenin, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’, Pravda, 18 May 1913, Collected Works, vol. 19, pp. 99-100.

2. Lenin, ‘Draft Resolution of the Tasks of the Party in the Present Situation’, January 1912, Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 456 and ‘Resolutions of the Conference. The Russian Organising Commission for Convening the Conference’, January 1912, Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 485.

3. Lenin, ‘The War on China’, Iskra, no. 1, December 1900, Collected Works, vol. 4, pp. 372-77.

4. Lenin, ‘Events in the Balkans and in Persia’, Proletary, no. 37, 16 October 1908, Collected Works, vol. 15, p. 221.

5. Lenin, ‘The Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up’, July 1916, Collected Works, vol. 22, p. 357.

6. Lenin, ‘A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism’, Zvezda, October 1916, Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 60.

7. Vijay Prashad, ‘For Comrade Lenin on his 150th Birth Anniversary’, Lenin 150, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020.

8. All these articles are in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 20.

9. Horace B. Davis collected the five articles by Luxemburg from her Kraków journal Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny in The National Question. Selected Writings, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976.

10. J. V. Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, Collected Works, vol. 2, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1953.

11. V. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967.

12. Vijay Prashad, ‘Vladimir Ílyiç Lenin/Uluslarin Kaderlerini Tayin Hakki’, Marksist Klasikleri Okuma Kilavuzu, Istanbul: Yordam Kitap, 2013.

13. Luxemburg, The National Question, p. 107. For a critical appraisal of Polish Social Democracy, see Eric Blanc, ‘The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg’s Politics in Poland (1893–1919)’, Historical Materialism, vol. 25, issue 4, 2017.

14. Luxemburg, The National Question, pp. 133-135.

15. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 396.

16. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 409.

17. On 24 October 1869, Engels wrote to Marx, ‘Irish history shows what a misfortune it is for one nation to subjugate another. All English abominations have their origin in the Irish pale. I still have to bone up on the Cromwellian period, but it appears clear to me that things in England would have taken another turn but for the necessity of military rule in Ireland and creating a new aristocracy’. Marx/Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43, p. 362.

18. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 410.

19. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 412.

20. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 412.

21. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 432.

22. In an early formulation, Lenin argued not for the ‘self-determination of nations’ but for the ‘self-determination of the proletariat’. ‘We on our part concern ourselves with the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than with the self-determination of peoples or nations’. (‘On the Manifesto of the Armenian Social Democrats’, Iskra, 1 February 1903, Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 327). It appears that this position is close to that of Luxemburg, that nationalism of the bourgeoisie had to be opposed in all respects, and that the Social Democrats must take a class view over a national view. Over the course of the decade, Lenin changed his position–no longer was there the emphasis on the ‘self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality’. Lenin now saw the difference between the oppressor nationality and the oppressed nationality, which nuanced his stand a great deal.

23. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 409.

24. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 412-413.

25. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 143.

26. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 165.

27. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 150.

28. Lenin, ‘Socialism and War. The Attitude of the RSDLP Towards the War’, Sotsial-Demokrat, 1 November 1914, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 316.

29. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 408.

30. Luxemburg, The National Question, p. 123.

31. Warren Lerner, Karl Radek, the last internationalist, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1970.

32. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 408.

33. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism?, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 49-50.

34. Lenin, ‘On the Establishment of the USSR’, 26 September 1922, Collected Works, vol. 42, pp. 421-422.

35. Lenin, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, 3 January 1918, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 425.

36. Lenin, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, 3 January 1918, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 424.

37. ‘Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World’, 6 March 1919, Liberate the Colonies. Communism and Colonial Freedom, 1917-1924, ed. John Riddell, Vijay Prashad, and Nazeef Mollah, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2019, p. 33.

38. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 94.

39. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 97.

40. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 98.

41. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 98.

42. Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017.

The Kenosha Uprising and the Need for a People's Revolutionary Party

By Maoist Communist Party

Originally published by the Maoist Communist Party under the title, “Kenosha and Our Strategic Orientation.”

[Editors Note: Republishing political programs such as these does not necessarily reflect an official endorsement by the Hampton Institute.]

The course of the George Floyd Rebellion has demonstrated unequivocally that the principle task of the communist movement is the work of party building: the provision of revolutionary organization forged in the fires of class struggle and capable of providing proletarian leadership to the mass movement. It would be pure delusion to suggest that any contemporary communist formation has the capacity to provide that leadership and shift the objective situation we now face in the direction of a revolutionary break – the spontaneous rebellion which continues to rage across the country, most recently stoked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI, is entirely outside of the control of the revolutionary movement, which now exists only in small-group form. The questions facing the communist camp revolve around our path forward and overall strategy: how to construct a fully constituted revolutionary communist party in our context, in the face of sharpening reactionary paramilitary aggression and a nearly unprecedented (at least in recent memory) wave of anticolonial uprisings.

The overall failure to seize upon the current juncture is an indictment of a left which has neglected to take seriously the anti-imperialist character of the popular struggle for black liberation, that is, the struggle for national liberation of the New Afrikan internal colony. Allowing the black liberation movement to be subsumed by a chauvinist politics of “class unity” has obfuscated the transformation of the white proletariat into a labor aristocracy which reaps a portion of the gains looted through superexploitation of the colonized. We have addressed the dialectics of this transformation elsewhere, but in short, any meaningful class analysis of the so-called u.s.a. context reveals a proletariat cut across by imperialist contradictions which must be resolved through struggle against white supremacy and settler colonialism. The fight against white supremacy must be considered as much a question of principle as of strategy; the liquidation of either component amounts to the liquidation of any practical path to revolutionary struggle itself.

Recognizing the practical limitations of the contemporary communist movement within the so-called u.s.a. – consequences of decades of sectarian squabbling, the hegemony of revisionism and white chauvinism, and the complete absence of a truly mass-oriented politics guided by a strategic revolutionary program – means also recognizing that the only path forward is one of constructing mass organizations with a burgeoning party formation at their core, and of uniting the struggle for black liberation with the struggle for socialism by putting politics, rather than dogma, in command.

The following theses summarize the general strategic orientation of the Maoist Communist Party – Organizing Committee in this regard:

i. The fight against white supremacy must take on a strategic priority. Recent events have demonstrated to the world at large what the black revolutionary movement and the agents of the settler-state apparatus have both recognized for decades: the oppression of the New Afrikan internal colony is the principal contradiction in the contemporary u.s.a. context. The intense repression of the black revolutionary movement – indeed, the construction of all new repressive apparatuses for this singular purpose – speaks to the fear which the old bourgeoisie rightly feels in the face of this national liberation struggle. Lenin, during the Third International, changed the course of the international communist movement by correcting its slogan, from the famous lines of the Manifesto (“Workers of the world, unite!”) to “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!” Communist unity with the struggle of oppressed peoples for their liberation is not solely on the basis of national liberation struggles’ ability to ‘detonate’ the broader class struggle, but because the anti-imperialist struggle is the leading force in the world revolutionary movement today. A communist movement which is unable to unite the worker’s struggle with the black revolutionary struggle on the basis of anti-imperialism is destined for the dustbin of history. The MCP-OC directs its cadres to unite wherever possible with formations which organize for black liberation, principally the New Afrikan Black Panther Party and the United Panther Movement.

ii. The spontaneous uprisings across the country, in response to repressive violence against black people, are circumscribed by the overall level of mass organization existing in a given city. The broad success of the state apparatus and its nonprofit wing in recuperating the energy of the George Floyd Rebellion into nonthreatening (and even counterrevolutionary) programs is a direct consequence of the absence of mass organizations capable of transforming the struggle for immediate demands into a political struggle for power. Even the most militant rebellion will be limited to achieving only minor concessions from the state without the presence of revolutionary leadership armed with a political program. The task of our cadres in this context is not only to recruit for their own organizations, such as our For the People programs, which is ultimately a secondary objective. Instead, we instruct local cells to work towards the construction of organizations composed of the masses themselves, leading alongside militants. Such organizations must be made capable of resisting recuperation through ongoing and explicit political education and two line struggle; they must be made with the objective of protracting the fight against the class enemy, organizing for concessions from the enemy and operating as a “school of war.” Ultimately, they must be united with other mass organizations into a front under communist leadership.

iii. The experience of Kenosha – in particular, the murder of two demonstrators by the brownshirt Kyle Rittenhouse – not only speaks to the truth of the old adage “cops and Klan go hand in hand,” but provides an implicit critique of the liberal “abolitionist” line. We cannot be fooled by the illusion that the racist violence of the state is an anomaly of “policing” or the “carceral state.” Such rhetoric disguises the real class character of the repressive apparatus and its structural role – the amelioration of class struggle to defend the rule of the owning class. The repression of black people as colonial violence plays a structurally necessary role in the maintenance of capitalist domination – this will never be conceded so long as the capitalist system and its state apparatus continue to exist. Whether through traditional police officers or fascist paramilitaries, Capital will always defend itself. Thus, the fight for abolition must be connected with the revolutionary struggle and the initiation of people’s war. We reject the rightist line demanding “police abolition” as a political reform.

iv. As repressive violence escalates, the communist movement must respond by preparing the masses to defend themselves and their gains by any means necessary. The construction of community self-defense organs under the command of the mass organizations is an urgent task for our militants.

v. The rejection of the ballot as a tool for political struggle is a tactical necessity, not a metaphysical principle. The broad masses have already demonstrated their distaste for the electoral sham carried out by the bourgeois class dictatorship and have never attended the polls in high numbers; the passive electoral boycott of the masses must be transformed into an active electoral boycott that rejects the whole capitalist state system. Particularly as the electoral terrain is offered up by the class enemy as a site of struggle for “social justice” in order to recuperate the creative energy of the masses unleashed by the current uprising, our cadres must agitate around the electoral boycott and fight for revolutionary struggle. Elections, no! People’s war, yes!

If Death Doesn't Push Politicians Left, Then What Can?

By Christian Gines

I am sick and tired of seeing black bodies dead in the street for absolutely no reason at all. It is traumatic and exhausting to continue to see wanton violence perpetuated every single day. Every time I see a black person that has been killed from structural violence I think back to the first point of Afropessimism: “The slave, as an object, is socially dead, which means they are open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime.” Black people are killed daily without any justification. How can a representative of the state apparatus represent and legislate on behalf of the black community if we are socially dead in the eyes of the state? If wanton violence keeps occurring to us and nothing is done, what other means do we have other than Abolition?

In the eyes of the state, black people are seen as a commodity, not something that they represent, but something that they use when they need too and dispose of us when we aren’t required anymore. We are not seen as human in the country’s eyes, so why would a state actor actually represent us and our needs? How would the figurehead of the country not see us as anything but socially dead? When another black brother or sister dies, they see that as a side effect of the system. Instead of looking toward Abolition, they look towards performative action to subside the masses, and in the best scenario, they think that minor reforms will solve the issue. Arresting a police officer after they have killed a black person is not justice. Justice is a system that doesn’t allow that killing to happen in the first place. Justice is living in a system where you don’t have to worry about structural violence and gratuitous violence daily. There will never be justice in a system that feeds off of black death. We shouldn’t expect politicians, courts, voting booths, and other state-run apparatuses to do anything other than uphold anti-blackness. The state’s only goal is self-preservation. Whether that is defending capitalism, white supremacy, the (cis-hetero)patriarchy, and any other tentacles of oppression, it will do anything to stay intact. 

With talks of politicians being pushed left, I wonder how. If you look outside and see black bodies slain every day and aren’t moved left, what will move you? When we have had protest throughout the country since the killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, these politicians haven’t moved to the left an inch. In some cases, they are moving to the right. In the case of Minneapolis, change only came because of the destruction of property. Does the destruction of property outweigh the killing of an innocent black body? How many black bodies have to pile up before they wake up and realize that we need different solutions. Police without body cams kill us. Police with body cams kill us. No matter what reform we try to make, the police still are killing us. America is inherently anti-black. It is a country founded off the backs of Native Genocide and Slavery. Every single institution founded in the U.S. was based on racism and oppression. From the foundation of police deriving from slave catchers. The Prison Industrial Complex, deriving from slavery. The Immigration system, founded in settler colonialism and the exclusion of Asians. The Supreme Court and its racist rulings. The medical system and experimental surgeries on slave women. The U.S. military and its imperialism that devastates countries to the brink of land degradation, starvation, and death. Every US institution has its founding in either racism, settler colonialism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, which means that the U.S. itself is a system of oppression that we should work to dismantle. That affects of that foundation is something that we still have to deal with daily. Black people are open to violence on the regular. If the police don’t kill us, we are killed by prisons, homelessness, starvation, disease, and many other forms of violence. Knowing this and seeing this on an everyday basis, what more does a person need to be pushed left. 

If a person is apathetic and sometimes even supports the senseless use of bombings and drone strikes on our brothers and sisters in the Global South, what makes you think they will become susceptible to the calls for the end of death within the country.  How would anyone be held accountable inside of office when we can’t even keep them accountable when running for office. If they won’t meet the voter’s demands when they need our so-called votes to win in the first place, then why would they listen to us when they get into office? Politicians will run on a platform that seemingly seeks to change things when they get in office, but when they get in, they turn their backs on the everyday person. How are we then to hold them accountable? They have gained access to more power. They have gained access to more capital. They have gained access to the most extensive domestic and foreign military apparatus on the planet. They have gained access to the FBI and CIA, which allows them to undermine any effort at resistance or liberation. How will they be held accountable by constituents when the only thing they serve is the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy? How are they going to be held responsible when to maintain the structures that they benefit from and control the production cost is your life? There is no accountability in a system that is set up like that. You cannot expect a change in bourgeoisie politics because the only thing they are beholden to is money. 

How can you make someone acknowledge your humanity? Acknowledge that you have the right to a life free from the threat of death or oppression? We have been trying this for centuries, and it hasn’t worked. Why? It hasn’t worked because the foundation of this country was the foundation of our social death. When slavery emerged in conjunction with blackness, anti-blackness emerged as well. Slavery necessitated the condition for our blackness, because how else could you justify putting someone into slavery unless they aren’t seen as human. How many videos do you need to see black people being shot by the police to believe that we need to abolish the police? Blackness’s participation in civil society is a contradiction because for civil society to exist, blackness has to be subjugated and oppressed. It has to be seen as nonhuman. To validate civil society, you must also validate anti-blackness because one necessitates the other. For a time now, we have invited people to see what is what it’s like to live at the bottom of the totem pole. Most people never take the time to even try to go through what we experience daily, and those that might help here us out do so out of their interest most of the time and come out with small reformist goals. Now that isn’t to knock any effort of reform. We should be advocating for some of our pain and oppression to be alleviated here and now, but in the long term, reform is nothing but fascism, as George Jackson says. You cannot elect and legislate away oppression. Minneapolis proves that when civil society starts to become disrupted, then change might come. Civil society only exists to maintain structures of oppression and normalize oppressive violence and demonize revolutionary violence. 

If a person or party only acknowledges your existence as a commodity or, in this instance, a voting block that allows them to get power, then you are already on the losing side. If you, after decades of loyally supporting them have nothing in return except void representation and worsened oppression, then why are you supporting them in the first place. Bourgeoisie politics will never be a mechanism for change and ending oppression. You cannot legislate away anti-blackness when that is in the foundations of something. It’s either Abolition or oppression. The representatives of the state apparatus don’t see you as anything but a tool for power. You are not human to them. “That is why you will always be open to gratuitous violence, as opposed to violence contingent upon some transgression or crime; and generally dishonored, or disgraced before any thought or action is considered.” If they don’t see you as actual people, then your death at the hands of state-sanctioned violence is nothing but a casualty of their power, and we have had far too many deaths to not fight back anymore. That is why, no matter how many black people die, politicians will not be pushed to the left. To go to the left is to go against the core institutions that they seek to uphold, and if they were to do that, they wouldn’t have power in the first place.

Well, What Are Y'all Going To Do Then?

By Mack

On Tuesday, August 11, 2020, democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, announced his VP pick, Kamala Harris, to a flurry of mixed reactions online. As with all events that make up the political theatre typically observed in our country, there were corners of praise and corners of dissent. On one hand, Harris’ nomination symbolizes a potential historic “first” for Black and South Asian women in the US. It’s an opportunity to be represented in the second highest office in the world. But for many like myself, the optics are totally overshadowed by the bleak reality of electing the white supremacist, grandfather of mass incarceration, and a woman who has unironically self identified as California’s “top cop”.

Under a true democracy, people should be allowed to ask questions. Under a true democracy, people should be allowed space for criticism and dissent. But in the illusion of a democracy that we find ourselves under in the so called united states, where elections cost millions of dollars to participate in, where all parties besides two are rendered virtually invisible, and where the two visible parties pull strings behind the scenes to usher forward uninspiring candidates, dissent is often viewed as life-threatening. We are taught that democracy should be free, but every four years the american people are held at gunpoint and forced to make a decision. Every election becomes “the most important election of our lifetime”.

When those among us who choose to dissent speak up, we are often met with a few similar retorts. They don’t vary much, but one that we can constantly depend on is, “So what do you want me to do then?” I want to recognize that often this question is asked from a genuine place. When you are held politically hostage the way we continue to be in this country, we find ourselves destitute and miseducated. People’s concerns about the future are real.

But more often than not, “So what do you want me to do then?” is a question asked in bad faith, particularly to leftists, people who identify as communists, socialists, anarchists, or any other faction of the true left, who, after lifetimes of study and lived experience, have decided to opt out of the dog and pony show that is american electoral politics. It’s a question asked to invoke shame. To suggest that we are the true failure of this country. To remind us that if we just took this thing a little more seriously, maybe we’d all be in a better place. This question often leads to arguments that don’t go anywhere and don’t yield any solutions. This question only serves to further isolate the people.

I do not like being asked this question, because I believe that most people who ask it, do not want the answer, and most certainly will not like mine. But for the last time, here, I will answer it: I don’t want you to do anything. I literally just want you to stop. I want you to read. I want you to listen. And then, and only then, do I want you to act.

The big issue with being socialized in a patriarchal society, which is to say, a society governed by and constructed in the benefit of men, is that solutions are constantly valued over concrete analysis. We continue to leap for solutions to problems that we do not fully understand. And that is why we continue to find ourselves repeating the same mistakes and asking the same questions (read: “So what do you want me to do then?”) over and over again. Before asking this question, understand that you need new tools. You need a new framework from which to understand the world around you.

Marxists value a process known as dialectical materialism. What dialectical materialism allows us to do is to step back from the noise— the non-stop hysteria on TV and the bought-and-paid-for political chatter, and actually evaluate the material conditions around us. Dialectical materialism reminds us that almost everything in life can be explained when you look at real world conditions and apply the context of history. It asks us to sit with the history of our world, and evaluate the contradictions that come up in our society. A person constantly asking “So what do you want me to do then?” is very far removed from this crucial process of interrogation. And what I need you to do is unplug from the theatre and join me in struggle and in material evaluation. In essence, I need you to take a break from being condescending as I invite you into the thought exercise of a lifetime.

“So what do we do then?” To tell you the truth, it would actually be great if you commit to coming back into the streets with us. I want you to stop ignoring houseless people in your own community. I want you to give them money and food and clothes every chance you get. I want you to band together with your friends and figure out ways to get them off the streets permanently. And I want you to study the history of houselesnees in your city. Why are so many people without homes where you live, while so many homes sit empty? What are your local politicians doing to address it and what’s taking them so long? I want you to get so angry about that, that you do something.

“So what do we do then?” To be really honest with you, there are likely hundreds or thousands of people where you live who have been laid off. I think it would be great if you got organized in your city and learned how to do an eviction blockade. Because people are about to get evicted. Bonus point: it would be really awesome if you have a home that someone who’s getting evicted could live in while they work to sort out their life. I’d love it if we stopped shaming people who are receiving the extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. I’d like it if you developed a better class analysis and stopped going to war with people who share similar material interests as you on behalf of the ruling class. We all deserve more. I want you to get so angry about that, that you do something.

“So what do we do then?” I want you to figure out what resources the elderly in your community need access to. Can you help someone do some grocery shopping? Is an elder struggling to afford prescriptions? As it stands, no one running for office in this country is interested in even discussing universal healthcare. Perhaps you can help an elder pay for their meds? Maybe do some crowdfunding to help them afford them? What about the single parent households where you live? Will you be a resource to those who are about to struggle with starting virtual learning in the fall? Can you talk to them and find out what they need? Can you and a group of your friends mobilize around that? I want y'all to get so angry about what’s about to happen, that you do something.

“So what do we do then?” Well, right now we’re living through a moment where more people than ever are ready to explore getting rid of one of the deadliest forces in our country: the police. At this moment, Harris wants to “reimagine” them, an exercise we’ve done before with no result, and Biden wants more of them. It’s likely that with the current presence of police, your community already isn’t safe. Are you a cishet man? If so, you should be talking with other cishet men about the ways in which women and LGBTQ+ folks in your community are not safe and may require protection. Can you organize a system of protection for people harmed in your community, and a system of accountability and restoration for those who do harm? Are you trying to put ego aside and unlearn so much of the toxicity that persists in our society? For everyone else, will you organize with folks around you on ways to divest from violence and punishment? It would be dope if you could have a conversation or two about how your community wants to handle interpersonal conflict. I think it would be great if we all took some time to think about how we model ideas like abolition in our everyday lives. I want us to get so mad about this shit, that we do something about it.

“So what do we do then?” I want you to develop a better analysis of the country you live in and begin to engage it in a more ethical way. I want you to really process what it means to live at the heart of the US empire. I want you to not be ok with disposing of the lives of Black and Brown people in the global south on the premise of representation. Change.org petitions aren’t cutting it anymore. I want you to interrogate why you even want to be represented as the face of the death machine that is the united states. No more Black Panther cosplay until you understand the politic that set them on fire. I want you to be pissed off about the fact that you’ve never participated in a truly democratic election in your entire life. I want you to get angry about the electoral college. I want you to stop hypothetically asking me “So what are you going to do then?”, and maybe ask yourself what YOU are going to do in the event that November 2020 ends up being just like November 2016— a scenario where your favorite war criminal wins the popular vote, but still loses the election.

What a proper analysis of our situation tells us is that we did not get here by some slip of a lever. Nothing about our current situation is by mistake. The path that we continue to go down is totally predictable, in fact, people have been theorizing our current reality for decades. What a proper analysis tells us, is that if we don’t completely halt and bring the US empire to its knees, it is going to swallow the rest of the world, and when it’s done, it’s going to cannibalize itself. What it tells us is that until we wake up and stop feeding the machine, nothing is going to change. The only realistic and material way to stop this, is to start building a new world from the ground up. First, with ourselves, and then in our communities.

Via electoralism, we are being continuously asked to feed into our own demise. And no matter how much people claim “we can do both”, history shows us that until we don’t, by and large we continue to rely on elections to solve our societal problems. But no matter who sits at the helm, the machine is never going to slow,  turn around, or stop. The only path this machine is taking, is forward. So please don’t treat questions like “So what do we do then?” like big jokers in a game of spades. Before asking “What are yall going to do then?” or “What are the alternatives?” understand that those who fully understand the problem aren’t looking for alternatives. We’re trying to build something new, and we are asking you to join us.

Black Politicians: White Supremacy's Indirect Rulers

By Christian Gines

The Black Community is an internal colony within America. We have a Perpetual Foreigner status and are treated as such. We are socially, politically, educationally, and economically deprived. We have no self-determination. Where there is institutional racism, there is colonization. U.S. Imperialism affects black people abroad just as much as it does at home, and it is sustained in one fundamental way: Black Politicians. Black Politicians are the faces of white supremacy in the black community. They uphold the same structures that we need to dismantle under the guise of them having to “play ball,” which they claim will lead to “useful” compromise. That approach only benefits the individual and not the entire race. Black Politicians are colonial masters. They are indirect rulers and one of the biggest roadblocks to Black Liberation.  

Black Visibility does not equal Black Power. Just because we have black people that look like us in office or in power doesn't mean that it will benefit us. Just because you have a Black face on a white-supremacist system doesn't mean that white supremacy is over. It has just adapted to the conditions of society. Take the state of Mississippi, for example. Mississippi has the most black politicians in office. Yet, the state still has one of the highest poverty rates, one of the lowest education ratings, worst healthcare systems, and more than half of our renters are at stake of homelessness because of Covid-19. If we have a black person in power implementing the same policies that the white people are implementing, then that representation has no worth to us. What is good for America does not equal what is good for black people. That representation is only worth something to the white-supremacist structure which benefits from the facade of progress by placing a black face on racism and oppression. 

Black Politicians are the same as the indirect rulers that were in colonies during the Scramble for Africa. They come to us saying that they “see us, hear us, and are going to do something about it.” Then they get into office and say that they can't speak up about an issue plaguing the black community because if they speak up, they will be ousted from the club. They claim that they won't have a seat at the table anymore. That shows you the fundamental problem right there. Black Politicians don't really exercise any real power for the community. They are more interested in their individual wealth and comfort than actually fighting for any real change. They are no more than puppets that, instead of being loyal to the constituents that put them into office, are loyal to a political party. They are more worried about personal status than changing the status quo. 

Take the Congressional Black Caucus, for example. The Congressional Black Caucus is dominated by politicians who are more worried about their corporate interests and filling their pockets than actually representing the Black Community's interests. Take the race of Jamal Bowman and Eliot Engel. Jamal Bowman was a black progressive candidate running against the incumbent Eliot Engel, who is a moderate white politician. In this race, the CBC decided to endorse Eliot Engel instead of Jamal Bowman. This example right here goes to show you what the goal of black politicians is to protect the status quo of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. They are elected to do the bidding of the ruler. Same as colonial masters. They co-opt revolutionary language to benefit the goals of neoliberalism. 

Look at Jim Clyburn, who was a Freedom Rider and participated in the civil rights movement. When young, he put in work and likely had revolutionary tendencies and thoughts. His effectiveness, though, after being brought into the Democratic Machine, has gone to waste. He no longer articulates the ideas and needs of the black community. What he does now is silence black radical thought and dissent. Take for instance what he said about the protest happening around Defunding the Police. He stated that "Nobody is going to defund the police." That statement is very disingenuous, seeing that most of the protesters are calling for defunding if not abolition. He is doing his job as a colonial master. He is watering down the movement and  trying to subside the black masses by getting us to settle for incremental change instead of fighting to dismantle current systems of oppression. 

Joe Biden picking Kamala Harris as his running mate displays this indirect rule the most. Right now, we are going through a global uprising against policing and prison systems, with people advocating for the abolition of both. During this time, Joe Biden decides to choose a candidate who is known for criminalizing black and brown bodies by keeping innocent people in jail for labor, defending the three-strike system, withholding police misconduct information, defending the death penalty, defending prosecutors falsifying confessions, and a myriad of other things. This shows you the logic of the Democratic Party. They see black people as political pawns who they can manipulate into giving their undying support to the party by just nominating a black woman as Vice President without substantial policy promises. And this strategy has worked. People who were calling for the abolition of police and prisons in June and July are now the same people supporting the Vice Presidential pick of Kamala Harris.

In Black Power, Kwame Ture quoted Machiavelli in saying, "And here it should be noted that a prince ought never to make common cause with one more powerful than himself to injure another unless necessity forces him to it.… for if he wins you rest in his power, and princes must avoid as much as possible being under the will and pleasure of other." This is the reckoning that the Black Community has to have because when we hear talks about “harm reduction,” what harm is actually being reduced. Bombs are still going to be dropped, people are still going to get shot by police, people will still be in jail under both presidents. Harris is deliberately being used to sideline the discussions of real change that we need because we have a black face as the possible second-in-charge of the oppression. We had a black face as the head of America for eight years, and the black community's situation did not get better. Black Lives Matter started under his presidency, and he was hesitant to speak about it, let alone offer substantial change. The Flint Water Crisis was under his presidency, and he didn't provide any substantial change. Not to mention, he dropped 72 bombs a day on the Global South and helped coordinate the outright destruction of one of Africa’s most prosperous nations in Libya. Black faces in high places are just brokers of White Supremacy sold with the guise of progress. 

We don't need Colonial Masters and empty representation. It's not about having a Black person in a position of White Supremacy. We need new institutions in place and new systems that will actually bring about change. Black people are not politically, socially, and economically depressed because of our character or work ethic. Black people are politically, socially, and economically depressed because we are a colonized community. The indirect ruler does not make any colonized situation better. It is just cheaper and easier than having white men run everything in the colony. If we ushered an end to colonization, then we would have an end to our economic serfdom, exploitation, and oppression. We have just as much right to self-determination and freedom than any other colonized group has, and having Black faces doing the bidding of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy is not the way to achieving that liberation and freedom.

Frantz Fanon: A Personal Tribute to the Philosopher of the Colossal Mass

By Alieu Bah

Originally published at Red Voice.

"The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth... But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight."

The wretched of the earth, the damned of humanity are still here. Still clamoring, still caught in a thousand many battles with themselves and the world built to keep them in their place. Their fate signed, sealed, and packaged for the consumption of the rich and wealthy few of the earth — buffets where the flesh, blood and tears of the poor are served to a greedy, barbaric, capitalist horde are even more sumptuous. Their feasting is the stuff of legend and their belch a recognition of a satisfied bunch of heartless thieves who rejoice more in their heist than any sort of remorse or regret thereof. The proverbial cocktail party list that was supposed to be changed at the dawn of decolonization remains the same even as it is inherited and one family name supplanted for another in a vicious circle of inheritance.

(Un)fortunately your book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is still relevant to us. It was supposed to be an artifact of history, forever to rest in the museums of liberated territories. But fact is, it remains this living, breathing, painful reminder to us the colonized of the earth. We still study it because it’s more relevant than ever in this colonial continuity. From the favelas of Brazil, the hoodlands of America, the jungles of Chiapas, from the townships of Johannesburg to the slums of Nairobi, this masterpiece continues to shine in the eyes of a new generation whose parents were sold nothing but dreams.

The shantytown, the medinas, the slums of the world still persist. The compartmentalization of the world continues unabated. However, the divide gets deeper and more cancerous, the line, the border isn’t in the same town or neighborhood anymore, but between the geography of the oppressed — the third world — and the center of the oppressor, the colonist. With the ever-increasing globalized configuration of capital, the choke hold of a staggering market to the expansion of “soft” imperialism in the form of intergovernmental organizations and NGOs from the colonizer, the metropolis has exceeded all expectations of a shared analysis between our generations; the chasm deepened as Hannibal crossed the alps. It all has gotten deeper since you've succumbed to the white claws of death in that hospital in Maryland. The rich neighborhood and the slums today are mostly populated by the same faces, the same race of men and women. When I was in Nairobi last year, it reminded me so much of your analysis on the divided, schizophrenic colonial society.

In more ways than one it’s as if your take was about the neocolonial state in those illuminating first chapters of The Wretched of the Earth. The naked violence of it and the wanton disregard for human life makes you a prophet in this secular tradition of progressive politics we share. But more searing and penetrating of your analysis was the scholar and intellectual who comes home from the west. They’re here after all this time, still concerned about particulars and false western moralisms. They do all kinds of gymnastics with the minds of the masses to divert them from the struggle for land, bread, and water.

They are being found out, though. Young and old progressive Africans have started studying and propagating your works and see their (colonized intellectuals') likeness once again. The objective conditions are also giving rise to a newer, more badass context that defies the pull and gravity of bourgeois intellection grown from those barren western soils. These new rebels, ghetto-grown intellectuals, unknown revolutionaries, are at once denouncing these puppets and concretely building again the old-but-known mass organizational model that led to our liberation in times gone by from the clutches of classic colonialism.

Your name, though, continues to raise colonial anxiety. It continues to sound like metal dropping on the silence and soothing sounds of the corporate world. From Palestine to Panama, it continues to liberate, to agitate, even, as it brings home sanity to a lost generation. Your righteous ghost keeps coming back to haunt the Towers of Babel. Even after all this time! It reminds one of the old saying that wickedness tarries but a little while, but the works of the righteous lives on forevermore. Your lives and afterlives have clearly shown the truth and precision of that good old saying. Year after year, you resurface in the most unlikeliest of places, but unbeknownst to bourgeois historians, so long as oppression exists and there is a demand for the objective material conditions to change, you, the philosopher of the colossal mass, will show face, heart, and mind, and guide the movement even from the grave.

But there is trouble now. Your name and your work continues to be appropriated by academe. You’ve become a career for the well-to-do, the ones who erase. They have complicated your legacy. The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth. I hope you come into the thunder, into the tsunami, into the catalytic force of nature. But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight. To honor your name by bringing it home to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth.

There is so much to enrich this letter with, but so little time and space. But we who inherited the disinherited, we who took the pledge to raise a billion-strong army, we who know liberation and freedom is a birthright, we who want to end the compartmentalization of the world — the Manichaeism of the land — we are here, in our many forms, subjectively and objectively honoring the call to “...shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry.”

The Garifuna in Honduras: A History of Pillage and Dispossession

By Yanis Iqbal

Originally published at Green Social Thought.

Amid the current Covid-19 pandemic, the Garifuna community of Honduras is experiencing state-sponsored violence and regulated repression. On July 18 2020, heavily armed personnel of the Police Investigation Department (DPI) barged into the house of Alberth Sneider Centeno, Garifuna president of the land community of El Triunfo de la Cruz, and abducted him. Later, the same armed group kidnapped Suami Aparicio Mejía García, Gerardo Mizael Rochez Cálix and Milton Joel Martínez Álvarez, members of the OFRANEH (Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras), and a fifth person, Junior Rafael Juárez Mejía. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) has issued a statement saying “that the kidnapping of these people is motivated by the activity of the Garifuna people in defense of their ancestral lands and the rights of Afro-indigenous and indigenous people in these territories.”

The Honduran Solidarity Network (HSN) has similarly stated that “There are powerful people and businesses that have every interest in terrorizing the Garifuna communities in Tela Bay including Triunfo de la Cruz. Snider Centeno was an outspoken leader fighting against the global tourist industry allied with powerful and wealthy families in Honduras. Centeno was defending his community's collective and ancestral land rights. An investigation into the Honduran government's role in not only the kidnapping but also the context in which the kidnappings occurred, is absolutely necessary and important. The Honduran government has violated the Garifuna's land rights for decades.”

From the statements issued by CGT and HSN, it is clear that the kidnapping is not a regionally restricted event. Rather, it is an act involving myriad actors, both national and international. For example, DPI, the armed group responsible for the kidnapping, is a police force which is economically supported by the US State Department’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. With American assistance, the DPI has enormously expanded and by 2022, it is expected to have 3,000 personnel or 12% of the entire Honduran force.

Furthermore, the authoritarian alacrity with which the state has suppressed protests against the kidnappings betokens that there is something deeper of which the government is afraid. These peaceful protests were carried out by the residents of El Triunfo de la Cruz, Sambo Creek, Nueva Armenia and Corozal on Highway CA-13 and demanded that the 5 Garifuna activists be returned alive. In order to understand the underlying factors which are shaping the dynamics of violence and intimidation against the Garifuna community, we need to take a look at the historical backdrop against which it is occurring and understand the path-dependent nature of present-day happenings.

The Garifuna people are a community who find their existential roots in the soil of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. In 1675, a ship carrying Mokko people, slated to be enslaved, was wrecked near Saint Vincent, an island in the Caribbean. These people settled in the Caribbean island and resolutely resisted colonialist attempts by the French and British. Inspired by the heroic courage of the indigenous people in Saint Vincent, enslaved Africans escaped from the clutches of colonialism and arrived at the Saint Vincent Island. Through the intermixing of enslaved Africans and Caribs-Arawaks, the Garifuna subjectivity was produced which moored its identity in a revolutionary fight against the savagery of slavery and cruelty of colonialism.

While the Treaty of Paris of 1763 granted to Britain the Saint Vincent Island, the Garifuna people fought against colonialism for 34 long years. It was only in 1797 that the British were able to colonize the island of Saint Vincent, segregate the intermixed population and deport the darker colored Mokko to the island of Roatan, off the Northern coast of Honduras. Initially, the Garifuna community faced a lot of xenophobia and Ramon de Anguiano, the intendant governor of Honduras, had suggested that “all this coast be left clean of blacks...before they multiply further…in order to remove them from this Kingdom a people only good for itself [and] useless for our works”.

Later, it dawned on the Spanish officials that they could exploit the expendable bodies of black workers for mahogany tree cultivation and banana production. The Spanish considered the Garifuna as “diligent in agriculture, incessant in the work of cutting exquisite woods, like ‘fish in the water’ for fishing, skillful sailors, and brave soldiers. By virtue of their physical constitution they are strong and robust; for them, these climes are healthy, and they multiply in great numbers—wherefore they are very suitable for populating the immense wastelands of this coast with benefit to the state, and for forming settlements along the roads, which are so sorely lacking.”

Despite the evident exploitation of Garifuna workers by colonial trade, the community’s territory remained protected. The low population density of the coastal territories ensured that Garifuna people continued to cultivate their ancestral lands at least till the late twentieth century. But beginning in the 1990s, Garifuna land ownership got jeopardized as private investments in activities such as coastal tourism, housing and palm oil production became dominant. Dressed in development, these trade activities pulled to pieces the indigenous culture of the Garifuna people.

While the Garifuna people are present in four different countries (Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala), Honduras has the largest Garifuna population at an estimated 250,000 people located primarily within 48 coastal and island communities. For money-grubbing barons, this meant that “development” required enhanced efforts in Honduras where stronger and sterner techniques would have to be used to subjugate such a large population and conquer their large territory. This type of development was initiated in the 1990s, the age of neoliberalism and Washington Consensus, and the Garifuna labeled it as la maldición – the curse.

In 1992, the government passed the 1992 Law for the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector (LMA) which “promoted foreign and domestic investment in agriculture by accelerating land titling and enabling land cooperative members to break up their holdings into small plots to be sold as private lands.” The Congressional Decree 90-90 supplemented LMA by making foreigners eligible for purchasing coastal lands for tourism.

Earlier, the Honduran constitution had restricted such a free-flowing movement of foreign capital through article 107 which had enunciated that “The land of the Republic, municipal, communal and private property situated on the border zones with neighboring states and on the shores of both oceans for 40 kilometers inland, and the islands, cays, reefs, cliffs, and sand banks, may only be acquired and possessed by Hondurans by birth or corporations made up of only Honduran stockholders and by state institutions, punishable by annulment of the respective title or contract.” Now, any foreign capital seeking to build tourism project is allowed to purchase lands within 40 kilometers of the coast.

Impact of Tourism on the Garifuna People

The Honduran government, apart from instituting the Congressional Decree 90-90, has also passed the Tourism Incentives Law in 2017 which has given a number of benefits to tourism in Honduras: touristic initiatives are exempt from taxes on profits for 15 years, taxes on construction-related activities for 5 years and are provided with the freedom to not pay custom duties and tariffs tax for 10 years. These incentives are paying off as international tourism spending increased from $685 million in 2016 to more than $700 million in 2017. While the pockets of select-few Honduran elites and foreign businessmen get filled to the brim, the unsavory side of tourism is being delicately obscured: As European and American “recreational investors” visit Honduras, the Garifuna people get whipped by the scourge of suppression.

According to Christopher A. Loperena, “Tourism, like mining, is an export-based industry, since the products (e.g. hotel stays, package tours, air and ground transportation) are mostly marketed to, and consumed by, foreigners….Touted as sustainable development, the “industry without smoke” entails the intense commodification of natural and cultural resources, giving rise to recurrent conflicts between subsistence based producers and elite investors.” In Honduras, a number of tourism-related conflicts have arisen between the Garifuna collectivity and politically powerful capitalists and international organizations.

In 2007, for example, “Garifuna land between San Martin and Santa Fe was sold by Omar Laredo, president of the Garifuna community, to a local businessman. There was a community consultation in which it was agreed that about 20 hectares would be sold. The businessman paid $5000 to the president of the Garifuna community and then immediately sold the land for US$20,000 to Randy Jorgensen [a Canadian investor]. Without community consultation, however, the amount of land sold had increased to 53 hectares. According to INA [National Agrarian Institute] surveys done later, Jorgensen then actually fenced-in 62 hectares.” In a similarly shoddy manner, lands belonging to the villages of Cristales and Guadalupe were usurped by Canadian investors and the entire village of Rio Negro was evicted to make way for the construction of “Banana Coast” cruise ship port, a project of the Life Vision Properties, a company owned by Randy Jorgen.

John Thompson, a close friend of Randy Jorgensen, while arguing for the benefits of the cruise terminal in Rio Negro, said that “This cruise ship terminal is vitally important to this entire town . . . all these people are going to lose everything that they could possibly have here because of this. Because he’s [referring to Jorgensen] about to give up and go home. And then we’ll be left on our own, with no money, no cruise ships, no passengers, no airport. Nothing. That’s it. So these people are killing the golden goose.” No one apparently knows what else was left for the Garifuna to lose. With the loss of ancestral territories, Garifuna lose everything and according to Miriam Miranda, the coordinator of OFRANEH, “Without our lands, we cease to be a people. Our lands and identities are critical to our lives, our waters, our forests, our culture, our global commons, our territories. For us, the struggle for our territories and our commons and our natural resources is of primary importance to preserve ourselves as a people.”

Eco-tourism, a sub-category of tourism related to the visiting of fragile and endangered ecosystems, is a “green” way of dispossessing Garifuna people and attracting tourists to sanitized places, purged of little impurities called “indigenous people”. The Honduras Caribbean Biological Corridor (HCBC), part of the larger Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), is one such example of eco-tourism which uses “neoliberal conservation” to build purified (cleansed of indigenous people) eco-tourist destinations. The Jeanette Kawas National Park, present with the HCBC, covers over 70,000 hectares in Tela Bay and houses the Garifuna communities of Miami, Barra Vieja, Tornabe and San Juan. In this national park, intermittent bans are constantly placed on fishing and the areas of cultivation have also been reduced. In the Cayos Cochinos Marine Protected Area (MPA), similar restrictions have been placed on the extraction of marine life, leading to clashes between the inhabitants of Chachahuate, a Garífuna fishing village, and the state security forces.

In both the instances, the “environmentally conscious” policies of the government have undermined the Garifuna’s primary subsistence strategy i.e. fishing. Apart from being the economic foundation of the Garifuna group, fishing is the main protein source for the Garifuna living in the Tela Bay. Moreover, the limiting of land cultivation in the JKNP shows how indifferent capitalists are to the exceptionally viable agricultural practices of the Garifuna people. According to a local Garifuna individual, “We don’t use fertilizers because we don’t want to offend the earth. What do we do? There is a model of working, it’s called Barbecho. We work five years in one area, then we let it ferment and fertilize, and then we occupy another space. This is why our property is collectively owned. Because we need this space, which relates to our functional habitat … so the cultural and ancestral life we are accustomed to can continue. Rights are collective; there is no private property in our way of thinking.” In order to utterly uproot this anti-capitalist idea of land ownership and use, imperialists are effectuating “green grabs” i.e. the violent dispossession of lands in the name of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Instead of overtly and barbarously displacing Garifuna people from their lands, a green grab strategy uses the ideological integument of nature conservation to viably and ecologically expel them from their lands.

Through the deliberate destabilization of existential paradigms, eco-tourist projects are excluding Garifuna people from the ecologies in which these indigenous individuals are embedded. CA Loperena calls this “Garifuna Otherness” which is “packaged as a good to further the development of the Caribbean coast as a tourist destination. Garífuna subsistence practices, including fishing, are not contemplated within national development imaginaries, since environmental foundations view these activities as a threat to the touristic potential of protected areas and the sociospatial order pursued by the Honduran government.”

The Violence of Palm Oil

Honduras is the biggest exporter of palm oil in Central America. In the last two decades, its production has increased by 560%, making it the third largest producer in Latin America and eight largest in the world. This productivity increase has been propelled by a favorable global context where both demand and supply are consistently ballooning. From 15 million tonnes in 1995, global palm oil production has increased to 66 million tonnes in 2017. In response to this rising demand for palm oil, Honduras too expanded its production, exporting almost 50% of its palm oil. While countries such as China, India, USA and Netherlands indifferently import palm oil for manufacturing cosmetics, soaps, toothpastes and consumer retail food, the Garifuna community in Honduras is paying a heavy price for the production of these goods.

Vallecito, a Garifuna ancestral land in the municipality of Limón on the north-east coast, is an appropriate example for depicting the dispossession and disruption which has accompanies palm oil production. In this area, “the INA [National Agrarian Institute] handed out new titles to new ‘settlers’ who promptly sold them to the palm oil magnates. In this area alone, the Garifuna communities went from owning 20,000 hectares to 400 within a decade.” An important and strategic player in this chain of dispossession was Miguel Facusse, a Honduran business magnate labeled by locals as "the palm plantation owner of death”.

Between 1970 and 1989, Facusse had expropriated a large number of Garifuna lands to plant African palm, a product necessary to sustain his prosperous company Dinant which sold detergents, soaps and foodstuffs. In 1989, OFRANEH started a land recuperation campaign, aimed at retrieving an ancestral plot of 1600 hectares that 6 Garifuna cooperatives had cultivated. After sporadic and violent clashes between Dinant’s private security forces and Garifuna activists, the land was finally granted to the latter in 1989 by INA. But this gain was soon reversed by the 1992 Agricultural Modernization Law that, in a period of 5 years, planted African palm in 28,000 hectares of Garifuna land. The Vallecito region too experienced the pressures of palm oil predation as Facusse again arrived in the Vallecito cooperatives in 1995 and initiated his palm oil violence. The INA, after much Garifuna activism, chose to extend its administrative sinews and in 1995, restored the stolen lands. Not demoralized by consecutive failures, Facusse came to Vallecito in 1997 and planted African palm on 100 hectares of Garifuna land. OFRANEH, in response to this intrusion, took this land case to the Honduran court and surprisingly, was able to expel Facusse from that piece of land.

The constant cycle of dispossession in Vallecito continues till the present-day, despite the fact that a 2012 INA survey had confirmed Garifuna ownership of specific lands and had asked Facusse to evacuate the region. In 2019, it was found that armed groups carrying high-caliber weapons were patrolling Vallecito, cutting security wires, randomly shooting at community members and raiding the beach everyday with motorcycles. The Honduran poet Chaco de la Pitoreta’s poem “Ode to the African Palm”, written a few years back, lyrically expresses the current situation in Vallecito:

You came when we least needed you

and remained longer than we expected.

You displaced the ancestral kapok tree that used to

rise upon my fields

and shook off the maize that filled my plains…

Oh, African palm!

neither white, nor black…

red and bloodied.

You are not from the…peasants

nor from Honduras or Central America.

You are of the looters that ruin us,

of Facussé and his killers.

Challenging Development

With the kidnapping of Garifuna people in Honduras, the thick mystificatory veil of development is slowly peeling off. For decades, the Honduran Garifuna community has been culturally compressed and tyrannized into accepting development. The current kidnappings belong to that concatenation of development-oriented cold-bloodedness. Miriam Miranda, while delivering a speech in New York during the September 2014 People’s Climate March, said that “The time has arrived to question the model of ‘development’ that has been imposed on us in these last decades. We cannot accept nor perpetuate this supposed development which doesn’t take into account or respect nature and the earth’s natural resources...We act NOW against the culture of death that we are being condemned to by the grand corporations of death and transnational capital.” In the current conjuncture, we can’t remain silent on the development which has kidnapped Garifuna people and depredated the entire community. The time has come to challenge development.

Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published by different magazines and websites such as Monthly Review Online, ZNet, Green Social Thought, Weekly Worker, News and Letters Weekly, Economic and Political Weekly, Arena, Eurasia Review, Coventry University Press, Culture Matters, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Countercurrents, Counterview, Hampton Institute, Ecuador Today, People’s Review, Eleventh Column, Karvaan India, Clarion India, OpEd News, The Iraq File, Portside and the Institute of Latin American Studies.