Too Little, Too Late: Biden's Self-Congratulatory Marijuana Reform Falls Short

By Youhanna Haddad

On October 6th, 2021, President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon of those federally convicted of marijuana possession, noting that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.” This pardon, while seeming huge, releases exactly zero prisoners as no American is in federal prison for simple marijuana possession. Biden further stated that the federal government’s classification of marijuana as more serious than fentanyl “makes no sense,” with the attorney general and Department of Health and Human Services reportedly initiating a process to review marijuana’s scheduling. “Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana,” Biden said. “It’s time that we right these wrongs.”

Biden’s pardon disrupted the more than a century-long history of anti-marijuana policy at the federal level. While the pardon affects but a small minority of total possession convictions, the potential rescheduling or even descheduling of marijuana has not been seriously considered in the United States since the late 1980s. This is thanks in large part to the Controlled Substances Act, which schedules drugs without any regard to their scientifically understood qualities.

To examine the eclectic legal quagmire that is marijuana prohibition, one must explore the history of the plant: its use over time and geography. While the first culture to use marijuana frequently changes as anthropologists continue uncovering older instances of use, it is widely acknowledged that the psychoactive variety of the plant has been consumed for over two millennia. Little to no scholarship has uncovered any historical use of marijauna leading to the decline of living standards anywhere near the level of drugs such as opium.

In the United States, the first marijuana regulations appeared in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. Motivated by the white-supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny, the United States government pushed westward, running into the then much larger nation of Mexico. After the Mexican-American War, thousands of Mexicans found themselves in newly “American” territory.

To avoid sharing resources, white-American settlers employed a mixture of vigilante and state-sponsored violence to subjugate the Mexican population. They fixated on Mexican use of “locoweed” — a slang term for marijuana — and used prohibition as a means of subjugation. Criminalization thus turned Mexicans into an outlaw class. This served to both reign in the Mexican population and reinforce settler propaganda regarding the “Mexican Menace.”

But it wasn’t just Mexicans who became associated with marijuana around this time. The global phenomenon of jazz music was well underway by the early 20th century. An art form with unmistakably black roots, the popularity of jazz in urban centers led to black male performers gaining fame across the United States.

Concerns over white women in jazz clubs potentially having sexual relations with these men incited panic, particularly in white, bourgeois families. Worrying their daughters might be mesmerized by the siren song of the performers, they sought to restrict the influence of the jazz wave. This manifested in a reinvigorated opposition to marijuana — a known favorite of many jazz performers such as Cab Calloway, whose song ‘Reefer Man’ lauds the drug’s benefits. 

White imagination thus associated Latino and black peoples with marijuana. This set the stage for white outrage at the drug in order to suppress both populations. Rhetoric focused on the potential of marijuana to be used by men of color to dull the inhibitions of white women, facilitating their seduction. While the reality may have been that white women were simply interested in relations with these men, or wanted to explore jazz nightlife, the settler masses adopted this hyper-sexualized rhetoric. The newly established Federal Bureau of Narcotics capitalized on these racist lies in the early 1930s, with leader Harry J. Anslinger proclaiming that marijuana use promoted interracial sex:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

This rhetoric, which ignored widespread white use in order to racialize the issue, was successful in convincing Congress to pass the first truly restrictive federal regulation of marijuana: The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively made the drug illegal to possess or distribute. It took until 1969 for an infamous Supreme Court case to invalidate the law for its violation of 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination. One year later, President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, which classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning the federal government did not recognize any medicinal value and recognized a high potential for abuse.

While obviously nonsensical, this scheduling seemed to make sense to John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief under Nixon. In a 1994 interview, Ehrlichman stated that there was significant political motivation from the Nixon administration to target certain communities through the Controlled Substances Act. He explained that:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate [them with drugs] we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Nixon’s presidency is widely recognized as a particularly embarrassing chapter in American history, largely due to the Watergate scandal. Only escaping the scandal through a presidential pardon, Nixon was caught red-handed by the nation and world. In light of his crimes, it is unsurprising that the administration sought to quell political opposition through the legal route provided by the Controlled Substances Act.

Today, arrests for marijuana possession follow the same racist logic that birthed prohibition. In 2018, black Americans were 3.64 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. In Montana and Kentucky, they were over 9 times more likely to be arrested. This is despite the fact that black and white Americans use marijuana at similar rates.

There is no state, including all states where marijuana is legal, that arrests white and black citizens at equal rates. Even in Colorado — the first state to legalize recreational use — black people are 1.54 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession (even “legal” states have possession limits).

Incredibly, there are 19 counties in the United States where black people are more than 20 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana. In Georgia’s Pickens County, black people are over 97 times more likely to be arrested! These statistics demonstrate the racist nature of marijuana enforcement — an enforcement that has never separated itself from its roots as a tool of subjugation of nonwhite populations.

In the best-case scenario, Biden’s directive to reschedule marijuana would result in complete descheduling. That means marijuana would no longer be prohibited by the Controlled Substances Act. While this would undeniably be an overdue victory, it wouldn’t expunge or pardon any past convictions from draconian laws that unjustly decimated generations of black communities. Descheduling alone, therefore, does little to right the wrongs Biden claims to be so concerned about. In order to properly address this state-sponsored terror campaign, all prisoners whose charges derive from marijuana possession must be freed and their records expunged. Anything less is a frivolous distraction masquerading as a step toward justice while keeping the victims of prohibition in bondage.

Laundering Black Rage

By Too Black

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

"Black rage is founded on blatant denial

Squeezed economics, subsistence survival

Deafening silence and social control

Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul" [1]

- Lauryn Hill, “Black Rage”

"Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." [2]

- Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1

For stolen lands to remain colonized, for investments to remain profitable, for white capital to remain ruthless, Black Rage must be neutralized. Black Rage—the omnipresent force radiating throughout the anxieties of the State—is a boundless threat to the capitalist order.

Like a Big Bang, Black Rage began its expansion into colonial existence at the exact moment the first African was plucked from their roots and cast down into the sunken dungeon of the European slave ship. Its expansion is the survival of the human spirit, serving as a potential death knell to oppression—ringing its bell with smoldering waves of resistance quietly hissing in infamy. Black Rage finds expression in the assisted asphyxiation of the slave trader (accompanied by the seizure of their ship), the alleviation of the slave master's heartbeat (seasoned by the enslaved maid), the transformation of the settler city-state into a community fireplace (the riot of the unheard).

When politicized against white capital, Black Rage blossoms into an anti-colonial weapon. Black Rage harmonizes the anger that the colony tunes out, it synchronizes our struggles, it is an ode to the bold notion that our discontent is undeniably justified. Black Rage is justice—outlawed by the State.

The State, as defined by Dr. Rasul Mowatt, geography and American Studies scholar in his book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence, is the “configuration of the power of government, corporate interests, classes of elites, and upper levels of a bureaucratic management class that implements the ruling class’ goals and aims that sits atop an accumulated economic base." [3] Thus, the State is incapable of coexisting with Black Rage in its most potent form. It's too combustible of a substance to tolerate in the open market. When unleashed on white capital’s economic base, Black Rage sets aflame all its market principles: genocide, dispossession, slavery, and profit.

Attempts to outright suppress this substance only further stoke the flames of rebellion. Conversely, supporting its unfettered spread is State suicide. So, whether it's suppressed or supported, explosion is imminent. As a result, Black Rage cannot be entirely controlled, only managed.

To manage Black Rage, it must be laundered like the Blood Money that birthed it. To launder Black Rage into the market, its potency must be defanged. The social capital it produces, the clarion call by the Black masses for a free and equitable world, must be snatched and funneled into the hands of the State; "cleaned" of the original people and conditions that manufactured its existence but still recognizable enough to appear untraced. 

Laundering may manifest in a litany of forms including tax havens ,[4] structural adjustment ,[5] non-profiteering, municipal bonds ,[6] drug dealing, etc. but ultimately laundering is the logic of the State. Historically, as white capital was looting people, land, and resources, they gradually erected competing institutional fronts including government, commerce, media and religion to manage and codify their conquests i.e., the State. Henceforth, practically everything built under the rule of the western State is a front for white capital.

Ergo, what first appears to be inspired by Black Rage is reduced to simulacra: the self-determination of Black power is pigeonholed to front Black capitalism ,[7] the anger and suffering of the Black poor is liquidated to front rich Black entertainers' ambitions ,[8] the courage of Black militancy is strangulated to front State repression ,[9] and on the laundering flows.[10] At the helm of nearly each sheep-herding front squats the Black elite, feeding off the breadcrumbs bribed to them by white capital.

With each commodity, laundering repurposes the crimes of white capital and the opposing threats against their rule—to legitimate their rule. The imperial laundering strengthens with every cycle as the "illegitimate" crimes of the past fund the "legitimate" crimes of the present. Black Rage is the repercussion of each crime, the deafening echo from the past roaring into the decadence of the present.

To muzzle the roar, the State dispossesses the labor of Black Rage and harnesses it into a commodity that can be consumed harmlessly as if its original potency is retained. Stated plainly, Black people do not own our rage. More precisely, we are robbed of our rage with the coercive aim to legitimize the State.

This process supersedes everyone of good or bad faith, spilling its blood on all involved. A grand conspiracy need not be necessary when our immediate material interests are linked to the maintenance of the State. To further understand this metamorphosis of Black Rage an examination of money laundering itself is first required.

Laundering Deconstructed

According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FCEN) of the US Treasury Department : “Money laundering is the process of making illegally-gained proceeds (i.e. "dirty money") appear legal (i.e. "clean").”[11] In accordance with FCEN, expert forex trader and head of content for wealth management at J.P. Morgan, James Chen explains how the dirty money must “appear to have come from a legitimate source. The money from the criminal activity is considered dirty, and the process "launders" it to make it look clean [emphasis added]."[12]

Hence, dirty money is never truly "cleaned," nor are the questionable activities done to accumulate it, just manipulated to make it appear as such. An undirting occurs. So, laundering is making something “clean” by simply moving the dirt or debris away, not by actual scrubbing. Thus, the original source of the funds cannot be redeemed.

To achieve concealment, the process of money laundering occurs in three steps: placement, layering, and integration. Chen explains the purpose of each step:

"Placement puts the "dirty money" into the legitimate financial system.

Layering conceals the source of the money through a series of transactions and bookkeeping tricks. In the final step, integration, the now-laundered money is withdrawn from the legitimate account to be used for whatever purposes the criminals have in mind for it."[13]

Each step is consummated to distance the source away from its questionable origins. Famously, we see this process transpire in the critically-acclaimed TV drama, Breaking Bad, when the meth chef, Walter White a.k.a. Heisenberg buys a literal car wash to conceal his "empire business ." We also see Walter try to redeem the source of his empire with the now infamous excuse , "everything I do, I do for my family." This type of rationalization of harm is common considering that money laundering is predicated upon an appearance of legitimacy. Yet again, the source cannot be redeemed.

Similar to Breaking Bad, money laundering is generally depicted as the actions taken by the morally corrupt who break bad from a flawed but otherwise "legitimate financial system." This conception of money laundering, like that of FCEN, Chen and even the United Nations with their emphasis on terrorists,[14] has its limitations. The pitfalls lie not in the description of the process, but in the amorphous categories that are ascribed to it. Typically, definitions of money laundering assume a clear line between good and bad that is easily identified: legal vs illegal, citizen vs criminal, clean vs dirty. Although so-called criminals may conceal their illicit activity, the definitions assume criminality—both the criminal and criminal behavior—is neatly defined.

These definitions fail to acknowledge how the State socially constructs the rigid categories of good and bad, and the subsequent laws that govern them. For example, the U.S. often facilitates the very activity it claims to criminalize such as laundering money to fund an anti-communist war in Nicaragua while outlawing laundering at home.[15] [16] Yet, since the State creates the law, it can pardon its own activity to make it look clean. So, what gives it legitimacy? What source makes capitalism a legitimate financial system?

The irredeemable source at the core of capitalism, endlessly breeding the entire structure, is conquest. As Pan-Africanist, psychiatrist and political philosopher Franz Fanon makes strikingly clear in his text Toward the African Revolution: "The colonial situation is first of all a military conquest continued and reinforced by a civil and police administration."[17] Put differently, the continuation and reinforcement of the colony is to launder the spoils of imperial conquests. With each conquest, industries were built and expanded around the globe with resources pillaged from the previously conquered. As expansion occurred, the integration of colonial production became inevitable. When speaking of European imperialism throughout the globe, Walter Rodney highlights this phenomenon in his seminal text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,

"...sugar production in the West Indies was joined in the colonial period by cocoa production within Africa, so that both merged into the chocolate industry of Europe and North America. In the metallurgical field, iron ore from Sweden, Brazil, or Sierra Leone could be turned into different types of steel with the addition of manganese from the Gold Coast or chrome from Southern Rhodesia. Such examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely to cover the whole range of capitalist production in the colonial period."[18]

Conquest begets conquest; crimes enacted on one population became seed capital for the next crime of capitalist production on another. Without stolen resources from stolen land, stolen people would be unaffordable, and vice versa. Laundering arises as the colonial act of legitimizing each conquest.

At its base, money laundering is capitalism. Early-stage merchant capitalists primitively accumulated wealth from "criminal" activities via slavery, genocide, and dispossession. As land, people and resources were being stolen, capitalists invested their felonious profits into constructing a State of fronts to do the laundering/management (Placement). These fronts established the necessary laundering institutions such as government, law, banking, commerce, education, tax collecting, media, etc. as well as the violent enforcement agencies of police and military, thereby concealing capitalists' crimes and making their blood money appear clean through reinvestment (Layering). By capitalists legitimizing themselves via the organized crime of State-making,[19] their nefarious behaviors disappeared through Heisenbergian rationalizations such as "a more perfect union" or "The White Man's Burden." Invaders became founding fathers, thieves became businessmen, human beings became chattel and indigenous lands became colonies (Integration).

Emerging from laundering is what Mowatt identifies as a spatially fabricated society, "built upon the indigenous, the enslaved, and that which is crafted by the labourer."[20] The enclosed cities of the State create a racialized and gendered division of labor alienating people from themselves and the source of fabrication. However, laundering conquest as a legitimate enterprise is no easy task to fabricate.

Whereas wealth is being accumulated, so is suffering and death. This contradiction eventually bleeds through the eyes of the conquered. It is in this colonial process of conquest, the dialectic between wealth and death, that Black Rage finds its form and which all Black Rage originates.

As Fanon articulated in: "The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery."[21] Black Rage, uninterrupted, is the opposition to conquest which is the protected robbery of white capital managed by the State. Consequently, in the inevitable moments when Black Rage migrates to the surface of the colony, laundering is set in motion.

Laundering Black Rage: A Short Case Study

In early June 2020, as contagious Black Rage was charring US cities in response to the enkindling police murder of George Floyd,[22] a sea of capital flooded the streets to cool off the raging heat.[23] On the government front, the Democratic Party broke their one-month online fundraising record raising $392 million just in the month of June alone via Act Blue, including a massive $115 million in the first four days of June, thereupon capitalizing on the rage from Floyd's murder which occurred only a week prior on May 25th. Posing as the "opposition" to Black Rage, and the hotbed for white rage, the Republican Party also saw a huge bump in the same month raising a respectable $131 million. On the philanthropic front, "racial equity " funding nearly tripled from $5.7 billion in 2019 to $16 billion in 2020.[24] On the corporate front ,[25] roughly $50 billion was suddenly pledged by "America’s 50 biggest public companies and their foundations" to fight so-called "racial inequality.”

Promising big transformative change,[26] the Democratic Party rode the 2020 wave of Black Rage to seize control over the White House and the halls of Congress. On brand, the Democrats failed to pass any legislation to address police violence including their own lukewarm George Floyd Policing Act. This need not matter since the toothless bill would not have saved Floyd's life anyway.[27] Still, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi merrily thanked Floyd for "sacrificing his life for justice."

This "sacrifice" also proved beneficial to the white rage party, as Republican controlled states exploited the fear of Black Rage by passing repressive anti-protest laws that criminalized protesters for assembling in the streets while granting immunity to the drivers who ran them over.[28] Skillfully, Republicans used the fear of what was already washed diversity programming to attack K-12 education with anti-critical race theory bills .[29] Obviously, neither CRT nor any critical Black history was taught in schools prior. Thus, Black Rage was but another commodity to bolster their racial fascism. Notwithstanding, bipartisanship proved to still be alive and well as frolicking party leaders vied to demonstrate their love for police.[30]

Ostensibly, Black Rage was raining down rewards for everyone but the ones who suffer and die for exercising it. Following a $90 million windfall of manna from the co-opt cosmos,[31] Black Lives Matter Global Foundation Network laundered and embezzled Black Rage to buy a mansion and enrich the family members of their top celebrity-activist leaders.[32] [33] Meanwhile, many local BLM chapters and Black families of slain police victims were initially left destitute despite it being the families and chapters who create the pressure for a donation to be sent to BLMGFN in the first place.[34] [35] As of this writing, the BLMGFN director is currently being sued by BLM Grassroots for stealing $10 million.[36] Whether the allegations prove true or false, these Spider-Man meme level conflicts obscure the fact that philanthropic foundations are repository fronts of “twice-stolen wealth”[37] for capital to avoid the taxation of their profits stolen from workers; what remains left is a struggle over crumbling bribes.

Quietly, Black legacy organizational fronts like the NAACP and the Urban League received more "racial equity"[38] bribes than BLMGF as they steered Black Rage towards enfeebled outlets already debunked by professor of communication studies, Dr. Jared Ball such as "buying Black "[39] and Black banking .[40] Prominent historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs ) also gobbled up bribes as some of their students slept in tents to avoid their molded dorms.[41] [42] [43]

Most of the funds pledged were about undirting the rage rather than scrubbing the problem. Of the $50 billion pledged by the top fifty corporations, only $70 million directly went to fight so-called criminal justice reform.[44] In comparison, $45 billion was "allocated as loans or investments they could stand to profit from." Much of this blood money intersected as the principal State fronts funneled their funds through their Black subsidiary fronts including the above-mentioned entities.

Often, the charge is made that said institutions are "profiting off Black death." This is only half true since Black people are killed daily with impunity yet not a single donation, grant, loan or thought is generated on most days. It is the threatening response to death—Black Rage—that activates the laundering. Black death is merely an ingredient.

At the core, Black Rage was the source indirectly financing the entire heist. The failure here is not in any one fronts inability to deliver but in the extractive structure that funnels the money in their direction at all. The general public may have believed a donation to these State carve-outs was a net positive for Black people, but white capital undoubtedly knew any serious resistance to their rule ceased with the first transaction.

Laundering Black Rage phases

As established prior, laundering is the maintenance and perpetuation of imperial conquests administered by the white capitalist State. Rage is an inescapable outcome of conquest. To enslave, steal, and kill is to become your own gravedigger. This is not lost on the conquering class of white capital. As Walter Rodney once said to a crowd of Guyanese comrades, "when you dedicate yourself to oppressing others, you cannot sleep."[45] This means long before police precincts scorch the stolen earth or the colony is amassed with revolution, mechanisms are developed to bring Black Rage to heel.

Therefore, what many call co-optation is the regularly scheduled laundering of the State developed over centuries of conquests. Materializing from this development are the three primary phases to laundering Black Rage: Incubation, Labor, and Commodification.

Incubation, via the State, places Black Rage in circulation by setting both the oppressive conditions for rage to be expressed and seeding the contradictions for it to be cleaned. Labor, sets mass uprisings in motion. Threatened by the Black masses, the State layers the narcissistic rage of the Black elite overtop the illegal militant rage of the masses to conceal class interests and collapse the labor of Black Rage into the grips of capital. Commodification, the now-laundered Black Rage— managed by the Black elite—is integrated within the State, ready to be withdrawn as a labor-crushed commodity to be bought, sold, or repressed by white capital for the next cycle.

"The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of outlet..."[46]

- Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

"Black is a classification of domination, and Black is a response to being dominated."[47]

- Rasul Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us

The specter of Black Rage pervades inside the colony like the calamitous ambitions of the runaway slave who eagerly plots their return to the plantation by raiding it of its human property and jarring it into a can of ashes. Black Rage is a grand marronage spreading the remains of oppression about as the wheezing flames wave goodbye to its blood shaving whips. Haunted by this specter, white capital hides behind the laundering body of the State as it attempts to transform the rebellious nature of Black Rage into submissive capital.

Incubation

The State provokes Black Rage by engineering the inhumane conditions that place it in motion. As Black Rage incubates, so do the guardrails to keep it from swarming to an unmanageable scale. This dialectic defines the laundering process.

In Avengers of the New World, historian Laurent Dubois chronicles how prior to the Haitian revolution ,[48] noticing the potential for small slave uprisings to balloon larger, the French crown instituted various reforms (1685 Code Noir , 1780s royal decrees) to curb the barbarism of plantation managers in the colony of Saint Domingue. The reforms provided the enslaved with off days, food and shelter, and limitations on the beatings they could receive. Reforms proved ineffective as French colonists in Saint-Domingue rejected them in favor of more bloodthirsty cruelty. Apparently, as historian C.L.R. James documented in Black Jacobins, pouring burning wax on enslaved bodies and roasting them on slow fires was seen as the best means of social control.[49] These tactics inflamed Black Rage, leading to the defeat of the most profitable colony in the Caribbean and the establishment of the first Black republic.

The colonial world took notice. Historian Gerald Horne documented the fear of the U.S. via Vice President of the time, Thomas Jefferson in Confronting Black Jacobins: "If something is not done, and soon done,” he advised darkly, “we shall be the murderers of our own children,” as “the revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe will be upon us.”[50] Thomas’s fears proved real as a revolutionary storm of Black Rage via slave uprisings incubated worldwide, particularly in the U.S. post-1804.

To manage this colonial pandemic and “foster a new image” of power, white capitalist empires slowly began transitioning their rule from the iron fist of hard power to the unseen hand of soft power, as Mowatt describes “for the sake of capitalism.”[51] Mowatt also comments: “While the capabilities of hard power (force, coercion, and warfare) were always ready, the use of soft power (culture, values, and ideals) had become the preferred method of moving forward.”[52]

White capital embarked on the mission of stabilizing territories for smoother laundering. Among a few examples is the Congress of Vienna from 1814-1815 which balanced territory among warring European States,[53] the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which declared U.S. hegemony over the Americas landmass,[54] the U.S. Civil War from 1861-1865 which settled slavery and westward expansion,[55] and the “Scramble for Africa” via the Berlin Conference[56] from 1884-1885 in which white capital met “on long tables during catered meals” where, as Mowatt notes, “the continent of Africa was carefully carved up and re-designed for the purposes of extraction…”[57] Following these mobster-like parlays was an inflation of State power that better absorbed the opposition.

State-fabricated society expanded through now conquered territories, centralized in cities. The city builds the fronts—law, schools, media, religion, government, business, etc.—for the State of white capital that reaches to the countryside. The capitalist State, through the indoctrination of its fronts, becomes what Italian Marxist revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci described as the hegemonic “educator ,"[58] thereby establishing the norms that govern the ambitions of the people. Correspondingly, State fronts also collectively act as the “organizer,”[59] performing as pre-existing institutions of consent disciplining the will of Black Rage over time. Fronts may serve legitimate human needs but their entanglement with the State jeopardizes any liberatory outcome.

Accordingly, when U.S Black liberal organizations of the 1940s and 50s colluded with the government to purge their organizations of alleged communists it later weakened the potential radicalism of the civil rights movement.[60] Similarly, when elite philanthropic foundations created African Studies fronts throughout Nigeria and west Africa to induce pro-western sentiments, subsequent anti-colonial struggles were compromised.[61] Thus, when Black Rage is structured by State fronts the primary frustrations may not always be with the rule of white capital but with exclusion from rule, the limited crumbs received underneath rule, or internal disputes over which group of Black folk deserves more crumbs leftover from rule.

Nevertheless, workers employed by State fronts or those with ambitions of managing one do not need to morally align with the interests of white capital to serve them. To feed ourselves we all must participate in the maintenance of the State to a degree because it controls the resources we require to attend to our material needs such as housing and food. Political theorist, Dr. Joy James astutely reminds us of this contradiction when speaking on the captive maternal ,[62] "as you stabilize your family , you are also stabilizing this predatory structure ." [63]

These contradictions effectively reduce everyone to launderers for the predatory State. Our pursuit to stabilize nourishes the State-fabricated society with our labor. We become socialized to launder simply by living our lives surviving the day-to-day mundanity of capitalism.

Bribes become a precondition for stability. That is to say, the more we stabilize the more susceptible we are to the bribes of the State. Bribes as wages. Bribes as property. Bribes as wealth. White capital shares these crumbs of theft to help stabilize the laundering.

Our pursuit of stability conditions us to greedily accumulate and hoard like white capital. We hope to accumulate enough bribes that eventually we can become the bribers i.e., capitalists. Predictably, this aimless lottery to achieve stability rarely involves jackpots for the conquered as the betting odds are not in our favor. The State is the house, and as they say in gambling, the house always wins.

Ultimately, the State cannot bribe everyone effectively with profit as the motive. To remain kicking capitalism requires the super-exploitation of cheap labor while it increasingly cranks out a global surplus labor population whom receive absolutely no bribes.[64] With this being the case, certain populations will never sniff stability which inevitably requires the State to still rely upon hard power methods of social control, such as police and military, as unstable populations jostle for basic needs. Recognizing it is their unbridled rage that could radically sunder the entire flow of capital, violence work stands as a stalwart for policing the crisis .[65] Constituted as an all-suffocating monopoly, white capital comes to own both the wealth we produce and our visceral response to their hoarding of it.

Labor

Similar to how workers do not own their labor, Black people do not own our rage. After white capital seized the means of production—land, technology, raw materials, and labor power—conquest did not neatly bleed to an end. Instead, by monopolizing these productive forces, white capital not only controlled the material resources for economic creation but also mutated to possess the domains in which the self-actualization of our rage is naturally expressed.

In this sense, Black Rage is labor that can either be exploited or liberated. Nonetheless, at the moment that Black people collectively respond to oppression—no matter the form—labor is exercised. Labor was exercised when Afro-Cubans led the revolution against the Spanish,[66] it dawned on the British as the Mau Mau rebels of Kenya attacked settler-colonialism,[67] it occupied Ferguson , Missouri by relentlessly protesting throughout the blood-stained streets after the police killing of Mike Brown.[68] Labor is exercised anywhere Black people rage against our oppression.

Problem is that this type of revolutionary labor is also illegal. Yet, while the State outlaws the explicit practice, it still exploits our labor to fuel its conquest economy like a Black-market drug that funds a "legitimate" business. Herein lies the laundering. To break our labor, the State funnels our rage through their fronts, pacifying it with bribes and crushing it with repression. The internal contradictions the State-fabricated society creates serve as perfect fodder for this process to occur.

Although Black Rage universally burns throughout the diaspora, the motivations and actions that arise from the debris when an uprising occurs tend to be shaped by class interests. The Black masses (unemployed, proletarian poor and working class), receiving minimal to no bribes while experiencing the constant exhaustion of instability are the most likely to unleash their rage against the State like prisoners at their wits’ end taking hostages and occupying the prison. The Black elite (petit-capitalists, upper-level professionals, and middle-class aspirants), the most bribed and stabilized by the State are the most likely to repress their rage and/or sell it for more enhanced bribes and stability like jailhouse snitches copping to a plea.

bell hooks, the late Black feminist author and cultural critic, lamented a similar observation in her book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism. She describes two distinct forms of rage: militant rage and narcissistic rage. She defines the militant rage of the Black masses as, "the rage of the downtrodden and oppressed that could be mobilized to mount militant resistance to white supremacy." She juxtaposes it with the narcissistic rage of the Black elite as, "not interested in fundamentally challenging and changing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They simply want equal access to privilege within the existing structure."[69] This critique of the Black elite echoes Malcolm X's condemnation of this class, "These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation."[70]

The Black Elite function as double agents with dual access to contradictory classes. They function as a professionalized buffer for white capital, and as it follows the unelected leaders of the Black masses. Their shared racial identity with the masses lends them legitimacy. When the labor of Black Rage produces social capital for any type of change, they become the benefactors. It is this social capital that grants them dual access and makes them valuable to the State.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, defines capital as "accumulated labor" that allows "groups of agents" to "appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor."[71] He later defines social capital as the "aggregate" that "provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a 'credential' which entitles them to credit..." In the case of Black Rage, the "accumulated labor" of it creates a "credential" that credits Black people to its fruits.

Bourdieu goes on to discuss the implications of representation "when the group is large and its members weak" their social capital "contain the seeds of an embezzlement or misappropriation of the capital which they assemble." Therefore, the Black elite is a "subgroup" existing as a "nobility" that "may speak on behalf of the whole group, represent the whole group, and exercise authority in the name of the whole group."[72] Per their nobility, the Black elite possesses the capacity to embezzle the social capital of the masses.

By owning the means of this embezzlement, State fronts utilize shared Black social capital by layering the narcissistic rage of the Black elite over the militant rage—the "dirty" money—of the Black masses to conceal the transfer of wealth. Thus, when the masses perform the bulk of the labor—organizing, rioting, revolting, rebelling,[73] thereby igniting the fear of God in the State—the Black elite inherit the chunkiest crumbs of the surplus value. They arrive at the scene of the fire, like scab labor reps, flaunting their State-sponsored credentials. Next comes the bribes in the form of token jobs, flag independence, loans, investments, donations, grants, sponsorships, property rights, and sometimes even semi-protection from the rabid right-wing who will punish the masses for their dignifying audacity.

The Black Elite shriek at the fate of the rebellious slaves, the western-backed coups and assassinations of Black leaders like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Malcolm X, but still recognize the need to project a similar militancy for popular appeal. They are incentivized to crave freedom without sacrifice, so they legitimize their bribes as Black liberation. To maintain the delusional front, this labor aristocracy bullishly appeals to racial kinship.[74]

As the fallen soldier, Jonathan Jackson wrote to his brother and political prisoner, George Jackson in Blood in My Eye, "what better way is there for them to sell themselves to us than to scream Black, Black, Black, Black." Observing the laundering of Kenyan independence,[75] Jackson warned how vague appeals to Blackness can shield State collusion: "Like Tom Mboya, whose whole service for the C.I.A. was to redirect the revolutionary rage of the people into a thing more compatible with the interests of Western Businessmen."[76] Perhaps, this type of State-sponsored embezzlement is why years prior the Mau Mau did not limit their rage to the British but extended it to the African British loyalists as well.[77] Racial kinship is useless when the proclaimed "kinfolk" is colluding with the enemy.

For laundering to be most effective, Black Rage must be flattened to reflect the class interests of narcissistic rage while cosplaying as militant rage. When labor is strong, flattening fails. When the French tried to offer equal rights to free people of color in Haiti to control the rebellious slaves, it backfired immensely.[78] The rebels were too organized to succumb to any flattening other than the total demolition of slavery. But when labor is weak and engulfed in contradictions incubated by conquest, Black Rage is flattened, its militancy demolished with its ashes valorized into commodity form.[79]

Commodification

Now that the labor of Black Rage is broken its only exit valve is in the marketplace. This commodification occurs due to the initial colonial act that inspired Black Rage—conquest. Returning to the means of production, white capital holds a monopoly on the use of force necessary to overthrow them (weapons, police, military) and the resources necessary to build independence beyond them (land, machinery, raw materials,). If labor is unable to wrestle away a sufficient share of these resources, it has no immediate option other than to sell itself back to capital for material subsistence.

Following an uprising, the State either constructs or upgrades outlets for the people to exercise their rage. To avoid war during slavery in the Caribbean, occasionally colonial administrators granted amnesty to hand-picked maroon camps—communities of runaway slaves—in exchange for them capturing fresh runaways for the colony.[80] Thus, when the enslaved exercised their rage by escaping the plantation, certain maroon camps became fronts for their recapture.

Fronts for recapture (State fronts) are essential to understanding the conversion from rage to commodity. It demonstrates how the rage ignited by the knee of the State compressed ten minutes on a poor Black man's neck transformed into corporate pledges for diversity and consumerist slogans to "buy black " almost immediately.[81] Of course, not too dissimilar from runaway slaves, some Black people naively ran towards these fronts to exercise our rage. Unfortunately, the narcissistic rage of the Black elite was already waiting on the other side with iron collars and keys to recapture our rage and hand us back to politicians, corporations, and nonprofits.

Fronts for recapture go by another name too—reform. Reform is when the boot tells the neck that oxygen is on the way. Reform is also when the neck is forced to believe it. George Jackson named the necessity of the facade: "Each economic reform that perpetuates ruling-class hegemony has to be disguised as a positive gain for the upthrusting masses."[82] Thus, when the neck begins to remove the boot, the boot may loan the neck oxygen to recapture its foothold, but if the boot slips the floodgates of rage pour into the colony.

As a red sea of Black Rage grew to an almost insurmountable threat—colonial dams bursting at the seams, Black revolution drowning empires, social movements sinking racial apartheid—neocolonialism emerged as the fundamental front to withstand the tidal waves of Black Rage.[83] Post World War II, White finance capital gradually began conceding puppet control to Black elites in the form of political and corporate representation while still maintaining control over the resources that govern the institutions Black elites purportedly represent. In Africa, the bribe of flag independence absorbed Black Rage while International Monetary Funds and World Bank loans flowed through the client-states of the continent and out-flowed commodities to power phones and drill oil.[84] In the US, Black Rage was squeezed by token integration as the State poured brain drain funds into Black communities and out-flowed neo-colonial "First Black s"[85] as human commodities selling consumptive commodities of Blackness in media and entertainment. Civil rights activist and current political prisoner, Jamil Al-Amin formerly known as H. Rap Brown, said it best : "White folks will co-opt dog sh*t if it's to their advantage!" [86]

Once Black Rage is recaptured and the commodities are produced, they become ideological tools i.e., propaganda for incubating against the next uprising. The more white capital can use these commodities to convince the masses there's hope in the imperial State and/or that it is simply too powerful to overcome, the less likely the masses to destroy it when Black Rage inevitably boils over again. Each cycle differs in character depending on the historical conditions, but conquest remains the end result.

Conclusion

At the root, Black Rage is the logical response to being conquered. All other targets of rage—discrimination, inequality, bigotry, bias, poverty—emerge from the initial colonial act of conquest. Laundering throws Black Rage off the scent. The red herrings of this State-fabricated society either obscure that conquest ever occurred or imply reconciliation through the same apparatus that set conquest in motion. No matter, the source cannot be redeemed.

Laundering is unsustainable. The State-fabricated society cannot continue to legitimize its death-marching actions without collapsing on itself and crushing the rest of us beneath it. The growing multi-polarity, creeping techno-feualism and looming climate chaos guarantee so. Hence, notable ancestors prophetically warned against integrating into a burning house . [87] They understood there was no reasoning with firefighting arsonists.

By continuing to reason, the Black elite of today is more subdued by elite capture than prior generations.[88] They are tranquilly bribed to confuse arson for firefighting. Thus, they peddle racial patriotism amidst white nationalists’ reawakening, Black luxury amidst financial collapse, and escapist Black joy amidst mass suffering and death. Their only redemption comes by vacating their narrow class interests and locking up arms with the masses they are otherwise bribed to propagandize.[89]

The struggle for Black Rage is an exercise in class warfare. White capital is not some mythical force oppressing us from the heavens but a ruthless ruling class that perpetuates itself via the State. As Mowatt remarked, "(State) Power repeats itself, not history."[90] Unlike the mythmaking of history, State power can be seized and forged to wither away towards a post-western world . As Black studies scholar, Dr. Yannick Marshall argues: "We need the rage we feel after looking out at the charred remains of our earth under centuries of Western rule to mature into an act. The act of putting the West aside."[91]

To put the west aside we must reverse launder what it has stolen. That is to flip the bribes of the capitalist State and fund the anti-colonial, anti-imperial measures it so religiously outlaws. The instructions for such acts lie beyond the mission statement of a white liberal non-profit front or the "decolonizing" syllabus of a bromidic academic. We cannot formalize what is illegal. The answers rest in our collective Black Rage, the conspiring rage of every conquered and oppressed people, and our ability to organize it all towards a life-affirming post-western communist world. Anything less is a reconstruction of fronts.

Too Black is a poet, host of the Black Myths Podcast , member of Black Alliance For Peace , and communications coordinator for the Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2 . He is based in Indianapolis, IN and can be reached at tooblack8808@gmail.com or @too_black_ on Twitter.

References

[1] Lauryn Hill, “Black Rage,” YouTube (YouTube, August 22, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_sdubWaY5o&ab_channel=GO .

[2] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1. (London: Penguin Books, 1976) 341.

[3] Rasul Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us. (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2021.), 2.

[4] Vanessa Ogle, "The end of empire and the rise of tax havens: How decolonisation propelled the growth of low-tax jurisdictions, with lasting economic implications for former colonies." The New Statesman. 09 September 2021. Retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2020/12/end-empire-and-rise-tax-havens .

[5] York W. Bradshaw, and Jie Huang, "Intensifying Global Dependency: Foreign Debt, Structural Adjustment, and Third World Underdevelopment." The Sociological Quarterly 32 no. 1 (1991) 321-342. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4120911 .

[6] Destin Jenkins, The Bonds of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

[7] In Black Awakening in Capitalist America Robert Allen lays out how in the late 1960s co-opting American state fronts such as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and National Alliance of Businessmen were attempting “to equate black power with black capitalism.” By reducing Black Rage to a failure of the exclusionary market Black Power could be redefined. Robert L Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1969.)

[8] For a clearer view on how the contemporary Black poor provide involuntary labor for the Black elite and Hollywood see Bertrand Cooper, "Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?"Current Affairs, July 25th, 2021. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/who-actually-gets-to-createblack-pop-culture .

[9] The FBI COINTELPRO Ghetto Informant program, although minimally effective, provides insight into how spaces for radical gathering were turned into fronts for capture. Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Ghetto Informant Program 75-76, by Frank Church and John G. Tower, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf

[10] Fedaral Bureau of Investigation. Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law    Enforcement Officers. Fedaral Bureau of Investigation, by FBI Counter Terrorism

[11] Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, “History of Anti-Money Laundering Laws,” FinCEN.gov, accessed August 26, 2022, https://www.fincen.gov/history-anti-money-laundering-laws .

[12] James Chen, "Money Laundering." Investopedia, May 18, 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/moneylaundering.asp .

[13] Ibid

[14] For UN definition on money laundering see “Money Laundering Overview,” United Nations: Office on Drugs and Crime, accessed August 26, 2022, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.html .

[15] From 1981-1986 top officials in the Regan administration were secretly selling Arms to Iran to “illegally” fund the right wing contras in Nicaragua against the communist Sandinistas. This is also known as reverse laundering where “legitimate” funds are used to fund illicit activity. For more on Iran Contra see Robinson, Teresa Simons. 1991. "FBI knew BCCI financed Iran-Contra deal, bank official says." United Press International. 22 October. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/10/22/FBI-knew-BCCI-financed-Iran-Contra-deal-bank-official-says/3522688104000/ .

[16] The Money Laundering and Control Act of 1986 was apart of the larger War on Drugs bill, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The Anti-Drug Abuse act disproportionately criminalized crack-cocaine. Coincidently or not, much of the cocaine used to make crack was imported by CIA sponsored Contras. For more see William J. Hughes, “Money Laundering Control Act of 1986,” Money laundering control act of 1986 §, accessed June 15, 2022, https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/5077 .

[17] Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (New York: Grove, 2004), 84.

[18] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018), 357.

[19] For how capitalist states monopolize the force of “crime" see Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge etc: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 169-191.

[20] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 108

[21] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 191.

[22] Derrick Bryson Taylor, “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” The New York Times, May 30, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html .

[23] Elena Schneider, “Record Cash Floods Democrats, Black Groups amid Protests and Pandemic,” Politico, July 7, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/actblue-june-protests-coronavirus-347492 .

[24] “Foundation Maps Racial Equity,” Foundation Maps, July 24, 2022, https://maps.foundationcenter.org/#/advancedsehttps://maps.foundationcenter.org/home.php .

[25] Jena McGregor and Tracy Jan, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” The Washington Post, August 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/george-floyd-corporate-america-racial-justice/ .

[26] Cassella, Megan. 2021. "‘Part of the fabric’: Democrats say Biden’s sweeping changes will be hard to undo." Politico. 28 April. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/28/biden-100-days-lbj-public-life-484830 .

[27] For the uselessness of the George Floyd Policing Act read, Derecka Purnell, “The George Floyd Act Wouldn't Have Saved George Floyd's Life. That Says It All ,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, March 4, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/04/the-george-floyd-act-wouldnt-have-saved-george-floyds-life-thats-says-it-all .

[28] Adam Gabbatt, “Republicans Push 'Tsunami' of Harsh Anti-Protest Laws after BLM Rallies,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, April 12, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/12/republicans-push-anti-protest-laws-blm-demonstrations  

[29] Kiara Alfonseca, “Map: Where Anti-Critical Race Theory Efforts Have Reached,” ABC News (ABC News Network, March 24, 2022), https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/map-anti-critical-race-theory-efforts-reached/story?id=83619715 .

[30] Eric Bradner, Sarah Mucha, and Donald Judd, “Biden Says He Doesn't Support Defunding Police,” CNN (Cable News Network, June 8, 2020), https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/joe-biden-defund-the-police/index.html .

[31] Nicholas Kulish, “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html .

[32] Sean Campbell, “Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House,” NY Mag (Intelligencer, April 4, 2022), https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6-million-dollar-house.html .

[33] Morrison, Aaron. 2022. "AP Exclusive: Black Lives Matter has $42 million in assets." Associated Press. 17 May. https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-race-ethnicity-philanthropy-black-lives-matter-5bc4772e029da522036f8ad2a02990aa .

[34] BLM 10, “Tell No Lies, Statement from the Frontlines of BLM,” Statement From The Frontlines of BLM, July 8, 2021, https://www.blmchapterstatement.com/no2/ .

[35] Imani Perry, “Stop Hustling Black Death,” The Cut, May 24, 2021, https://www.thecut.com/article/samaria-rice-profile.html .

[36] Orlando Mayorquin, “Activists Accuse BLM Foundation Leader of Siphoning $10 Million in Donations, Lawsuit Says,” USA Today (Gannett Satellite Information Network, September 6, 2022), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/06/black-lives-matter-foundation-10-million-lawsuit/8003798001/ .

[37] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 41-51.

[38] Black Lives Matter Leaders Defend BLM's Decision To Buy $6M Home, Condemn Claims Of Mismanaged Funds, YouTube (Roland Martin Unfiltered , 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSndlf8kPF0&t=923s&ab_channel=RolandS.Martin .

[39] Jared A. Ball, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020).

[40] Jared Ball, “Buying Power and Black Banking Revisited!,” iMWiL!, May 5, 2020, https://imixwhatilike.org/2020/05/05/buying-power-and-black-banking-revisited .

[41] Black Alliance for Peace - Mid-Atlantic, “The Neocolonial Collusion of Hbcus and the State,” Hood Communist, October 28, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/10/28/the-neocolonial-collusion-of-hbcus-and-the-state/amp/ .

[42] Tracy, McGregor, and Hoyer, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” Education

[43] Hannah Joy, “Atlanta HBCU Students Protest, Sleep in Tents for Better Campus Conditions,” TheGrio, October 22, 2021, https://thegrio.com/2021/10/20/atlanta-hbcu-students-protest-sleep-in-tents-for-better-campus-conditions/ .

[44] Tracy, McGregor, and Hoyer, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” Criminal Justice

[45] Walter Rodney, “The Struggle Goes on by Walter Rodney,” History as Weapon, September 1979, https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rodnstrugoe.html .

[46] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 54.

[47] Rasul A. Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us (New York: Routledge, 2022), 46.

[48] Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (London; Cambridge: Belknap, Harvard University, 2004), 61-63

[49] C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 12.

[50] Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 79.

[51] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 130.

[52] Ibid

[53] Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity: 1812-1822 (New York: Grove, 2001).

[54] James Monroe, “Monroe Doctrine (1823),” National Archives and Records Administration, accessed August 10, 2022, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/monroe-doctrine#:~:text=The%20Monroe%20Doctrine%20is%20the,further%20colonization%20or%20puppet%20monarchs .

[55] James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 1st ed., vol. 6 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[56] Matthew Craven, “Between Law and History: the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the Logic of Free Trade,” London Review of International Law 3, no. 1 (March 10, 2015): pp. 31-59, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrv002 .

[57] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 122.

[58] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Dehli: Aakar Books, 2018), 260.

[59] In Policing the Crisis: Mugging the State and Law and Order, Stuart Hall and his co-authors rebuke overly simplistic explanations of the capitalist State that reduce it to the ‘executive committee of the ruling class.' For them this proved too conspiratorial and obscured the independence of competing capitals under capitalism. Thus, for Hall and his co-authors the State functions as the organizer of capital by mediating the conditions for capital to succeed. The capitalist state governs the masses through popular consent with the looming threat of coercion. The State universalizes the interests of capital as the interests of all through economic, legal, social, ideological, and political hegemony, thereby building consensus. For more see Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging the State and Law and Order, 2nd ed. (New York: ‎Red Globe Press, 2013), 202-203.

[60] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Black Cold War Liberalism as an Agency Reduction Formation during the Late 1940s and the Early 1950s,” International Journal of Africana Studies 19, no. 2 (2018), 77-112.

[61] Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 266.

[62] Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft and the Captive Maternal,” Challenging the Punitive Society: Prison Notebooks 12 (2016): pp. 253-296, https://www.thecarceral.org/cn12/14_Womb_of_Western_Theory.pdf .

[63] Joy James, "We Are Not Our Ancestors' PT. 3 w/ Joy James," August 26th 2020, Black Myths Podcast, produced by Black Myths Pod, MP3 Audio, 10:27, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-our-ancestors-pt-3-w-joy-james/id1504205689?i=1000489212555 .

[64] Homi Kharas, Kristofer Hamel, and Martin Hofer, “The Start of a New Poverty Narrative,” Brookings (Brookings Institute, March 9, 2022), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/06/19/the-start-of-a-new-poverty-narrative/ .

[65] For police as a counterinsurgency force see Micol Seigel, Violence Work State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke Universities Press, 2018).

[66] Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

[67] David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).

[68] Associated Press, “Ferguson Protests Erupt in Violence as People Lob Molotov Cocktails, Police Use Tear Gas (Slideshow) (Video),” Cleveland, August 14, 2014, https://www.cleveland.com/nation/2014/08/ferguson_protests_erupt_in_vio.html .

[69] bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 27-29.

[70] Malcolm X, “Message to Grassroots,” Teaching American History, transcript of speech delivered at King Solomon Baptist Church  in Detroit , Michigan , November 10, 1963, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/message-to-grassroots/ .

[71] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 241-258

[72] Ibid

[73] Joshua Clover notes how the riot is “the other of incarceration.” A response to the “othering” of racialized surplus populations, Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot.: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2019), 162. For a scientific comprehension on rioting see; For scientific distinctions between rebellion, revolt, insurrection, and coup d'etat see James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).

[74] During an outtake conversation on the web show The Last Dope Intellectual Africana studies professor, Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly referred to the Black elite as a “labor aristocracy” and in further correspondence through messages with author. Charisse Burden-Stelly, text message to author, July 15th, 2022.

[75] Gerald Horne , “Barack Obama's Father Identified as CIA Asset in U.S. Drive to ‘Recolonize’ Africa during Early Days of the Cold War,” MR Online, February 10, 2022, https://mronline.org/2022/02/10/barack-obamas-father-identified-as-cia-asset-in-u-s-drive-to-recolonize-africa-during-early-days-of-the-cold-war/

[76] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 37.

[77] Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 200

[78] Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 89.

[79] Borrowing from Karl Marx description of the valorization of labor in chapter 7 of Capital Vol. 1. For Marx the laborer transforms nature and them self through work. The capitalist intervenes in this process and extracts the surplus value of the labor by valorizing it into a commodity. This is exactly what happens to Black Rage. White capital extracts it’s value to serve as a commodity and then sells it back to us to be consumed for their interests. Here Black Rage is transformed from labor to the commodity of labor power. Marx, Capital: Volume 1. 283-305.

[80] Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 54.

[81] In the summer of 2020 and 2021 the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre was used as a front to promote “Black wealth” and buying Black despite the actual community of Greenwood having little to no wealth in 1921. For more see Too Black, “From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism,” Hood Communist, June 3, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/06/03/from-black-wall-street-to-black-capitalism/ .

[82] Jackson, Blood In Eye. 118.

[83] Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1984).

[84] York W. Huang. Intensifying Global Dependency.

[85] Too Black, “‘The First Black,’” Hood Communist, February 25, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/02/25/the-first-black/ .

[86] Jamil Al-Amin, Die Nigger Die!: A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), 132.

[87] In his memoir, Harry Belafonte said Dr. Martin Luther King believed Black people in America were “integrating into a burning house.” In response on what to do he said “I guess we’re just going to have to become firemen.” Malcolm X had been warning about the volcanic nature of America years prior. Harry Belafonte and Michael Shnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), Epub, 806.

[88] Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O., “Identity Politics and Elite Capture,” Boston Review, May 7, 2020, https://bostonreview.net/articles/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-politics-and-elite-capture/ .

[89] For analysis on class suicide see Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” Marxist.org, January 1966, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm .

[90] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 64.

[91] Yannick Giovanni Marshall, “The Future Is Post-Western,” Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera, May 20, 2022), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/20/the-future-is-post-western .

What is Nkrumahism-Touréism?

By All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP)

Republished from Hood Communist.

The Africa which exists today, as well as the one we are struggling to build, is not the old Africa but a new emergent revolutionary society; a classless society in which a new harmony, a new cohesiveness, a new revolutionary African personality and a new dignity is forged out of the traditional African way of life which has been permanently changed by thousands of years of Euro-Christian and Islamic intrusions and by the historical development of the competing and conflicting slave, feudal, capitalistic and newly emergent socialist modes of production. A new emergent ideology is therefore required. That ideology is Nkrumahism-Touréism!

Nkrumahism-Touréism takes its name from the consistent, revolutionary, socialist and Pan-African principles, practices and policies followed, implemented and taught by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Seku Touré; two of the foremost proponents and practitioners of the scientific strategy to liberate and unify Africa under scientific socialism. These principles, practices and policies are recorded in their speeches, writings, actions, achievements and life. In a larger and more complete sense, Nkrumahism-Touréism is the synthesis of the accumulated practical and theoretical contributions and achievements of centuries and generations of mass, revolutionary Pan-African and larger socialist struggles. Nkrumahism-Touréism is the application of the universal laws of revolutionary growth and development of the particular conditions of Africa and her children. Its concrete living manifestation is to be found in the creative contributions of the present day African Revolution.

Nkrumahism-Touréism provides the masses of African People with a program of human transformation turning individual defects into qualities by living the ideology. It is a Pan-African ideology that breaks the web of complexes put on us by the dominant culture and enables us to reclaim our humanity, reassert our dignity, and develop a new Revolutionary African Personality. It provides a revolutionary view of Africa and the world applying the universal principles of scientific socialism in the context of African history, tradition, and aspirations. It gives us a set of analytical tools which enable the masses of Africa People to correctly interpret, understand, redeem African culture and reconstruct Africa by way of the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumahism-Touréism provides a complete social, political, philosophical and economic theory which constitute a comprehensive network of principles, beliefs, values, morals and rules which guide our behavior, determines the form which our institutions and organizations will take; and acts as a cohesive force to bind us together, guide and channel our revolutionary action towards the achievement of Pan-Africanism and the inevitable triumph of socialism worldwide. Nkrumahism-Touréism includes the following principles:

The Primacy and Unity of Africa

The concept of the primacy and unity of Africa has its origins in the emergence of the modern Pan African movement which was characterized by our Peoples resistance to foreign domination in the 15th century. This foreign domination was soon followed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and full blown colonialism which culminated in the European partition of Africa agreed upon by the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885. The primacy of Africa dictates that we reject these artificially imposed colonial borders. A united Africa, the concept of continental African unity is the source of our strength and the key to our liberation. As Nkrumah says:

“African Unity gives an indispensable continental dimension to the concept of the African nation…Unity is the first prerequisite for destroying neo-colonialism. Primary and basic is the need for a union government on the much divided continent of Africa.” (Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism p.253) We cannot accept any other version of our land, to define Africa as anything less than the entire continent including its islands is to accept the neo-colonial strategy to divide and conquer. The primacy of Africa also speaks to our primary identity as African people. We are African. Rather than promoting our micro-national identities such as Nigerian, Ivorian, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Brazilian, African-American, etc. we must focus on the common denominator which is African. For us as Africans and Pan-Africanists as Nkrumah says, “the core of the black revolution is in Africa and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the black man throughout the world lacks a national home… All people of African decent, 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.” (Nkrumah, K Class Struggle in Africa)

The Integrity Of The Revolutionary African Personality

The African personality is the product of the evolution of African people’s conception of the world, way of life, their ethics and moral principles which are a particular reflection of African culture. This African cultural personality has been under attack by capitalism /colonialism and its extension neo-colonialism which have developed in diverse and sometimes subtle ways a moral, intellectual, and cultural superiority complex towards us as an oppressed people. Sekou Touré says, ”the science of depersonalizing the colonized people is sometimes so subtle in its methods that it progressively succeeds in falsifying our natural psychic behavior and devaluing our own original virtues and qualities with a view to our assimilation”. (Touré A. S.The Political Leader Considered As The Representative Of A Culture p.3) We are clear that the assertion of the cultural personality of an oppressed culture becomes the catalyst for its national liberation movement. Nkrumah and Touré both call for the revival and integrity of the African personality, it is this re-personalization, which constitutes the successful affirmation of the cultural personality of the oppressed culture. Re-personalization for Africans means re-Africanisation to be accomplished through the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumah says that the revolutionary African personality “expresses identification not only with Africa’s historical past, but with the struggle of the African people in the African Revolution to liberate and unify the continent and to build a just society.”(Nkrumah,K Revolutionary Path p 206). The Revolutionary African Personality is a pan-Africanist concept which identifies us not by our language, religion or geographical location but in terms of our goals which are dynamic, just and noble. Thus, the Revolutionary African Personality puts emphasis on our ideological identity over anything else. It is this ideological identity for which we must consistently struggle which can only be ultimately realized through the success of the Cultural Revolution.

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism are the cluster of humanist principles which underlie traditional African society and define the African personality. Respect for human beings and social solidarity, coupled with a keen sense of fraternity, justice and cooperation between men and women are the very foundation of traditional African society.

However, Sekou Touré adds to this that “ society has been marked by the existence of two natures of life, two natures transposing themselves in thought, action, behavior and in the options of (wo)men, whether political, economic, social or cultural. In other words there are two human natures in mankind and in each People; we have the People [interests] itself and the anti-People [interests], with a permanent struggle being waged between the two, the class struggle.”…(Touré A.S. Women In Society p26)

The imperialist incursion into Africa has exacerbated these contradictions, and the battle against the anti-people’s class has dictated that we incorporate in addition to our class analysis the national and gender aspects of the struggle to include the full scope of our Pan African reality. Our ideology teaches us that the first principle of the Revolution is that everything we have earned in life is a reflection of the struggles and contributions of the People and that the masses of People are the makers of history. Included in this principle is the understanding that (wo)man is not merely treated as a means to an end but also as an end in themselves. This is the revolutionary operational principle that forms the basis for the egalitarian, humanist and collectivist character of our ideology.

In fact the (dialectical) relationship between (wo)man and the People shows that the Peoples interests are (wo)man’s interest because it is the People that generate (wo)man. Further more the value and level of the historical evolution of a People is faithfully measured by the condition of the women in society.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

Revolutionaries want Revolution because it means a qualitative change in the oppressive conditions of the status- quo of capitalist society. In order to bring about this change, revolutionaries must study the science of Revolution. Dialectical and historical materialism is the essence of revolutionary science. Through the study and application of revolutionary ideology, which includes the scientific laws of dialectical and historical materialism, revolutionaries are able to understand the most general laws of the development of nature, human society, and thinking. It is therefore an indispensable instrument of scientific analysis and revolutionary transformation of the world. Sekou Touré says dialectical materialism “studies the general connections between the elements of nature, the laws of evolution of the objective world and the action that these laws exercise on human consciousness.”.(Touré, A.S.Strategy and Tactics of the Revolution, 52) “Dialectics is the method of scientific analysis which all [people] Christians, Muslims and atheist alike can use. Historical materialism is scientific. It objectively proves the rule of historical evolution from the production system. The changes society experienced, the succession of different regimes from the primitive community to socialism can scientifically be explained by historical materialism. Here dialectics deals with the method of analysis and explanation of facts of social and historical phenomena. Historical materialism made it possible to enlighten the process of changes recorded in every man’s life and characterized by the existence of production systems with properties and features different from one another.”(Touré, A.S. Africa On The Move vol xxiv chapterVI,Revolution and Religion p185) 

Historical materialism is the dialectical method applied to history. Historical materialism analyzes and explains the historical processes of evolutionary and revolutionary changes in society characterized by the changes in production systems with properties and features which differ from one to another. Historical materialism does not list the stages of the evolution of society, it analyzes society to show the specific origin of every stage of it’ s evolution, how every qualitative change originates and the specific characteristics of every stage.

The Harmony between Religion/Spirituality and Revolution

For Nkrumahism-Touréism, a revolutionary ideology coming from African culture there is and cannot be any contradiction between Revolution and Religion. In fact Revolution and Religion/spirituality are in harmony and are complementary aspects of culture. Religion and spirituality are dominant features of the African Personality. Nkrumah points out that “The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity and value” ( Nkrumah,K. Consciencism p68).

For African people there is essential harmony in our faith in the Creator and the African Revolution. To fulfill our obligations to our religion or spirituality we have an obligation to properly serve one another, Gods’ highest creation. Man and Woman, the true servants of God and the People, have the duty to fight for the liberation of those deprived of liberty, whether an individual or a People.

Revolution is the collective action and struggle of an oppressed People guided and supported by a consciously planned process (ideology) and determination to qualitatively change an old, backward and oppressive political-economic condition (capitalism), into a new progressive and just system that will work for the People’s interests (Socialism).

Religion is a set of beliefs and principles that affirm the existence of one or more supreme beings or God(s) which govern us all. Religion influences and motivates social behavior in the sense that it serves as a moral guide and provides reassurance to People that in spite of what may seem to be an overwhelmingly negative situation, through the practice of religion and serving God, peace, justice and prosperity will prevail. Religion holds respect for human dignity and human virtue. Religion can also project man’s existence onto the next world, and reserves for a future world positive or negative existence according to their life conduct in this world. However as Sekou Touré, a revolutionary who practices Islam,  points out “The Revolution does not intend to deny this future world; it only wishes that the struggle against evil be not `deferred` or postponed, and this is actually what all sincere believers and the dispossessed, regardless of race, sex or nationality are pressing for.” (A. S. Touré, Revolution and Religion, Africa On The Move volxxiv).

Both Revolution and Religion share common values which they want people to reflect, and even more they want People to become the uncompromising and faithful advocates of. Some of these values are justice, peace and freedom for mankind, the nation and the laboring masses. Revolution and Religion proclaim, organize and conduct a permanent struggle, a universal struggle which, for the former is class struggle, the clash between antagonistic interests represented by classes that are opposed in the process of production, distribution and utilization of goods. While for the latter it is a struggle between good and evil, good embodying truth, justice and beauty, and evil embodying exploitation, lies, oppression, in essence all that is contrary to good.

Suffering, sweat and sacrifice are considered by both Revolution and Religion as necessary and ongoing on the long road to freedom. An important part of Religion and Revolution involves the unity of the philosophy and the behavior it advocates. In other words, not only is there is a constant struggle for the honest adherents of both Revolution and Religion to live up to the principles of each, but both Revolution and Religion have also been misused by corrupt men and women as a tool of exploitation and oppression.

Hence we should judge Revolution and Religion primarily by its principles not necessarily by its adherents. We know that our People’s faith and belief in righteousness and justice, which is upheld by their religious and spiritual faith must reinforce the need to engage in revolutionary political activity to defeat the enemies of God and the People on earth. The essential harmony of Revolution and Religion can only be affirmed in the struggle to build a just society.

The Necessity For Permanent, Mass, Revolutionary, Pan-African Political Education, Organization and Action

Following the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945, the mass political party emerged within the mass political movements as a qualitative leap and superior form of organized mass struggle, although mass political movement remained the dominant form of struggle. Some of these political movements can and do topple neo-colonialism, as most puppet regimes are weak. But generally speaking only mass-based revolutionary parties unified by a monolithic ideology will be strong enough to seize and sustain state power when confronted with imperialism’s counter-offensive of political, economic, military and psychological terrorism. Only mass-based parties with revolutionary ideology will maintain class struggle as a strategic principle and properly organize the class struggle along clear-cut class lines to defeat the internal and external enemies of the People’s class. Only ideological monolithic mass parties of conscious cadre are capable of organizing socialist transformation. 

A dialectical relationship exists between mass political movements and mass revolutionary parties. Revolutionary mass parties are a product of mass political movements. The mass movements remain relentless in struggle against oppression and for a better way of life. They serve as a source of sustenance and bulwark of defense for revolutionary party building. The wider mass movements stand as an inexhaustible reservoir of revolutionary mass potential, which ultimately must be tapped to realize our mass party. Revolutionary party building is integrally connected with and seeks to be a catalytic force with respect to ideologically transforming the broader mass movements into one revolutionary mass Pan-African party. Through ideological education and struggle, the Party seeks to progressively raise the level of class-consciousness. This transformation largely depends on acquiring the special Competence of ideologically recruiting and training cadre on a mass scale.

Revolutionary Ideology as The Greatest Asset

Nkrumahism-Touréism puts emphasis on the fact that the fundamental task facing Africa is the ideological transformation of man and woman. This transformation begins in the realm of morals and values:

“Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest, informed man [and woman] who submerges self in service to the nation and mankind. A man [and woman] who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of man [and woman] whose humility is his [her] strength and whose integrity is his [her] greatness.” (Nkrumah,K. 1975 Africa Must Unite p.130).

Both Nkrumah and Touré held ideology as the crucial element and the greatest asset in the African revolution. Touré teaches us that “Culture is the framework of ideology. Culture is the container, which carries ideology as its contents.” Africa has her own culture and thus must have her own ideology thereby conforming to the African personality. Nkrumah informs us that philosophy is an instrument of ideology and must derive it’s weapons from the living conditions of African people and that it is from those conditions that the intellectual content of our philosophy must be created. Nkrumah teaches us further that…. “a united people armed with an ideology which explains the status quo and illuminates our path of development is the greatest asset we posses for the total liberation and complete emancipation of Africa. And the emancipation of Africa completes the process of the emancipation of man.” (Nkrumah, K. 1964 Why The Spark p.2).

Touré echoes Nkrumah’s position that political freedom is a prerequisite for economic freedom and adds that political revolution is part and parcel of the ideological revolution. Hence ideological revolution is the fundamental requirement for political and economic revolutions. Likewise, political independence is incomplete unless it is followed by an economic revolution. Touré shows revolutionary ideology as the critical element in developing revolutionary consciousness as he teaches us the laws of developing consciousness. When he says,

“ Without revolutionary consciousness there is no Revolution! All those who have had to conduct revolution have been able to verify this. But where does this revolutionary consciousness come from, since it is certain that it is not basic datum, nor does it come into being and develop spontaneously? History teaches that it is created and developed through ideological education and revolutionary practice. We can equally affirm that without ideological training and without revolutionary action, there can be no revolutionary consciousness.”

Sekou Touré

To achieve a decisive impact on or recruit from mass movements the Party must have ideologically strong cadre and a program of ideological development. With the mass party our masses can bring forth and strengthen the best attributes of the mass movement into the qualified expressions of the mass revolutionary party characterized by mass revolutionary consciousness and mass ideological power as the guiding force to revolutionary practice.

The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) is a permanent, independent, revolutionary, socialist, Pan-African Political Party based in Africa. Africa is the just homeland of African People all over the world. Our Party is an integral part of the Pan-African and World Socialist revolutionary movement. The A-APRP understands that “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”. — (Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, page 4)

Blood in the Bank: Hidden Profits of American Slavery and the Call for Reparations

By Youhanna Haddad

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders declined to support reparations. He instead proposed instituting programs to help “distressed communities” in general, believing this indirect approach to compensation to be superior. “There are better ways to [repay blacks] than just writing… a check,” Sanders insisted.

But the patchwork of social-democratic reforms that comprised the Senator’s presidential platform are wholly insufficient to this task. To see why, we must scientifically analyze the role chattel slavery played in the construction of the United States. Doing this leads us to an obvious and inescapable conclusion. As Karl Marx himself observed, “Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

Origins of Bondage

In what is now the United States, chattel slavery developed primarily to produce agricultural commodities. Europeans constructed race to justify the creation of a class in permanent bondage, forced to work the vast estates they’d amassed through genocide of the indigenous population. Millions of slaves kidnapped and transported to the New World harvested cash crops like cotton, coffee, sugarcane, and tobacco. They did so, of course, under unimaginably toilsome and oppressive conditions. Sugarcane production, for example, entailed such dangerous conditions that deaths among slaves outnumbered births. Slaves were forced to produce sugar until their health crumbled, necessitating constant importation of additional slaves to keep plantations profitable. 

The need for labor pervaded the colonial economy. Even large portions of white immigrants came to address this demand through the system of indentured servitude. Nearly half of European immigrants arriving in the colonies came in this manner. Upon arrival, they began a stint of hard and often degrading labor for paltry wages. However, within several years of starting their contracts, these servants would become free citizens. They were then entitled to “freedom dues” from their masters, which typically included land or money. Despite the unsavory terms of the contract, servitude was largely an opportunity for Europeans seeking access to land and wealth unavailable in their homelands. Their contracts allowed them to become settlers without needing capital as a prerequisite.

Despite the exploitative character of indentured servitude, it is utterly incomparable to chattel slavery. Only the former included an element of voluntariness, and the chance to improve one’s economic situation. Indentured servants typically chose to sign their rights away. Of course, this was often done under coercive conditions. Nevertheless, indentured servants had opportunities that slaves were never granted. And the option to leave for the New World is one servants would have only chosen if they believed their life would improve in the colonies. Marxist historian Christopher Hill alludes to this in his 1967 book Reformation to Industrial Revolution:

“For many of the early settlers servitude was a temporary phase through which one worked one’s way from freedom to land-ownership.”

Indeed, many emancipated servants would go on to join the ranks of the rich and powerful. In 1629, for example, nearly 17% of members in “Virginia’s House of Burgesses [were] former indentured servant[s].” This mobility led Marx to remark that classes in early America “continually change[d] and interchange[d] their elements in constant flux.”

The ability to ascend economically, however, was enjoyed almost exclusively by whites. Conversely, Africans in the New World faced maximal exploitation, generation after generation. Aside from limited exceptions, until 1865, they could not escape enslavement and subsequently died in shackles. Europeans benefiting from this racial caste system were well aware of its titanic productive capacity. As British merchant Malachy Postlethwayt noted in 1745…

“Is it not notorious to the whole World, that the Business of Planting in our British colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce?”

Calculating the Theft

Scholars have spilled a lot of ink trying to estimate the dollar value of labor stolen from black slaves. Considering the breadth of industries involved, and the interconnected nature of markets, such a figure is exceedingly difficult to calculate. However, by summing the hours of labor performed by American slaves, policy scholar Thomas Craemer produced an estimate. He concluded that “the present value of U.S. slave labor… ranges from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion.” in 2009 dollars. Adjusted for 13 years of inflation, the range is $8.2 to $19.6 trillion in today’s money. The upper limit of Craemer’s estimate is therefore roughly equivalent to America’s entire gross domestic product!

If we utilize Craemer’s upper limit and think that black Americans today should be compensated for the value of their ancestors’ labor, they’re each owed a whopping $467,000. Even the lower limit still comes in at around $195,000. And this by no means covers all of the profits derived from the institution of slavery.

Banks, for example, lent vast sums of money to productive plantations and profited off the interest. The shipping industry got rich from building and selling slave ships. Insurance corporations grew wealthy from insuring the shipments of slaves and the products of slave labor. Furthermore, the explosion of the textile industry was facilitated by the abundant supply of cotton picked by slaves. Great Britain was considered the titan of textiles in the early industrial period with over half of British cotton imports produced from American slave labor.

We must recognize the variety of ways in which capitalist development benefited from chattel slavery. Ignoring them suppresses proper academic investigation of questions pertinent to racial justice. The colonial project as we know it would’ve been impossible without the forced labor of millions of African slaves. And that has strategic implications for how society should try to rectify the historical and ongoing oppression of black people.

Ramifications of Ignorance

Particularly since the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr., the American political establishment has tried to co-opt the black liberation struggle. Every February, school children are taught that black leaders look down from heaven with approval at a nation that never went beyond piecemeal reforms to address gross historical injustices. This mischaracterization of the black liberation struggle and its leaders is only possible due to misunderstanding the function of slavery. From Bernie Sanders to Mitch McConnell, American politicians do not wish to see the reappropriation of stolen wealth to black people. To do so would acknowledge the incredible economic benefit slavery provided to the nation and, more importantly, force the beneficiaries to pay compensation.

In essence, the effort to downplay the role of slavery in American development is a matter of legitimacy to the United States regime. Obscuring the role of slavery in American development allows liberals to falsely assert that “liberal-democratic values” are the root of American exceptionalism. This erroneously whitewashes history with the self-congratulatory implication that European ideologies, rather than African labor and Native land, built the world’s most successful empire. In order to eradicate capitalist pseudo-history from the realm of fact, we need to tirelessly examine how exploitation is the real engine of growth in capitalist development.

While reparations alone would not end global capitalism, it is always necessary and beneficial to explore the economic contributions of every exploited group. The unrecognized domestic labor of women, the wage slavery in factories of the Global South, the historical theft of trillions of dollars in assets from the Global South — this is the hidden life force of capitalist states. Without recognizing these contributions, it is impossible to materially analyze history to the benefit of the masses.

In our mission to end capitalism, the vast majority of our allies are the highly exploited masses of Africa and Asia. Their exploitation is still financed through the reinvested wealth created by African slaves. Connecting these struggles is an essential prerequisite to building the durable, international, class solidarity of the colored masses needed to end capitalism once and for all.

Who Are "The People"?

[Pictured: Waiting several hours to vote has become commonplace in the United States]

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Republished in modified form from The Specter.

If democracy is government by the people, then perhaps the first and most important question to ask is: Who are the people? When the United States was founded, the answer was brutally simple: white men of property. This class, of course, comprised only a minority of colonial America. But confining rights and representation to an elite subset was hardly unique in the history of “democratic” governance. Women were excluded from republics as far back as Athens in 500 BC. Similarly, in the early United States, slavery and “democracy” coexisted.

Of course, the United States is different now. It formally abolished chattel slavery and many women, as well as people of color, can now vote and hold office. Yet the American electoral system still blocks, by law, countless marginalized people from having a say in government.

Over 5 million Americans, for example, are legally disenfranchised due to felony convictions. That’s almost 2% of the voting-age population. And the majority of these disenfranchised people have already finished their sentences.

There are also millions of Americans who are disenfranchised by virtue of where they live. Residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands have no representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Those living in Washington DC also have no congressional representation. Hence why their license plates read “Taxation without representation.” Under the most general definition of “democracy” — citizens governing themselves through elected leaders — America isn’t fully democratic.

But even those officially granted the right to vote may lack the ability to exercise it. After the 15th Amendment granted black men voting rights, various methods of suppression arose to limit expansion of the franchise. Decades of political struggle combating this culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Among other things, it required nine states with especially discriminatory pasts to obtain federal approval before altering their election laws.

In 2013, however, the Supreme Court nullified this key part of the Voting Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, huge purges of voter rolls commenced and are still ongoing. Election officials purge millions each election cycle, a deeply disturbing trend even absent any particular political motivations.

It’s hard not to see this as yet another example of white supremacy in the political system. Felony disenfranchisement affects blacks at more than four times the rate of whites. In potentially decisive swing states like Florida and Virginia, more than 20% of black adults are disenfranchised. 

Disenfranchisement also cuts along class lines. The five aforementioned territories, for example, all have average incomes below that of the poorest state. And their lack of representation worsens existing material deprivation.

Take Guam, for instance. Its people disproportionately fight and die in American wars. Meanwhile, they receive far less money per capita from the Department of Veterans Affairs than any state. American Samoa finds itself similarly deprived. The federal government does virtually nothing for Samoans. In fact, they aren’t even granted full citizenship. Incredibly, though, American Samoans still legally owe “allegiance to the United States.”

That American Samoans aren’t citizens may strike some as sufficient reason for their disenfranchisement. But this is misguided. More people are currently living outside their country of origin, mostly by necessity, than ever before. In the United States alone, there are roughly 22 million non-citizens of voting age. These people live under the American government, fund it with their taxes, and participate in its capitalist economy and culture. It makes little sense to say that they do not deserve a say in how those systems run.

Enfranchising non-citizens is both moral and feasible. Until the 1920s, non-citizens in the United States enjoyed voting rights. They could participate in state, local, and even federal elections. Even today, a number of cities allow non-citizens to vote in municipal races. And countries other than the United States let non-citizens cast ballots in certain elections.

Of course, expanding the franchise is far from a panacea. If all Americans were instantly granted full voting rights, that might change a lot. But the United States would still be a bourgeois republic. And so long as capital runs the show, the rest of us will be left subject to its insatiable lust for profits. That means systematic disempowerment of the majority, both politically and economically.

In this key sense, the dictatorship of capital under which we live is fundamentally undemocratic. Fully realizing the promise of democracy therefore requires moving away from capitalism and toward collective ownership of society’s productive resources. In a word, socialism.

Nevertheless, the facts of disenfranchisement in America are quite illustrative. More specifically, they reveal a key insight regarding political disengagement. It’s no surprise that many Americans don’t feel represented by the political system. Millions of them literally aren’t. They are systematically denied a say in huge decisions that affect their daily lives. And this, of course, disproportionately impacts low-income people and folks of color. Clearly, the United States still privileges the rights of the white and wealthy at the expense of those who aren’t. Racism remains as American as apple pie.

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

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

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

[beginning of speech]

Brothers, Sisters, Patriots, Revolutionaries….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FREEDOM! FREEDOM! FREEDOM! NOW OR DEATH!

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

Long live the People’s Republic of China!

Long live Chairman Mao Zedong!

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

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

[end of speech]

The Real Dragon: George Jackson and the Black August Tradition

By Alieu Bah

Republished from This Is Africa.

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

— George Jackson 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Rodney: A People's Professor

By Curry Malott and Elgin Bailey

Republished from Liberation School.

In a recent book on the ongoing relevance of Walter Rodney’s work, Karim F. Hirji notes that, “as with scores of progressive intellectuals and activists of the past, the prevailing ideology functions to relegate Rodney into the deepest, almost unreachable, ravines of memory. A person who was widely known is now a nonentity, a stranger to the youth in Africa and the Caribbean” and the U.S. [1]. Rodney’s theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist movement warrant an ongoing engagement with his life story and major texts.

Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript.

This essay, which complements our new study guide on The Russian Revolution, offers a brief overview of Rodney’s background historical context. Highlighting aspects of Rodney’s individual life demonstrates that his commitments were not just the result of his own individual experiences and conclusions, but were part of and emerged from the revolutionary crisis ripping through the world at the time. To better comprehend A View from the Third World, we turn to Groundings with My Brothers, which Rodney produced as a relatively new professor in Jamaica. In that book, Rodney reflects on the dialectical pedagogy he developed to make his academic labor part of the global movement against capitalist imperialism, which he also called the white power structure [2].

What is clear throughout Rodney’s work is the influence of the materialist insight that, while people make history, they cannot make it as they please, but it in the context of existing material conditions. Rather than start with abstract slogans or formulas, Rodney’s place of departure is an assessment of concrete conditions. For example, Rodney begins Groundings with a political assessment of the situation in Jamaica and he begins A View from the Third World with his analysis of the historical situation that gave way to Russia’s revolutionary era.

Raised in struggle

Walter Rodney was born March 23, 1942 into a working-class Guyanese family. According to Walter’s partner, Dr. Patricia Rodney, his parents introduced him to community activism at an early age. Growing up in Guyana in the 1950s, when the socialist movement was influential, “sociopolitical engagement was not uncommon among Guyanese youth” [3]. This was an incredibly exciting era to be a part of. It was a time of qualitative changes as the people of Guyana set out to build a whole new social and political system. “Walter and I, and our peers,” Patricia writes, “were strongly influenced by the political climate and the infectious spirit for independence that called and moved Guyanese of all generations to action” [4].

In contemporary U.S. society—a society that has been gripped by a deep reactionary counter-revolutionary force in response to the era of Walter Rodney’s generation—critical education tends to be viewed as something that can assist students in developing a critical consciousness. During the era that preceded the current one, when the colonized and oppressed world was in rebellion against colonialism and imperialist capitalism, it was the people, as Patricia Rodney alludes to above, who brought revolutionary commitments to education, not the other way around.

Walter Rodney was therefore one of countless students who took a sense of possibility with him to Queens College in Guyana. While at Queens College, Rodney became president of the historical society and deepened his interest in activism. In 1960, he won an Open Arts scholarship to the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Patricia notes that “it was as a student in Jamaica that Walter first felt the disconnect between his life on campus and the grassroots community that surrounded the university” [5]. Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, earning a doctorate in history in 1966 at the age of 24.

While in London Rodney deepened his political commitments through a deep study of Marxism with a group of Caribbean students who would meet at the home of C. L. R. James on Friday evenings for hours on end.

Becoming a people’s history professor

Rodney accepted his first teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1966, but only stayed a year. However, Rodney would return to Tanzania for five years in 1969. Vijay Prashad says that Tanzania at the time was at the “highpoint” of its “experiment with self-reliance and non-alignment, which was then called ‘African socialism’” [6].

Shortly after beginning teaching in Tanzania, “the radical students from across the region formed the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front” as a response to Tanzania’s president Dr. Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration of 1967, which called for a more direct move to socialism [7]. Nyerere was the leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), one of the post-WWII independence movements under British-controlled Tanganyika. Support for TANU grew and by 1960 the first elections were planned for the East African country. On December 9, 1961, Tanganyika became an independent republic and changed its name to Tanzania. In 1969, C. L. R. James concluded that, as a result of these developments, Tanzania stood “as one of the foremost political phenomena of the twentieth century” [8].

James specifically points to Nyerere’s focus on rethinking secondary and higher education as Tanzania’s “most revolutionary change of all…in order to fit the children and youth…for the new society which the government…seeks to build” [9]. Many of the students from across the continent Rodney encountered at the University of Dar es Salaam brought transformative, revolutionary determination, optimism, and organizational capacities with them. As a product himself of this revolutionary era, Rodney was well positioned to not just learn from, but contribute to, the radical student movement.

In 1967, Rodney was offered a position as a history professor in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where his contributions flourished. As a professor in Jamaica, Rodney was “torn by the lack of connection between academia and the working class” and having “a strong desire to bridge these worlds” [10]. It is fitting then that “unlike other professors at UWI, he chose to live with his young family outside the insular university compound housing” [11]. Rodney continued to use his position as a university professor to untether his academic labor (e.g., writing and teaching) from the white power structure of bourgeois state forces to contribute to the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Refusing to put the narrow self-interest of his academic position before the broader interests of the working class, Rodney’s commitment to revolution represents not only a recurring theme throughout his work (including A View from the Third World) but of the broader liberatory atmosphere of the times.

Rodney developed a practice for bridging the gap between academia and the working class called groundings. Groundings are a dialectical process of dialogue and exchange aimed at building the revolutionary movement. Rodney saw his studies, travels, and experiences as contributions to groundings, which he shared informally in working-class public spaces and privately through formal lectures.

Groundings with My Brothers is a collection of lectures developed for their practical relevance. These lectures include tidbits of reflections on practice and pedagogy, but mostly include the content that contributed to the process of groundings. In offering a class analysis of Jamaica and various contributions to the Black Power movement, Rodney situates the Soviet example within this broad framework. His interest in revolutionary Russia was part of this larger project of charting “a new direction for Black Studies and African studies” [12]. As he writes in the second essay in Groundings:

Since 1911, white power has been slowly reduced. The Russian Revolution put an end to Russian imperialism in the Far East, and the Chinese Revolution, by 1949, had emancipated the world’s largest single ethnic group from the white power complex. The rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America (with minor exceptions such as North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba) have remained within the white power network to this day. We live in a section of the world under white domination—the imperialist world. The Russians are white and have power, but they are not a colonial power oppressing black peoples. The white power which is our enemy is that which is exercised over black peoples, irrespective of which group is in the majority and irrespective of whether the particular country belonged originally to whites or blacks [13].

For Rodney, the Russian Revolution represented the first major victory in the global movement against racist capitalism and imperialism, which he experienced in various forms as a young person in Guyana and as an adult in Tanzania. Since capitalism is essentially a globally interconnected system, all progressive movements in the capitalist era are also related to and connected with others, while unavoidably maintaining their context-specific uniqueness. Beyond the larger historical interconnections of popular uprisings in the capitalist era, Rodney draws parallels between the experiences of poor peasants in tsarist Russia and the formerly enslaved of the Third World. The practical lessons gleaned from these connections, as highlighted below, are the raw materials for his groundings.

The Third World’s perspective

Reflecting on his own position as a professor, Rodney asks if “people like us here at the university” will follow the example of Cuba and join the Soviet and Chinese-led struggle against white power, against capitalism/imperialism? Even though most who have studied at the University of the West Indies are Black, reasons Rodney, “we are undeniably part of the white imperialist system” and “a few are actively pro-imperialist” and therefore “have no confidence in anything that is not white.” Even if the professoriate is not actively and openly anti-Black but still “say nothing against the system…we are acquiescing in the exploitation of our brethren” [14]. This silence, Rodney points out, is secured through an individualistic approach to progress, displacing the long tradition of collective struggle. As a result, “this has recruited us into their ranks and deprived the [B]lack masses of articulate leadership.” Part of the answer to the question, what is to be done is for Rodney, “Black Power in the West Indies” which “aim[s] at transforming the intelligentsia into the servants of the [B]lack masses” [15].

Like his other works, Rodney’s approach in A View from the Third World is an example of what commitments to Black liberation looked like in practice. In the Foreword to Rodney’s first posthumously published book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, George Lamming offers some crucial insights into the practical lessons Rodney saw in past movements, relevant to our understanding of his approach in A View from the Third World: “every struggle planted a seed of creative disruption and aided the process that released new social forces” [16].

Groundings and the Russian Revolution

Revolutionary Russia was an important source of hope in Rodney’s groundings. A View from the Third World deepens the practical relevance of his groundings on the subject by offering a thorough rebuttal and exposure of bourgeois propaganda aimed at discrediting the Russian Revolution as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and so on. Rodney also speaks to the practicality of revolution by engaging the questions of organization, assessment, and tactics and by examining, for example, the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Finally, while demonstrating the correctness of the Bolsheviks, Rodney does not shy away from surfacing their mistakes, highlighting the insights their successes and mistakes offer contemporary organizers.

Rodney engages these tasks through the method of historiography. A View from the Third World compares and contrasts bourgeois, Soviet, and independent socialist writings on the Russian revolutionary era with an eye toward underscoring relevant lessons for the liberation struggles of his time and place. For example, in the first chapter, Rodney points to the international context to situate his “dialectical materialist” approach to historiography noting that, “there is every reason to be suspicious of the Western European (and American) view of the Soviet Revolution, and there is every reason to seek an African view” [17]. Rodney argues for the necessity of historical accounts that advance the view of the oppressed, of those systematically underdeveloped by the capitalist-imperialist system from which Russia was the first to make a break. In developing this view, he addresses various accusations that the Russian revolutionary era was anti-democratic or authoritarian.

Rodney describes many of the critiques against the Soviet Union, from multiple political positions, as idealist, deterministic, or stageist, because they do not deal with the concrete, materialist balance of class forces but rather with abstract concepts of the ideal, such as predetermined stages of development. Rodney engages the question of Marx and Engels’ predictions regarding where socialism would first emerge as a point mobilized to discredit either Marx and Engels or to claim the Russian revolution was a departure from Marxism.

Marx and Engels’ predictions of the socialist future—which were far and few in between—were informed by dialectical or historical materialism rather than idealism, since they were based on the information they had available rather than on predetermined, universal stages of development. Rodney writes that “historical or dialectical materialism is a method that can be applied to different situations to give different answers. Marx’s comments on Western Europe were based on a thoroughly comprehensive study of the evidence that he had before him… Hence to say anything about Russia would also require close study of what was going on in Russia” [18].

The practical relevance of Rodney’s groundings work to build a mass movement is readily apparent here: without an assessment of concrete conditions, organizers are left with irrelevant and/or incorrect abstractions and formulas not likely to gain much traction. Driving home the practical implications of this point for organizers, Rodney is instructive:

Marxism is not a finished and complete product contained in a given number of texts… Marxism is a method and a worldview. Neither Marx nor Engels believed their interpretations were unassailable given the limited amount of scientific and accurate data available to them, as well as their own limitations. Furthermore, new situations arising after their time required new analysis. This is where Lenin made his major contributions” [19].

From questions of spontaneity in the February Revolution to the issue of dissolving the Constituent Assembly in the October Revolution, Rodney makes a strong case for supporting the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik leadership. He refutes the claim that the U.S., for example, was more democratic than the Soviet Union because it had two major parties. The difference, Rodney points out, is that the U.S. had a bourgeois democracy where the major parties represented the interest of the capitalist class, while the Soviet Union had a proletarian democracy whose ruling party was responsible to–and largely emerged from–the working class and peasantry.

Rodney also addresses the major debates within the international socialist movement. For one example, he foregrounds the international significance of the harsh condemnation of the Bolsheviks by the German socialist Karl Kautsky, “who had known both Marx and Engels since his youth, and after their deaths he became their principal literary executor” [20]. Kautsky argued that Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as proletarian democracy was not yet possible in Russia since the proletariat were not the majority. Consequently, Kautsky concluded that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of state power represented an anti-democratic dictatorship that imposed its will on the peasantry. Rodney summarizes Lenin’s response to Kautsky, setting the record straight that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the political domination of the exploited classes over their former exploiting ones.

Groundings against reactionary academia

Rodney exposes the counter-revolutionary role of academia as one of the primary locations producing anti-Soviet propaganda. Explaining the hegemony or dominance of the bourgeois approach to revolutionary Russia and history more generally, he interrogates “the university institutions that are responsible for the vast majority of research and publications in the field” as “an important element in the superstructure.” Elite universities exist to “serve the interests of the capitalist or bourgeois class” [21]. At the individual level, for example, “the conservative historians always expose themselves by their contemptuous attitude toward the working people” [22].

Even more explicitly exposing the role of universities in serving the larger interests of the bourgeoisie, Rodney points to a 1957 publication by R.N. Carew Hunt, who was “widely believed to be a British intelligence agent” parading as a “scholar and authority on the Soviet Union” [23]. Beyond individual professors, Rodney implicates entire university projects such as Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for War and Peace, which “is notorious for its connections with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department” [24].

Using himself as an example to deepen the practical relevance of his critique, Rodney rhetorically asks, “what is my position? What is the position of all of us because we fall into the category of the black West Indian intellectual, a privilege in our society? What do we do with that privilege? The traditional pattern is that we join the establishment…How do we break out of this…captivity” [25]. He offers three suggestions for academics: 1) to confront pro-imperialist and racist knowledge production; 2) to challenge the idea that racial harmony defines our “post-racial society” by moving beyond the intellectual division of labor in bourgeois academies; and 3) to connect with the masses of Black working and poor people.

Expanding on these directives, Rodney makes an important pedagogical statement that, in challenging the many myths of white supremacist imperialism in the process of connecting with the masses, “you do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they will add something to what you are saying” [26]. As a result of engaging the Jamaican working class as subjects with valuable knowledge, “Rodney encountered a Black Power movement in Jamaica that was already well underway” [27]. But it was a two-way street, and what Rodney contributed was “a framework that critically examined the impact of slavery and colonialism and that gave a foundation for interpreting the current situation of Black and oppressed peoples in these newly independent countries, who continued to be marginalized” [28]. In the Introduction to A View from the Third World, Robin Kelley affirms this contention, writing that “the way Rodney engaged society as a university lecturer was considered ‘strange’ and even dangerous that it was interpreted as a challenge to the establishment” [29]. Outlining what this pedagogy, this practice, looked like in motion, in action, Rodney elaborates:

“I lectured at the university, outside of the classroom that is. I had public lectures, I talked about Black Power, and then I left there, I went from the campus. I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of [B]lack people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting-down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the brothers say. We have to ‘ground together.’…[T]his…must have puzzled the Jamaican government. I must be mad, surely; a man we are giving a job, we are giving status, what is he doing with these guys, [people they call] ‘criminals and hooligans’[?]…I was trying to contribute something. I was trying to contribute my experience in  , in reading, my analysis; and I was also gaining, as I will indicate” [29].

Rodney’s groundings emerged from this powerful combination of research and teaching with his eagerness to learn from, and be taught by, those looked down on by mainstream academia. Committed to the revolutionary fervor of the times, the resulting perception and treatment of Rodney as a threat to the establishment was not an effective deterrent. Rodney’s remarkable and unyielding achievements are among the fruits of the post-WWII revolutionary crisis. As the crisis of capitalism and of the white power structure deepens, so too does the influence of Rodney’s life and legacy.

Conclusion

By the age of 38, Rodney had become part of the same “tradition of intellectual leadership among Africans and people of African descent in the Americas” that includes “Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore and C. L. R. James” [30]. It is important to note that for Rodney, scholarship was not simply an academic exercise but one central to making the academy relevant to the liberation of the oppressed. Jamaican professor Verene A. Shepherd argues that it is Rodney’s pedagogy that is the model for the activist academic, a model that remains relevant because activists in academia are still rare and still desperately needed [31].

A recurring theme throughout not only A View from the Third World, but throughout all of Rodney’s work, is  Marx and Engels’ caution against “applying the dialectic mechanically” because the specific historical development of the balance of competing class interests does not proceed in predetermined, inevitable ways, and that what people do matters [32].

The Liberation School study guide for A View from the Third World will help today’s organizers and activists do just that.

References

[1] Karim F. Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (New York: Daraja Press, 2017), xi.
[2] For a more in-depth analysis of Rodney’s pedagogy see Jesse Benjamin and Devyn Springer, “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals,” in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements, ed. D. Ford, (Boston: Brill, 2019), 210-225. For more on Rodney’s life, legacy, and pedagogy, see Devyn Springer and Derek Ford, “Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview with Devyn Springer,” Liberation School, 12 August 2021. Available here.
[3] Patricia Rodney, “Living the Groundings–A Personal Context,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, ed. A.T Rodney and J. Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2019), 77-85, 77.
[4] Ibid., 77-78.
[5] Ibid., 78.
[6] Vijay Prashad, “Foreword,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (New York: Verso, 2018), vii-xiii, viii.
[7] Ibid., viii.
[8] C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 118.
[9] Ibid., 128.
[10] Rodney, “Living the Groundings,” 80.
[11] Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution, xix-lxxiii, xxviii.
[12] Carole Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Re-grounding the Intellectual-Activist Model of Walter Rodney,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, xi-xxii, xvi.
[13] Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso, 1969/2019), 11.
[14] Ibid., 28.
[15] Ibid., 29.
[16] George Lamming, “Foreword,” in Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1981), xvii-xxv, xix.
[17] Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, (New York: Verso, 2018), 3.
[18] Ibid., 50.
[19] Ibid., 150.
[20] Ibid., 105.
[21] Ibid., 12.
[22] Ibid., 15.
[23] Ibid., 14.
[24] Ibid., 18. For a different example of the same line of inquiry, see Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” Monthly Review, 27 June 2022. Available here.
[25] Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers, 66.
[26] Ibid., 67.
[27] Kelley, “Introduction,” xxviii.
[28] Ibid., xxviii.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Lamming, “Foreword,” Rodney, xvii.
[31] Verene A. Shepherd, “The Continued Relevance of Rodney’s Groundings,” In W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 101-108.
[32] Rodney, A View from the Third World, 170.

Assata Shakur, Black Liberation Struggles, and the Cuban Revolution

[Pictured: Fidel Castro and Malcolm X meet in Harlem, NY in 1960]

By Abayomi Azikiwe

Republished from News Ghana.

As far back in history as the period of enslavement of African people in North America, resistance and rebellion has been met with retaliatory repression from the ruling interests.

Freedom fighters such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, among many others named and unknown, have been either brutally executed or left with no alternative other than to seek flight from oppression.

Assata Shakur in Cuba.

This same legacy of confinement, brutality and lynching continued into the post-slavery era of the 20th and 21st centuries. Between the 1880s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, thousands of African Americans were extra-judicially murdered by mobs of law-enforcement agents and vigilantes.

When the Civil Rights Movement erupted on a mass level during the 1950s with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56) and other actions, activists were subjected to unjustified arrests, sentencings and the bombing of homes and churches. During the 1960s, scores of Civil Rights workers were arrested, beaten, intimidated into leaving their home areas, wounded by gunfire and killed. People such as Medgar Evers (1963) and Herbert Lee (1961) of Mississippi were gunned down for their organizational work against racism and disenfranchisement.

In Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church killing four African American girls. During the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi, three Civil Rights workers: Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, were lynched by KKK members who were employed as law-enforcement officers.

In later years, key leaders such as Malcolm X (1965), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (1969) were all assassinated in plots carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) working in conjunction with police agencies and mercenaries. With the emergence of armed self-defense organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Monroe, North Carolina chapter led by Robert F. Williams, the Deacons for Defense (DOD) founded in Louisiana, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), the first independent political formation to utilize the black panther symbol in Alabama; the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Republic of New Africa (RNA), Black Liberation Army (BLA), among others, the Justice Department’s FBI and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies heightened their disruptive tactics against the African American liberation struggle.

Assata and the BLA

Assata Shakur, born in 1947, joined the Black Panther Party in the New York City area while she was a college student in 1970. She had already been active in Black students organizing when she made contact with the BPP, which during 1970, maintained dozens of chapters across the United States as well as an International Section in Algiers, Algeria in North Africa.

Many militant youths in urban areas joined and were influenced by the BPP during 1967-1970 as the level of repression coordinated by the federal government accelerated. A split within the Party leadership during early 1971 over tactics, led to the activation of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) which advocated armed struggle as a defensive measure in response to the widespread harassment and imprisonment of BPP members.

The BLA and the International Black Panther Party with its newspaper entitled “Right On”, supported the International Section in the 1971 split. Panther leaders such as Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Field Marshal Don Cox, Connie Matthews, etc. had maintained the Algiers office since the August 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival, when the Algerian government recognized the BPP as the official representatives of the African American people. The International Section hosted an Afro American Cultural Center during the festival and would later move into an official diplomatic residence which had been occupied by revolutionaries from Vietnam.

Panthers inside the U.S. who were aligned with the BLA continued to work in their underground structures. There were several armed engagements with law-enforcement agents between 1971-1973.

On May 2, 1973, an encounter between Assata Shakur, Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli resulted in the wounding and capturing of Acoli and Assata Shakur and the death of Zayd. One New Jersey State Trooper was killed in what was described as a routine traffic stop on the Turnpike.

This incident came amid enormous propaganda within the U.S. corporate and government-controlled media that characterized the BLA as a violent criminal gang bent on the killing of police officers. However, almost no mention was made by the mainstream press outlets related to the systematic repression under which the BPP and other revolutionary organizations were subjected to by the federal government.

In an open letter from Assata which coincided with the National Jericho March in Washington, D.C. in 1998, that demanded a general amnesty for all U.S. political prisoners, she articulates her position saying: “Neither Sundiata Acoli nor I ever received a fair trial. We were both convicted in the news media way before our trials. No news media was ever permitted to interview us, although the New Jersey police and the FBI fed stories to the press on a daily basis. In 1977, I was convicted by an all- white jury and sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison. In 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case, and who were also extremely fearful for my life.” (https://www.afrocubaweb.com/assata2.htm#Open%20letter)

By late 1981, other BLA cadres and their supporters were the subject of a nationwide dragnet by the FBI. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, an acupuncture specialist, was targeted by the U.S. government claiming he was the leader of the BLA and other revolutionary organizations operating in the New York/ New Jersey area. Scores of activists were subjected to surveillance, grand jury questioning, jailing and imprisonment. Dr. Shakur went underground in 1980 after establishing an acupuncture clinic in Harlem. Today, Dr. Shakur, having been unjustly held in prison since 1986, is suffering from bone marrow cancer and has been given only a few months to live. A campaign to win compassionate release has been underway for several months.

Assata Shakur and the Cuban Revolution

After being liberated from a maximum security prison in New Jersey, Assata lived underground for five years. In 1984, she was granted political asylum by the socialist Republic of Cuba then under the leadership of President Fidel Castro.

Cuban revolutionaries within the July 26th Movement had won genuine liberation for the Caribbean island-nation on January 1, 1959. The revolutionary government immediately outlawed racism and national discrimination while committing themselves to assisting the national liberation struggles in Africa.

In 1961, Robert F. Williams and Mabel Williams were granted refuge in Cuba where they fled after being subjected to threats of arrest and prosecution in North Carolina. Williams was given a program called Radio Free Dixie which broadcast via shortwave deep into the U.S.

Later other political refugees were welcomed by the Cuban Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. When Assata arrived in Cuba in 1984, there were thousands of Internationalist volunteers operating in the Southern African state of Angola in efforts to secure the revolutionary government of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) under fierce attack by the racist apartheid South African Defense Forces (SADF) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). By 1988, the apartheid military forces had been driven out of Angola and the-then racist government based in Pretoria soon agreed to withdraw from neighboring Namibia where they had attempted to suppress the Southwest Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the sole legitimate voice of the Namibian people.

The Republic of Namibia was declared independent on March 21, 1990, just weeks after the release of African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa political prisoners such as future President Nelson Mandela. The apartheid regime would eventually fall after the first democratic nonracial elections of April 1994. Since this time period, the MPLA of Angola, SWAPO of Namibia and the ANC of South Africa have remained in power.

Since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, the socialist government has continued to exemplify international solidarity with oppressed and working people around the world. Hundreds of students from African American and Latin American communities in the U.S. have studied medicine in the Republic of Cuba at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) through full scholarships provided by the Communist Party government.

These developments since 1959 have endeared the Cuban Revolution to revolutionaries in the U.S., Africa, Latin America and other geo-political regions. The political biography of Assata Shakur provides a clear reflection of the interrelationship of revolutionary movements from the U.S., Latin America, the African continent and throughout the globe.

Amílcar Cabral, Historical Materialism, and the "Peoples without History"

By Zeyad el Nabolsy

Republished from Scottish Centre for Global History.

In a speech delivered to the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America held in Havana in January 1966, Cabral posed the question: “does history begin only from the moment of the launching of the phenomenon of class, and consequently, of class struggle? [1] Cabral raised this question because he is concerned with the fact that maintaining the thesis that the existence of classes is a necessary condition for the existence of dynamic social processes logically commits one to excluding several peoples from the historical process, provided that one accepts that at least some societies were classless until they came into contact with European imperialists. The latter is an assumption that is shared by Cabral and his interlocutors. Of course, in order to understand what Cabral is asking here we have to understand what is meant by the word ‘history’ in this context. I think that if one takes into account the Marxist polemical context that Cabral is wading into with this speech, and his attempt to develop a version of historical materialism that would be suitable for conditions in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, one would be justified in thinking that Cabral is referring to a process of social development (or even progress). In other words, the question at hand is not whether peoples without classes have a past, they obviously do. The question is whether they have lived in societies that were dynamic, and where such dynamism could lead to qualitative transformations in social relations such that one could describe those societies as having specific developmental trajectories. Cabral wants to argue that they did in fact live in societies that were dynamic, even if such societies did not contain classes.

Cabral believed that at least some peoples in Guinea-Bissau, such as the Balanta, lived in a classless society before the advent of Portuguese colonialism, and to some extent even after colonialism. [2] Since Cabral thinks that such horizontal societies existed across Africa, Asia, and Latin America before the advent of colonialism, he believes that to maintain that the existence of class struggle, and consequently of classes, is a necessary condition for the existence of a dynamic society is to deny that those peoples who lived in horizontal societies lived in dynamic societies. As he put it: “It would also be to consider – and this we refuse to accept – that various human groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America were living without history or outside history at the moment when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism. It would be to consider that the populations our countries, such as the Balanta of Guiné, the Cuanhama of Angola and the Makonde of Mozambique, are still living today – if we abstract the very slight influence of colonialism to which they have been subjected –  outside history, or that they have no history”. [3] The view that Cabral rejects was upheld by the prominent Marxist Hungarian Africanist, Endre Sik, who in 1966, said of the people who inhabited the Guinea Coast that “we cannot speak of their history prior to the end of the 15th century”. [4] Sik essentially wrote African history as if it was only the history of European imperialism in Africa. [5] Sik’s view converged with the views of some colonial bureaucrats like Sydney Caine who also believed that  all African societies are characterized by a “social structure. . .[which] is inimical to change”. [6] We can understand Cabral as arguing that the convergence between the views of Sik and the views of colonial officials is a result of Sik’s misunderstanding of what historical materialism entails.

The Cabralian Alternative: Historical Materialism as a Theory of Modes of Production

Cabral rejects the reduction of historical materialism to a theory of class struggle and instead he stresses the centrality of the concept of a “mode of production”. According to Cabral,the main cause of historical changes in a given social formation is to be located in the mode of production characteristic of that social formation. Cabral defines the mode of production of a given society as the combination of “the level of productive forces and the system of ownership” that is characteristic of a given social formation or society. [7] It might be tempting to read Cabral as some kind of technological determinist, as Makungu M. Akinyela does. [8] For he says that “the level of productive forces, the essential determinant of the content and form of class struggle, is the true and permanent motive force of history”. [9] However, when we reflect carefully upon the manner in which Cabral speaks of the importance of political factors in bringing about social transformations, we recognize that this cannot be a correct reading of Cabral. Cabral argues that it is not necessary to go through all the stages (in terms of sequences of modes of production) that characterized historical developments in Western Europe. He argues that “such progress depends on the specific possibilities for the development of the society’s productive forces and is mainly conditional on the nature of the political power ruling that society, that is on the type of State or, if we like, on the nature of the dominant class or classes within society” [my emphasis]. [10] Cabral clearly thinks that societal change and transformation is not just exclusively driven by the growth of productive forces. Rather it is driven by the mode of production as a whole. Note that a technological determinist reading of Cabral cannot even get off the ground because Cabral does not seem to have identified productive forces exclusively with technology. If we refer to his practices as an agronomist, [11] It is clear that Cabral did not think that improving the productive forces simply meant introducing new more efficient technology, Cabral thought that the ways in which humans cooperated with one another was a crucial element of the productive forces. In this respect, he is in agreement with Marx and Engels. [12]

The mode of production interpretation is appropriate for explaining the history of societies without classes, because while it is true that not all human societies have historically had classes and/or stratification along class lines, it is true that all human societies have had to produce (where ‘produce’ means ‘work in a cooperative manner upon nature’) in order to sustain themselves. All class relations are relations of production, but not all relations of production are class relations (e.g., in a communist society without classes there would be relations of production which are not class relations). In any society one can identify relations of production in so far one can identify relations of control over labour-power, productive forces, and the fruits of production. Consequently, one can characterize any society according to its dominant mode of production. [13]

Zeyad el Nabolsy is a PhD candidate in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He works on African philosophy of culture, African Marxism, the history and philosophy of science in the context of modern African intellectual history, and history and sociology of philosophy in the context of global intellectual history. His work has appeared in Science & Society, The Journal of African Cultural Studies, The Journal of Historical Sociology, Problemata: Revista Internacional de Filosofía, Kant Studies Online, Liberated Texts, Jadaliyya, among others. He can be contacted by email at ze44@cornell.edu. His Twitter handle is: @ZNabolsy

Further Readings

Amin, Samir. 1964. The Class Struggle in Africa. Cambridge: Africa Research Group.

Bigman, Laura. 1993. History and Hunger in West Africa: Food Production and Entitlement in

Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

Blaut, Jim. 1999. “Marxism and Eurocentric Diffusionism.” In The Political Economy of Imperialism: Critical Appraisals, edited by Ronald Chilcote, 127-140. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Borges, Sónia Vaz. 2019. Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC Education in Guinea Bissau, 1963-1978. Berlin: Peter Lang.

Cabral, Amílcar. 1971. Our People Are Our Mountains: Amílcar Cabral on the Guinean Revolution. London: Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea.

Cabral, Amílcar. 1973. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amílcar, edited by Africa Information Service. New York and London: Monthly Review Press and Africa Information Service.

Cabral, Amílcar. 1979. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amílcar. Translated by Michael Wolfers. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Cabral, Amílcar. 2016. Resistance and Decolonization. Translated by Dan Wood. New York/London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Campbell, Horace. 2006. “Re-visiting the Theories and Practices of Amilcar Cabral in the Context of the Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of African Liberation.” In The Life, Thought, and Legacy of Cape Verde’s Freedom Fighter, Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973): Essays on his Liberation Philosophy, edited by John Fobanjong and Thomas Ranuga, 79-102. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Chabal, Patrick. 1981. “The Social and Political Thought of Amílcar Cabral: A Reassessment.” The Journal of Modern African Studies, 19.1: 31-56.

Chabal, Patrick. 2003. Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War. 2nd Edition. Asmara, Eritrea/ Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Chaliand,Gérard. 1969. Armed Struggle in Africa: With Guerillas in “Portuguese” Guinea. Translated by David Rattray and Robert Leonhardt. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Coutinho, Ângela Sofia Benoliel. 2017. “The Participation of Cape Verdean Women in the National Liberation Movement of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, 1956-1974: The Pioneers.” Africa in the World 02/2017 (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung West Africa).

Davidson, Basil. 2017 [1981]. No Fist is Big Enough to Hide the Sky: The Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, 1963-74. London: Zed Books.

Dhada, Mustafah. 1993. Warriors at Work: How Guinea was Really Set Free. Niwot, Colorado: University of Colorado Press.

Dhada, Mustafah. 1998. “The Liberation War in Guinea-Bissau Reconsidered.” The Journal of Military History 62.3: 571-593.

El Nabolsy, Zeyad. 2020. “Amílcar Cabral’s Modernist Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Liberation.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 32.2: 231-250.

Ferreira, Eduardo de Sousa. 1974. Portuguese Colonialism in Africa: The End of an Era: The  Effects of Portuguese Colonialism on Education, Science, Culture and Information. Paris: The UNESCO Press.

Galvão, Inês, and Catarina Laranjeiro. 2019. “Gender Struggle in Guinea-Bissau: Women’s Participation On and Off the Liberation Record.” In Resistance and Colonialism: Insurgent Peoples in World History, edited by Nuno Domingos, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, and Ricardo Roque, 85-122. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Gomes, Crispina. 2006. “The Women of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde in the Struggle for National Independence.” In The Life, Thought, and Legacy of Cape Verde’s Freedom Fighter, Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973): Essays on his Liberation Philosophy, edited by John Fobanjong and Thomas Ranuga, 69-78. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

LSM. 1974. Guinea-Bissau: Toward Final Victory!, Selected Speeches and Documents from PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde). Richmond, B.C.: LSM Information Center.

LSM. 1978. Sowing the First Harvest: National Reconstruction in Guinea-Bissau. Oakland, CA: LSM Information Center.

Ly, Aliou. 2014. “Promise and Betrayal: Women Fighters and National Liberation in Guinea Bissau” Feminist Africa 19: 24-42.

Ly, Aliou. 2015. “Revisiting the Guinea-Bissau Liberation War: PAIGC, UDEMU and the Question of Women’s Emancipation, 1963-1974.” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 14.3: 361-377.

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Endnotes

[1] Amílcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amílcar, trans. by Michael Wolfers, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 124.

[2] Amílcar Cabral, “Unity and Struggle,” Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amílcar, trans. by Michael Wolfers, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 38.

[3] Amílcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amílcar, trans. by Michael Wolfers, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 124.

[4] Quoted from:  Lars Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau: A Study of Political Mobilization, (Uppsala, Sweden: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1974), 76.

[5] Harry C. Meserve, “The Teaching of African History: A Marxist View,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 1, no.1 (1970): 52-63.

[6] Quoted from: Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,”  International Development and the Social Sciences, ed. by Frederick Cooper and Randall Pickard, (Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 72.

[7] Amílcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amílcar, trans. by Michael Wolfers, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 124.

[8] Makungu M. Akinyela, “Cabral, Black Liberation, and Cultural Struggle” Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral, ed. by Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher Jr., (Dakar and Montreal: CODESRIA and Daraja Press), 448.

[9] Ibid, 125.

[10] Ibid, 126.

[11] Carlos, Schwarz, “Amílcar Cabral: An Agronomist before His Time,” In Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral, ed. by Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher Jr., (Dakar and Montreal: CODESRIA and Daraja Press, 2013), 86.

[12] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, (New York: International Publishers, 2013), 50.

[13] Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History, ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 215.