The Internationalist Lenin: Self-Determination and Anti-Colonialism

By Vijay Prashad

Republished from Monthly Review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bourgeois Nationalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equal Rights of Nations and International Solidarity of Workers

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

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

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

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

A Free Union

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Complete equality for all nations.

• The right of nations to self-determination.

• The amalgamation of the workers of all nations.

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

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

In the USSR and in the Comintern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under Capitalism Black Lives Are Adrift and Vulnerable

By W. T. Whitney, Jr.

Originally published at Monthly Review.

It’s true. Too often, in too many circumstances, for too long, the lives of Black people in the United States don’t matter. Black people fill prisons; their children fill terrible schools; many are poverty-stricken. But at issue here are the killings and people being left to die.

Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that many Black people would not matter much and that some would die. A thousand or so were murdered in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois. Over 2000 more would be lynched during the Reconstruction years, as documented recently by the Equal Justice Initiative. [1] That organization had already documented and memorialized thousands of lynching deaths occurring between 1877 and 1950.

The police killings of Black people prompted the formation of Black Lives Matter. But they die unnecessarily in others ways. Life expectancy is far shorter and infant mortality far greater for U.S. Blacks, for example, than for white people.

According to journalist Adam Serwer, writing in the Atlantic,

The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy.” Specifically, “workers at the front lines of the [COVID-19] pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability.

Significantly, even white people viewed as worthless may be in trouble. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, commenting on the Covid 19 pandemic, told a reporter that “there are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country.” Representative Hollingsworth of Indiana identified Coronavirus deaths as “the lesser of these two evils,” the other being economic collapse.

That white people die because they don’t matter is revealing.  They too may be disposable—if they are unnecessary, in the way, or far off. The victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden are remembered, as are indigenous peoples decimated by settlers and invaders, and civilians and combatants dying in U.S. wars. The political powers seem to be at ease presently with the probability that millions will be dying soon due to climate change.

Dan Glazebrook, writing for Counterpunch, is a witness. He asserts that, “one product has defined capitalism above all else: human waste.” Criticizing Britain’s management of the COVID-19 crisis, he notes that,

Superfluous people, not necessary for production, not able to participate in the market, and an ever-present threat to the stability of the system [are] the main output of the bourgeois epoch.…. [S]urplus Europeans were exiled…to the colonies…to continue the process of exterminating surplus non-Europeans.

Glazebrook cites urban theoretician and historian Mike Davis’s observation that up to 3 billion informal workers constitute “the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet.” But this “is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers. [It’s] a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the corporate matrix.”

Marxist scholar Andy Merrifield identifies some people as “residues.”

They’re minorities who are far and away a global majority. They’re people who feel the periphery inside them, who identify with the periphery, even if sometimes they’re located in the core. Residues are workers without regularity, workers without any real stake in the future of work…. A lot of these residues know that now work is contingent [and] life itself is contingent.

George Floyd’s life was contingent. The lives of U.S. Black people who don’t matter are residues.

Under capitalism, human beings are valued for their use. Enslaved, Black workers were useful, even essential. Then their agrarian society merged with the larger one embarked upon industrial production and territorial expansion. They acquired a distant master that, like the old one, measured the worth of workers with an economic yardstick.

Black agricultural workers, bereft of education, their ancestors stolen from Africa, didn’t fit the capitalist mold. European immigrants ready to work in factories or to occupy land being opened up by the railroads amply fulfilled capitalist objectives.  From Reconstruction on, Black people were marginalized in a country where social needs are neglected and public attention distracted. Violent thugs threatening them have had free rein.

Du Bois in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935) offers an explanation for how the failure of Reconstruction led to limited political rights for Black people and exclusion from real participation in the larger society. Initially,

the reconstructed states were in the power of the rebels and…they were using their power to put the Negro back into slavery.” But the North “united its force with that of the workers to uproot the still vast economic power of the planters. It hoped…to induce the planter to surrender his economic power peacefully, in return for complete political amnesty.

The northern business class was insecure: “the Republican party which represented it was a minority party.” But “united with abolition-democracy [with its] tremendous moral power and popularity,” the party hoped to “buttress the threatened fortress of the new industry.” Giving Blacks the vote “would save the day.” The Republicans sought to nullify apportionment based on non-voting slaves, as provided for in the Constitution. Southerners had relied on that device to inflate their representation in Washington.

But poor whites in the South regarded Blacks as wage competitors. Landowners proceeded to “draw the color line and convince the native-born white voter that his interests were with the planter class.” Poor whites “thought of emancipation as giving them a better chance to become rich planters, landowners, and employers of Negro labor.” They wanted “to check the demands of the Negroes by any means” and were willing “to do the dirty work of the revolution that was coming, with its blood and crass cruelties.”

In the North, “Abolitionists failed to see that…the nation did not want Negroes to have civil rights and that national industry could get its way easier by alliance with Southern landholders than by sustaining Southern workers.” And so, “labor control passed into the hands of white southerners, who combined with white labor to oust northern capitalists” and themselves manage a southern-style capitalist economy.

What resulted remained for decades. Wages for Black people, initially non-existent or very low, stayed depressed. Aspiring Black landowners met resistance, eventually at the hands even of New Deal officials. Because the methods of exploitation available to southern overlords, sharecropping and the convict-leasing system, were less profitable than those available to northern capitalists, the material value of southern Blacks stayed low.

Most Black people were barred from occupying a sustainable niche in the productive apparatus of the U.S. economy. They’ve verged on the irrelevant, remaining as a “residue,” at risk of being disposed of.

Nevertheless, the U.S. political system has been open enough to allow many Black people to find remunerative work, elevate their social-class status, and be safe. Even Black workers defied expectations: in 1950, 43% of Black men in Michigan were working in the auto industry. [2]

The argument here has centered on social-class difference. But racism, which operates as a means for imposing differentiation among humans, also had a part. The notion of racism elaborated by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. is relevant. Reed explains that racism showed up historically as a tool devised by oppressors for dealing with social conflict. He claims that white settlers and other exploiters configured differences among humans—physical, cultural, and religious plus others fashioned out of upper-class snobbery—into an all-embracing concept of race. They thus gained the ability to weaponize inequalities within human society, the better to enforce oppression.

One example: southern elites, from Reconstruction on, arranged for Blacks and the white underclass to be at each other’s throats. Their northern counterparts did likewise, leaving it so that Blacks and whites don’t easily unite in common struggle.

Racism serves as an adjunct to classed-based oppression. Causing pain, it works for maintaining social-class boundaries. The combination of the two has resulted in Black people being left with a generally precarious role within U.S. society and with vulnerability to lethal violence.

Some basic ideas, no less true for being platitudinous, may suffice to conclude this effort. One, an injury to one is an injury to all. Two, ruling class prerogatives and oppression travel in the same lane. Three, dedication to equality, radical or otherwise, does matter.

Anti-colonialist intellectual and activist Franz Fanon has the last word: “For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” You need to replace “Africa” with “USA.”

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician.

Notes

[1] “Reconstruction in America–Racial Violence After the Civil War, 1865–1876,” Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama, pp. 118.

[2] Victor Perlo, People vs. Profits, (International Publishers, NY, 2003), p. 181.

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

By Maoist Communist Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Christian Gines

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Marxist Vision for the Post-Sanders American Left

[Pictured: Members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in NYC}

By Matthew John

As a socialist writer who has been regularly producing political commentary for the last three years, I’ve made some observations about the state of the American Left and it’s potential future prospects. Though my political education began with reading authors like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn nearly two decades ago, I have more recently evolved in my political tendency and now consider myself a Marxist-Leninist. With the advent of Bernie Sanders and the prospects for social democracy in the United States, I was both inspired and frustrated during recent years.

My political views changed significantly over the course of the tumultuous four-year period that included both of Bernie’s presidential runs. But it wasn’t all at once, like a “Eureka!” moment. There was considerable overlap between my espousal of Marxism and my naïve hope in a Sanders-led push toward social democracy. I believe my political trajectory is far from unique and I believe others can change their minds, just as I did. After all, there is a vast population of disgruntled American progressives who recently watched their dreams of a “democratic socialist” presidential administration dashed before their eyes by a relentless, neoliberal, ruling-class institution; the Democratic Party.

Although I am somewhat new to Marxism-Leninism, I have recently read Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds,” Walter Rodney’s “The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World,” and Douglas Tottle’s somewhat obscure “Fraud, Famine and Fascism.” I am currently reading Vincent Bevin’s “The Jakarta Method,” and have many more books on communism and socialism in my queue. These texts and other sources of information (such as online publications and the Revolutionary Left Radio podcast) have allowed me to refine my views on socialism and consider what might be the best path toward this daunting task of reconstructing society. My recent trip to Cuba then provided tangible inspiration in this pursuit.

The goal, simply put, is for the working class to gain control of the political system and the economy so that industrial production is harnessed primarily for human need and public good. Once the “means of production” are decidedly seized, universal human flourishing can then be persistently pursued. Under capitalism, things like housing, healthcare, food, and education are largely commodified. Assuming adequate resources exist, socialists like myself believe these services should be human rights. Building class consciousness, political education, the capacity for community defense and mutual aid, and developing socialist political parties are some of the major projects that await us. But a primary barrier to these prerequisites is a ubiquitous Western phenomenon: anti-communism.

There are certain postures Bernie Sanders himself adopted that not only fall into the category of “left anti-communism” (such as the demonization of socialist projects of the Global South like Venezuela and Cuba), but also contributed to his demise (such as Russiagate). Whether or not Sanders personally believes in all of his public stances is another issue all together. But speculation could lead us to surmise that Sanders felt the best political calculation was to lean into the anti-communist rhetoric; after all, most of the American political landscape is still saturated with evidence-free, McCarthyist stereotypes of Marxism and Actually Existing Socialism (many of which originated with conservative — or in some cases fascist — sources; a fact all self-proclaimed “progressives” should care about).

In addition to recognizing the fabrications and McCarthyism of tactics like Russiagate, we need to continue exposing voter suppression, the corporate nature of the two-party system, and the problems with bourgeois democracy more broadly. We also need to re-examine imperialist lies beyond just the Cold War variety (many of which Sanders and other progressives utilize in their rhetoric). And we need to recognize the glaring omission of the entire topic of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism within the rhetoric of “democratic socialism”, especially in terms of the foreign resource extraction required of an empire like the U.S. and the related culpability of a hypothetically successful progressive presidential administration.

A larger theme in this discourse is the progressive push for Medicare for All, tuition-free college, housing reform, and other such policies. These and similar initiatives are consistently implemented by socialist countries, as they are in the material interests of the working class. Of course, this is yet another element of Western anti-communism; the whitewashing and omitting of the actual, tangible accomplishments of socialism (which Parenti and others have elucidated). It is important to explore this topic in general, but also to point out the inherently white supremacist, colonialist nature of such omissions, as they discount and marginalize the vast accomplishments of the anti-colonial and socialist movements of the Global South. This phenomenon can be witnessed pretty much any time American “progressives” share information about how all other “industrialized” nations have some form of universal healthcare, yet they consistently fail to mention Vietnam, the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.

Speaking of Venezuela, there should also be a discussion of this oil-rich, Latin American nation as a modern example of Actually Existing Democratic Socialism, including the inherent challenges in such a path. These include far-right political parties and their violent sabotage in coordination with the still-existing bourgeoisie, specifically large companies hoarding food, right-wing protesters burning food, etc. — phenomena practically unheard of in countries that have taken a more Marxist-Leninist path. A major lesson from this particular discussion, once again, is that these progressive social programs have already been successfully enacted by revolutionary socialist governments around the world — not just by Western bourgeois welfare states. We therefore have numerous historical models regarding how to accomplish this outside of the false notion of socialism that has found its way into American political consciousness (which is essentially just social democracy accompanied by vaguely socialist rhetoric).

The progressive movement centered around the presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders has certainly had a far-reaching and positive impact. If nothing else, this effort accurately described the desolate material conditions in the “land of the free”, proposed reasonable solutions, and paved the way for future socialists to become involved in American politics. Possibly most importantly, Sanders has softened the blow of the “S” word, especially with Millennials. (Due to the vestiges of Cold War propaganda and McCarthyism, socialism has largely been portrayed as some sort of cartoonish “evil” in Western discourse.)

Bernie’s “Political Revolution” unfortunately failed, but if it had succeeded, the success might have only been temporary. When social democratic reforms (like the New Deal) are implemented, those gains can be — and usually are — rolled back significantly by the tenacious forces of capital, which are allowed to continue operating under capitalism and within bourgeois democracy. In short, not only are the reforms themselves compromises with the ruling class (and therefore watered-down half measures), but they are subject to the whims of the ruling class, which has not been overthrown. In addition to our own New Deal legislation being gradually decimated by neoliberalism, things could end up even worse, as Chileans tragically learned in 1973.

Despite the momentary setbacks experienced by the progressive Left, I find myself optimistic that, when properly introduced to the ideas of Marxism, it is often the case that “non-sectarian” progressives and leftists will respond positively and openly. It happened to me, it has happened to acquaintances and many social media users I have interacted with, and it can happen to others as well. Learning about anti-communist propaganda and the rich, global history of socialism can be a very rewarding and liberating process, and those who have a pre-existing distrust of major Western institutions are inherently more receptive to this type of information. The failures of the attempted “progressive insurgency” within the Democratic Party and the subsequent widespread disillusionment should also serve as catalysts for American progressives who are seeking new analyses and visions for a future socialist reality. We must learn from these domestic failures and look to the infinitely demonized, yet successful global socialist triumphs of history.

It is time for progressives and working-class Americans of all stripes to unite and chart a path toward true socialism and human liberation. As Marx said, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

"It's A Class Struggle, Goddammit!": A Speech by Fred Hampton (1969)

The following is the full transcript of a speech delivered by Fred Hampton at Northern Illinois University, November, 1969

What we're going to try to do, is we're going to try to rap and educate. We're glad to try to throw out some more information. And it's going to be hard to do. The Sister made a beautiful speech as far as I'm concerned. Chaka, the Deputy Minister of Information, that's his job--informing. But I'm going to try to inform you also.

One thing Chaka forgot to mention that Brothers and Sisters don't do exactly the same. We don't ask for any Brother to get pregnant or anything. We don't ask no brothers to have no babies. So that's a little different also.

After we get through speaking, for those people of you who don't think you understood all of the ideology exposed here so far, and the ideologies that I will espouse, we will have a question and answer period. For those people who have their feelings hurt by niggers talking about guns, we'll have a cry'in after the question and answer period. And for those white people that are here to show some type of overwhelming manifestation of guilt syndromes, and want people to cry out that they love them, after the cry-in, if we have time, we'll allow you all to have a love-in.

So now we'll get down to business. First of all, about what some people call the TRIAL. We call it a HECATOMB, we call it a hecatomb. That's spelled h-e-c-a-t-o-m-b. And I know there's enough dictionaries floating around up here to probably fill the room up, so you can check that out. It means a sacrifice. It usually means a sacrifice of an animal. So we'd like you, if you'd like to do that, so people ask you "Have you been to the trial," tell them that you've been down or heard about the hecatomb, because that's what it is. It's a public sacrifice. It's a situation where they're trying to unjustly, illegally try our Chairman.

We look at it as a 1969 manifestation of the Dred Scott Decision. We look at Chairman Bobby as being the manifestation of Dred Scott in 1857. And we look at Judge Hoffman as being a manifestation of Judge Taney in 1857. Because in 1857 Dred Scott was a negro, a former slave--he was still a slave, because we're slaves--who went into court and evidently had some type of misunderstanding about what he was in American society, where he fit in.

So he went to the Supreme Court to have Judge Taney answer him and try to clear up some mistaken ideas that he had floatin' around in his little old head. Ang Judge Taney did just that. Judge Taney explained to him very clearly that, "Nigger, you're nobody, you're property, you're a slave. That the systems--the legal system, the judicial system--all types of systems that are functioning in America today was set up long before you got here, brother. Because we brought you over to make money to keep what we've got going, these avaricious, greedy businessmen, to keep what we've got going, going on."

And Dred Scott couldn't understand this. There was a big rebuttal. And at that time, Judge Taney made a statement that has become famous. And that statement, maybe not in the same words but through actions ant through social practice, is being manifested down at the New reigstag Building at Jackson and Dearborn. It's being manifested through Judge Hoffman by saying the same thing that Judge Taney said in 1857. When he told Dred Scott that "Nigger, a black man in America has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." And that's the same thing that Judge Hoffman is telling our Chairman every day.

And we understand. You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that's anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, "Well, I can't dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you. They said these are some of the excuses that I use to negate really why I am not in the struggle."

We got a lot of answers for those people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara end Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that revolution is a class struggle. It was one class--the oppressed--those other class--the oppressor. And it's got to be a universal fact. Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know that as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a revolution. They can talk about numbers; they can hang you up in many, many ways, but as soon as you start talking about class, then you got to start talking about some guns. And that's what the Party had to do.

When the Party started to talk about class struggle, we found that we had to start talking about some guns. If we never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that when you, the by-product, what comes off of racism, that capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to take money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means that capitalism had to, through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a by-product of that.

Anybody that doesn’t admit that is showing through their non-admittance and their non-participation in the struggle that all they are, are people who fail to make a commitment; and the only thing that they have going for them is the education that they receive in these institutions—education enough to teach them some alibis and teach them that you’ve gotta be black, and you’ve gotta change you name. And that’s crazy.

The minister of education of the Party, Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, and Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, just got back from Africa visiting Eldridge Cleaver. And they said niggers over there never will be wearing the type of garb that some of these Africanized fools over here wear. They’re wearing rags or either they’re wearing nothing. And if you want to dress like some African people, then you oughta dress like the Angolans or the people in Mozambique. These are the people that are doing something. You need to dress like people that are in liberation struggles. But nah, you don’t want to get that Africanized, because as soon as you have to dress like somebody from Angola or Mozambique, then after you put on whatever you put on, and it can be anything from rags to something from Saks fifth Avenue, you got to put on some bandoliers and some AR-15’s and some 38’s; you’ve got to put on some Smith and Wessons and some Colt 45’s, because that’s what they’re wearin’ in Mozambique. And any nigger that runs around here tellin’ you that when your hair’s long and you got a dashiki on, and you got bubus and all these sandals, and all this type of action, then you’re a revolutionary, and anybody that doesn’t look like you, he’s not—that man has to be out of his mind.

Because we know that political power doesn’t flow from the sleeve of a dashiki. We know that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. And that’s true. It has to be true. We know that in order to be able to talk about power, that what you’ve got to be able to talk about is the ability to control and define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner. That means that if you can’t control and define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner, then you don’t even have any dealings with power, you don’t know and you probably never will know what power is. And we know what power is, and we know who’s doing harm to the people—the enemy.

And everybody wants to talk about…the pork chops will tell you in a minute “The pigs don’t want you to get black. They don’t want you to get no black studies programs. They don’t want you to wear dashikis. They don’t want you to learn about the motherland and what roots to eat of the ground. They don’t want that—because as soon as you get that, as soon as you go back 11th century culture, you’ll be alright.”

Check the people who went back to 11th century culture. Check the people that are wearing dashikis and bubus and think that that’s going to free them. Check all of these people, find out where they’re located, find out the addresses of their office, write them a letter and ask them if in the last year how many times their office been attacked. And then write any Black Panther Party, anywhere in the United States of America, anywhere in Babylon, and ask them how many times the pigs have attacked them. Then when you get your estimation of both of them, then you figure out what the pigs don’t like. That’s when you figure out what the pigs don’t like.

We’ve been attacked three times since June. We know what pigs don’t like. We’ve got people run out of the country by the hundreds. We know what pigs don’t like. Our Minister of Defense is in jail, our Chairman is in jail, our Minister of Information’s in exile, our Treasurer, the first member of the Party, is dead. The Deputy Minister of Defense and the Deputy Minister of Information, Bunchy, Alprentice Bunchy Carter, and John Huggins from Southern California, murdered by some pork chops, talking about a BSU program. We know what the pigs don’t like.

We said nobody would shoot a Panther but a pig, because Panthers don’t pose a threat to anybody but pigs. And if people tell you that Panthers pose threats, then ask them what kind of sense it would make, unless it’s to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to feed somebody’s son and then at 3 o’clock that afternoon shoot him—save a meal. We don’t need to do that. What sense does it make for us to open up a free health clinic where the only prerequisite that you got to have to receive free medical aid is the prerequisite that you be sick. And we’ve got students who jiving themselves and running around playing, talking about they doin’ something for the struggle, and I want to know what more could you do? And you all people come from Chicago.

People talking about the Party co-opted by white folks. That’s what that mini-fascist, Stokely Carmichael said. He’s nothing but a jackanapes. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a jackanapes, cause I’ve been knowing him for years, and that’s all he could be, if he go around murder-mouthin’ the Black Panther Party.

If we’re co-opted by white people, then check the locations of our offices, our breakfast program, our free health clinic is opening up probably this Sunday at 16th and Springfield. No does everybody know where 16th and Springfield is at? That’s not in Winnetka, you understand. That’s not in Dekalb. That’s in Babylon. That’s in the heart of Babylon, Brothers and Sisters.

And that free health clinic was put there because we know where the problem is at. We know that black people are most oppressed. And if we didn’t know that, then why the hell would we be running around talking about the black liberation struggle has to be the vanguard for all liberation struggles? If there’s ever going to be any liberation in the mother country, ever gonna be any liberation in the colony, then we got to be liberated by the leadership of the Black Panther Party and the black liberation struggle. We don’t negate that fact.

We’re not hung up in anybody’s not a Panther. We don’t want to get you thinkin’ that, because we can dig Fred, I mean Everett, we can dig him. But we can’t dig Ron Karenga and LeRoi Jones. We can’t dig that. We can’t see any social practice on the part of them Brothers. We know that they both have names longer than my arm. And both of them supposed to be so intelligent and so smart. And that’s the problem right now.

We’re talking about destroying the system, and they have hang-ups doing that because they’re constantly buying property within the system. And it’s kind of hard to burn up on Tuesday what you bought last Monday. Because they’re a bunch of unrepentant capitalists. They’ll never repent. And they know better. We try to make excuses for them—“Maybe they’ll have to go through stages, Fred.” No, that’s not it. Because they’re much older than we are—I’m 21. We’re all young. So stages, they don went through them. Ron Karenga has more degrees than a thermometer. That’s right, he has more degrees than a thermometer and he continues to do what he’s doin’. And how do they fool you? Because they pick the leaders they want. And they put those people up there and portray them as being your leaders when, in fact, they’re leaders of nobody.

…we call the oppressed apologists. Because after something’s happened, all they can do is apologize for it. Look in the papers. Now they’re drawing pictures of the Chairman chained and gagged. Don’t you know that if the news media, the established press, had moved before this, that they could have stopped this rising tide of fascism years ago. But they endorsed, they joined, they supported what fascists were doing at the time. And now it’s being heaped down upon all of the people.

And a lot of people think now that their hands are getting dirty. We call them ideological servants of United States fascism. And that’s what they are, because they serve fascism by doing nothing about it until the law goes over and then they apologize for it, they get apologetic. But we say it’s the same press that we’ll look at and believe and think is bona fide; the same press that talked us into believing that we was somebody when in fact we were nobody.

I don’t think there’s anything more important. I think that what Malcolm says is important. Now think back. Those students were laughing at Malcolm. Can you dig it? They were laughing at Malcolm. Why? Regis Debray, he says the revolutionaries are in the future. That militants and pork chops and all these people, radical students, are in the present, and that most of the rest of the people try to remain in the past. That’s why when somebody comes that’s in the future of a lot of us can’t understand him. And the same thing that you don’t understand Huey P. Newton now, you didn’t understand Malcolm when he was living. But we know that when Malcolm left, the well almost ran dry. You don’t miss the water til the well runs dry, and it almost ran dry.

Huey P. Newton got to reading, and he’s not like a lot of us. A lot of us read and read and read, but we don’t get any practice. We have a lot of knowledge in our heads, but we’ve never practiced it; and made any mistakes and corrected those mistakes so that we will be able to do something properly. So we come up with like we say more degrees than a thermometer, but we’re not able to walk across the street and chew gum at the same time, because we have all that knowledge but it’s never been exercised, it’s never been practiced. We never tested it with what’s really happening. We call it testing it with objective reality. You might have any kind of thought in your mind, but you’ve got to test it with what’s out there. You see what I mean?

They talked us into buying candy bars and throwing the candy away and eating the wrapper. They’re the only people in the world, you understand, that’s right, that can sell ice boxes to Eskimoes. They can sell natural wigs to niggers that’s got natural hair already. And see, this is a shame. They can sell a one-legged man probably 24 tickets in a asskicking contest, and he knows he has no business being there. See, these are the things they can do to us and then they have us believe that what they’re tellin’ us is right, it’s bona fide, it’s justified. We say that’s wrong, that’s incorrect, that Malcolm, when he spoke to students, and you probably heard that record, he speaks to some Jews, some slick people, and he told them.

You might say, “Well, the way I feel, people ought to be able to walk around naked because rape is love.” That’s idealism. See what I mean? You’re dealing in metaphysics. You’re dealing in subjectivity, because you’re not testing it with objective reality. And what’s really wrong is that you don’t go test it. Because if you test it, you’ll get objective. Because as soon as you walk out there, a whole lot of objective reality will vamp down upon your ass and rape you of whatever you have. So whenever this happens, this is when people get a whole lot of mistaken ideas. That’s why a lot of you can’t understand and can’t agree with a lot of what we said. You’ve never tried it.

You don’t know whether people relate to the breakfast program, because you’ve never fed anybody. You don’t know anything about the free health clinic because you never asked anybody. You don’t know anything about the good that a gun does you, because you never tried one. And we say that if you was born and if you said you didn’t like pears and you never tasted pears, you’d have to be a liar. You don’t know whether you like pears, but you can’t claim that you don’t like pears. The only way that anybody can tell you the taste of a pear is if he himself has tasted it. That’s the only way. That’s the objective reality. That’s what the Black Panther Party deals with. We’re not metaphysicians, we’re not idealists, we’re dialectical materialists. And we deal with what reality is, whether we like it or not.

A lot of people can’t relate to that because everything they do is gagged by the way they like things to be. We say that’s incorrect. You look and see how tings are and then you deal with that. We runnin’ around talking about “We gonna love all black people. We have an undying love for all black people.” And you know what? That if Malcolm came back, he’d walk pas a million Klansmen to get to Stokely and whoop his motherfuckin’ ass. Because Malcolm was standing right like this in a room, where white people weren’t even allowed. You hear me? They wouldn’t allow no white people in there. But Malcolm’s dead. Now what happened? What’d that fool’s name, James Whitmore. Didn’t he do his little skin?

Because they had names with 37X, 15X, blacker than black, and they were able to sneak in because of this ignorant potient #9 that these maniacs are trying to whoop on us—“We gonna love all black people because every Negro is a potential black man.”

The man that testified against Chairman Bobby in the Conspiracy Trial down in Chicago was a black man. The man that has Chairman Bobby on a murder trial in Connecticut is a black man. The man who murdered Malcolm X is a black man. The judge that denied Eldridge Cleaver bond after a white man had granted him bond—a nigger who investigated on his own and said, “Nigger, I don’t think you ought to be on the street,” was a black man, Thurgood Marshall, Thurgood NOGOOD Marshall, that the NAACP put in. That’s one of the things about sittin’ in and dyin’ in and waitin’ in and cryin’ in got us. If Thurgood Marshall hadn’t been there, then Eldridge Cleaver would probably still be here with the people.

He’s a nigger, a bootlicker, a tonto, a jackanapes. You understand? Goin’ “I don’t think you should be on the streets.” And we runnin’ around lettin’ niggers tell us we got to love all black people.

You heard about the conspiracy trial on the West Side that they were able to win, with Doug Andrews and Fat Crawford, when they had the big burn on the West Side in the Martin Luther King riot? Ask ‘em! Brothers, what’s wrong with you, Brothers and Sisters? Ask ‘em was that a white man. No! Because Doug and them they criticized us for our liberal stand. They call it liberal. So they let nobody in their hood but black people. But they didn’t know. Anybody ever hear about Gloves on the South Side of Chicago? He’s not white. [Glove Davis was later on one of the Chicago policemen that participated in Fred’s assassination.] Did you think Buckney was white? Buckney, who’s taking all of your Brothers and all of your little Sisters and all of your little cousins and nephews, and he’s gonna continue to take ‘em. And if you don’t do anything, he’s gonna take your sons and your daughters. And a lot of niggers is going to school now trying to make a name. We don’t hear nobody running around talking about “I’m Benedict Arnold, III,” because Benedict Arnold’s children don’t want to talk about they his children. You hear people talking about they might be Patrick Henry’s children—people that stood up and said “Give me liberty or give me death.” Or Paul Revere’s cousin. Paul Revere said, “get your guns, the British are coming.” The British were the police.

Huey said “Get your guns, the pigs are coming.” Same thing. There’ll be a lot of Newtons running around. A lot of your kids will be calling themselves Huey P. Newton, III. They won’t be calling themselves Ooga-Booga or Karangatang Karenga, or Mamalama Karenga—none of that shit. They won’t be calling themselves that. You see, ask the pigs in California. Ask them! You see that? Hand me one of them posters, Brother. The one right there. Now if you think I’m lying, look at this. Take a look at this. Now all you Sisters here, tell me what looks better—a nigger runnin’ around in a robe and a staff pole, lookin’ like Moses, or these bad—these are the baddest lookin’ …. You might think, you might say you’re chauvinistic, organizational chauvinistic you might call it. You might call me wrapped up in the Party’s own ego. But I’m wrapped up in the truth. And I think the Sister can verify that these are the baddest. These are the movie stars for Babylon, Godamnit. Huh? Fuck John Wayne and all this other shit.

Alright. But you see, if you look at that, that’s what we look good in. We don’t care if niggers wear dashikis. You understand? That’s not gonna mean anything in the final analysis. But we’re saying that you need some tools.

You ever had the occasion to have a doctor come to your house, or a plumber comes to your house? Suppose a plumber came to your house, he opened up his bag and he had stethoscopes and thermometers and hypodermic needles and syringes. You’d say “You came to fix the plumbing? Brother, you got the wrong tools. Something suspicious is going on because you don’t even have the proper tools.” Ain’t that right?

Suppose somebody came to deliver your baby and he had plumber's tools? I know you Sisters would scream bloody murder. No but you’d say, “This is not right, Brother. We can’t have this. You got to, you understand, you gotta come a little easier, you got to show me something better. You got to have some tools that are more appropriate for the occasion, you understand, because I don’t have any runny faucets or anything.”

So when people come into our community with tanks, when they come into Babylon or Warsaw, or whatever you want to call it, like they did into Henry Horner Projects—and that’s a manifestation of, a very clear manifestation of what’s happening in Babylon. When they do that, when they come in there with tanks and those tanks are tools, those tanks are tools of war, they’re declaring war on the community. And if you, when they come into the community with tanks, you come out with dashikis and nothin’ but dashikis, bubus and nothin’ but bubus, sandals and nothing but sandals, then you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. You’d better go back in the house, if you have to strip buck naked, if you got to get asshole naked, put you on even if it ain’t nothing but a holster and a gun and some ammunition. Take your bear ass, you understand, and they won’t consider you being naked. Nobody will try, you understand, to whistle at you, or anything. Cause this will be gone from the minute …any kind of sexual attraction you had will be gone. Cause they will be looking at Mr. and Mrs. Colt .45, Mr. and Mrs. .357 Magnum. And the shapes on them are the best shapes we have in Babylon to deal with. And you Brothers holdin’ a .357 Magnum in your hand, there ain’t nothin’ that feels like a .357 Magnum, except one of these beautiful black Sisters. But we need them.357 Magnums also.

When we go out there, we’ll be able to protect ourselves. Huey P. Newton issued a mandate a long time ago. It was executive Mandate #3. It said we need to draw the line of demarcation. And when pigs move on our cribs, we have to protect our crib with gun force. Pigs don’t move on Panther cribs. When they move on Panther cribs, they make sure the Panther’s out of town. We had a situation where they moved on a Panther crib and they had three helicopters above his crib. I’m serious, I’m serious. See, they come prepared. Because they know when they comin’ to a Panther’s crib that we might talk a lot of rhetoric, but we deal with the same basic jargon that the people in Babylon deal with. It takes two to tango, motherfucker. As soon as you kick that door down, I have to kick it back to you. We don’t lock our doors. We just get us some good guns and leave them motherfuckers open and when people come in there we put something on them that will make them go to the hardware, buy a lock, come back, pull the door closed, lock it and stay their ass outside!

We’re gonna move as quickly as we possibly can for the people with the questions and answers and the people with the guilt syndrome and the people that have been embarrassed and shamed and disgraced. And we’ve talked about their leaders like LeRoi Jones and Mamalama Karangatang Karenga, a big bald-headed bazoomie as far as we’re concerned. That’s what he is. And we think that if he’s gonna continue to wear dashikis, that he oughta stop wearin’ pants. Cause he’s look a lot better in miniskirts. That’s all a motherfuckin’ man needs in Babylon that ain’t got no gun, and that’s a miniskirt. And maybe he can trick his way out of somethin’. Cause he not gonna shoot his way outta nothin’. He won’t fight temptation, but he never killed anybody but the Black Panther member. Name somebody. Name me a time you read about Karangatang’s office being attacked. The only time he ever had the occasion to use a gun was on Alprentice Bunchy Carter, a revolutionary. This Brother had more revolutionary poetry for a motherfucker than anybody. Revolutionary culture. John Huggins. The only time they lifted a gun was against these people.

As Huey says in prison when they lifted their hands against Bunchy and when they lifted their hands against John, they lifted their hands against the best that Babylon possesses. And you should say that. You should feel anytime when revolutionary Brothers die. You never heard about the Party going around murdering people. You dig what I’m saying? Think about it. I’m not even gonna tell you. You think about it for yourself.

We started the Black Panther Party in 1966. I’m gonna tell you the whole story in a minute. We started dealing with pigs. You think we scared of a few karangatangs, a few chumps, a few male chauvinists? They tell their women “Walk behind me.” The only reason a woman should walk behind a faggot like that is so she can put his foot knee deep in his ass.

We don’t need no culture except revolutionary culture. What we mean by that is a culture that will free you. You heard your Field Lieutenant talking about a fire in the room, didn’t you? What you worry about when you got a fire in this room? You worry about water or escape. You don’t worry about nothin’ else. If you say “What’s your culture during this fire?” “Water, that’s my culture, Brother, that’s my culture.” Because culture’s a thing that keeps you. “What’s your politics?” Escape and water. “What’s your education?” Escape and water. When people ask us about our culture, we say our culture’s guns, baby. Our culture’s revolutionary art, like that. And when you see those two Brothers who picked up them guns and went out into Babylon in ’66 when a lot of us were scared to do anything except lock ourselves up in the closet and listen to Coltrane—ain’t that something for woopin’ a motherfucker’s ass. And this turned us on and this made us black enough that we were bad. Then this made us black enough to get out and launch a blanket indictment at the murder-mouthin’ rest of the black people. Nigger, you ain’t got no natural. Nigger, how come your name ain’t changed? Ask the pigs in California. Ask ‘em. “Who do you fear most? Ron Mamalama Karenga, or Huey P. Newton, who is named after a demagogic, lyin’ politician, Huey P. Long?” And pigs don’t care about that. Because you don’t have to call, if your shotgun’s a Browning, you don’t have to give it no African name, because believe me, it shoots the same. You understand? It shoots the same….

Changing your name is not gonna change our set of arrangements. The only thing that’s gonna change our set of arrangements is what’s gotten us into this set of arrangements. And that’s the oppressor. And it’s on three stages, we call it the three-in-one: avaricious, greedy businessmen; demagogic, lyin’ politicians; and racist, pig fascist, reactionary cops. Until you deal with those three tings, then your set of arrangements will remain the same. The only difference will be that you’re still under fascism, but instead of Fred being under fascism, I’ll be Oogabooga under fascism. But I’ll feel the same. Instead of me goin’ to the gas chamber, I’ll go to an African section of the gas chamber. We so Africanized over here that if Africans came over here, you’d have to give them a catalogue to find out what the fuck they were buyin’. That’s right, you’d have to give them a catalogue to find out what the fuck they were buyin’. You got posters and pictures and names, we’re namin’ things and namin’ ourselves names they never even heard of. And we call ourselves Africanized. And ain’t that somethin’? You understand?

If you’re racist, let me tell you somethin’. Or if you’re a reactionary nationalist. White folks run it. Go to south Africa and ask ‘em. Go ahead. If you want an example of cultural nationalism, the best one I can give you is Papa Doc, Duvalier. In Haiti, all the black people, “We need some black-ness” Papa Doc—naw, Duvalier said “Right on, we need some blackness. Let’s get all the white folks out of here.” Got all the white folks out, and now he’s oppressing all the black folks. When the black folks complain about it, he says, “Well, godamn; what you all complainin’ about now? I’m black. I can’t do nothin’ wrong brother. We already qualified that.” That’s why these apologists like Wesley South come on the air, and to rap that sophistry that the Sister was talkin’ about. Talkin’ about, they’re ballyhooing, really. Just rappin’ about nothin’ because they’re jackanapes in our community allowed to remain there only because of their skin complexion. And we ought to drive them out. Think about it.

You’ve got Bobby Seale chained and gagged at the Federal Building. You’ve got James and Michael Soto who was murdered in two days. By the way, for all you white folks who claim you’re radicals, that claim you’re gonna support the Party. We move in and we’re saying that there’s no better, there’s no higher Marxist than Huey P. Newton. Not Chairman Mao Tse-Tung or anybody else. We’re saying that unless people show us through their social practice that they relate to the struggle in Babylon, that means that they’re not internationalists, that means that they’re not revolutionaries, truly Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. We look at Kim Il Sung. We look at Comrade the Marshall, Marshall Kim Il Sung of Korea as towering far and high above in his social practice as Mao Tse-Tung. If you can relate to that, cool. If you can’t relate to that, walk out with your as picked clean like the chickens do, you dig? If you can’t relate to that. And we’re tellin’ you that.

And you motherfuckers who think you’re so radical that you’re trying to radicalise everything in Washington. And I don’t know what the fuck you could radicalise, because you ain’t gonna do nothing but walk between the bodies of two dead men, Lincoln and Washington. And I know you’re not gonna stand up and gain no redress. And there’s just as much chance for Nixon giving you some redress. If you can’t get 200,000 people to march on Washington for something that’s in Vietnam, why the fuck can’t you get 200,000 people to come to Jackson and Dearborn, the Federal Building, and march for the Chairman of Babylon, the man who did more for Babylon, and more for Vietnam than you marchin’ maniacs will ever do. Because you’re not doin’ nothin’ for nobody but Florsheims and Stetsons or Stacy Adams and anybody else, because you’re gonna wear your soles out—your metaphysical souls and the soles on your shoes. And we say if you can’t relate to that, then fuck you.

Because our line’s been consistent. We know the Marxist-Leninists. People who might not want to dig on it, they say Marxist-Leninist they don’t curse. This is something we got from slave masters. We know niggers invented the word motherfucker. We wasn’t fuckin’ nobody’s mother. It was the master fuckin’ people’s mothers. We invented the word, you dig? We relate to that. We Marxist-Leninist niggers, and we some Marxist-Leninist cussin’ niggers, and we gonna continue to cuss, godamnit. Cause that’s what we relate to, that’s what’s happening in Babylon. That’s objective reality. Don’t nobody be walkin’ around in Babylon spoutin’ out at the mouth about a whole lot of academic bullshit, intellectually masturbating, catching diarrhea of the mouth. We say to those motherfuckers if you want to catch a mouth disease, you come and talk that shit in a community where the Panthers are at, and you’ll get a mouth disease alright. You’re gonna get hoof-in-mouth; Panther hoof-in-mouth. So if you radicals can’t relate to that, then fuck you, because we know what Chairman Bobby did for the struggle.

And we know that the people in Vietnam, they know that peace, just like Huey P. Newton tells about our motto, that we are the advocates of the abolition of war. We do not want war, but we understand that war can only be abolished through war. That in order to put down the gun, make a man get rid of the gun, it’s necessary to pick up a gun. And you motherfuckers that’s for peace in Vietnam, the Black Panther Party is for victory in Vietnam. We say that they’re aggressors, they’re a bunch of lackey running dogs, that they’re imperialists. They’re a bunch of Wall Street warmongers. And they need to be driven out of there.

And the only way that the liberation of the oppressed people Vietnam or the oppressed people of Babylon’s freedom can be founded, it has to be founded on the land that is fertilized by the bones and blood of these aggressive pig dogs that come into our communities and occupy our communities like troops occupy a foreign territory and go into Vietnam and fight and struggle relentlessly against the people in Vietnam to have a right to self-determination. We don’t care whether anybody likes it or not. That’s our line. It’s a Marxist-Leninist line. It’s consistent. It’s going to remain that way, and it’s been that way.

If you can’t get 200,000 people to come see about Bobby, then we say you’re counter-revolutionary. That what you’re doing is you’re taking some kind of route from DeKalb where you’re going to get to Vietnam without even passing the Henry Horner Projects on the West Side of Chicago. That’s impossible. You think Vietnam is bad? Check the laws. In Vietnam if you lose one son they allow you to keep the other one. They say, “Here, mother dear, hold him—hold him tight.” He can stay at home, you understand. If you have two in there and one dies, they’ll ship him back. They’ll ship him back and get him out of the war where there’ll be no chance of him dying, because “Miss, this war is not going to take both of your sons.” And then you’re marchin’ on this cruel war in Washington, all you radicals, and what about Mrs Soto, who lost two sons in one week? That proves to us through historical fact that Babylon is worse than Vietnam; we need to have some moratoriums on the black community in Babylon and all oppressed communities in Babylon.

And Charles Jackson, from Altgeld Gardens. Last week a 14-year-old boy throwing rocks. The pigs told him to halt, and the motherfucker shot and murdered him. Murdered him in cold blood. And then you motherfuckers got the nerve to go tramping off to Washington, marching between two dead motherfuckers. The Panther Party is going to criticize you motherfuckers. We gonna criticize you out open because we believe in mass revolutionary criticism. We’re gonna tell you that you’re wrong, because we done had a lot of criticism levelled at us for fucking around with you. You will either be part of the problem or you’re gonna be part of the solution. And if we find out you motherfuckers is part of the problem, we’re gonna start turning the guns on you crazy motherfuckers.

We’re gonna have some questions and answers. We’re gonna do one thing, too. And this is another thing out of sight to show the people where we come from. We come from Babylon. The Black Panther Party’s ran solely by black people. If you get a chance—I don’t think it’s gonna be this Sunday, but we taped this Sunday and shown next Sunday, I’m almost sure. It’s gonna be taped this Sunday and shown next Sunday. There’ll be a big round table discussion that’s gonna be on “For Blacks Only”, any you can check the thing and see what it is. And either myself or Chaka will be there. We’ll be presenting the Black Panther Party. And if you get a chance, why don’t you look at it.

If you wanna do something for me, we’d like to do something for Chairman Bobby, if you just clap your hands for me. This is what we call—you don’t have to clap to loud—this is what we call the people beat. It’s a beat that was started in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. It’s a beat that never stops because it’s the beat they got because they knew it couldn’t be stopped. It’s the beat that manifested in you, the people. Chairman Bobby Seale says that as long as there’s black people, there’ll always be the Black Panther Party. But they never can stop the Party unless they stop the beat. As long as you manifest the beat, we can never be stopped. You think the beat is dangerous? We know it’s dangerous. Because when the beat started out on the West Coast, the chief pig out there, Mafioso Alioto, said to the rest of his people that helped him with his fascism out there, he said, “Listen to those people beat. Hey, they’re beating much to fast. Why don’t they go back home where they belong.” When that beat started last November a year ago in Chicago, Illinois, at 2350 W. Madison, when me and Chaka and Bobby Rush and Che and some more Brothers and Jewel got together and said we’re gonna start a Black Panther Party right here. Because this is part of Babylon; the Party exists tight here too. That we might be in school now, might think we’re on the mountain top, but we’re gonna come down to the valley, because people in the valley, commitment’s in the valley, oppression’s in the valley, aggression, repression, fascism, all exists in the valley. No matter how nice it might be on the mountain top, we’ve got a commitment, so we’re going back. We got to go back to the valley.

And when we did that, even Daley and Hanrahan and Judge—we call him Adolph Hitler Hoffman—the chief fascist who knows the art of tapista, the art that Mussolini was supposed to have mastered. We say that Hoffman is better at the art of tapista than Mussolini ever was, because we know what the art of tapista is: it’s an art of good timing. And when we started that beat, Judge Hoffman and Mayor Daley and hammerhead Hanrahan said, “Hey, listen to the people. It’s Chicago beat. Politically they are even beating beating much too fast. Why don’t they go back home?” To live with all black people where they belong, to live in dashikis and bubus and to be porkchop nationalists and cultural nationalists. Why don’t they go back home to thinkin’ what you’re wearin’ is going to change you? Why don’t they go back to “Political power flows from the sleeve of a dashiki.” And we said, No!” As long as that beat continues, we continue, because it gives us in the Party a type of intoxication, that it let’s us understand… we’re so revolutionary proletarian intoxicated that we cannot be astronomically intimidated.

Don’t worry about the Black Panther Party. As long as you keep the beat, we’ll keep on going. If you think that we can be wiped out because they murdered Bobby Hutton and Alprentice Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, you’re wrong. If you think that because Huey was jailed the Party’s gonna stop, you see you’re wrong. If you think because Chairman Bobby was jailed the Party’s gonna stop, you see you’re wrong. If you think because they can jail me you thought the Party was gonna stop, you thought wrong. Because they can “Rage”, Eldridge Cleaver out of the country…you’re wrong. Because we said it before we left and we said it today. That you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can lock up a freedom fighter like Huey P. Newton, but you can’t lock up freedom fighting. You might hire some pork chops like Mamalama to murder Alprentice Bunchy Carter, a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation, because if you do, you come up with answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain, conclusions that don’t conclude.

We say that if you dare to struggle, than you dare to win. If you dare not to struggle you don’t deserve to win. We wouldn’t go into the ring with Muhammad Ali and not fight and wonder why we lost, would we? If you don’t fight, then you don’t deserve to win. If you don’t move on these fascists, then you’re crazy. We say it’s no longer a question of violence or non-violence. We say it’s a question of resistance to fascism or non-existence within fascism. We say let’s stop the war in Vietnam. Let’s stop it by acquiring victory for the spirit of Ho Chi Minh. We say let’s stop the war in Babylon. Let’s initiate the decentralization of the police….

The only real thing is the people, because pigs bite the hand that feeds them and they need to be slapped. And like Chaka said, when you catch them in you’re house, hit ‘em with anything. You shouldn’t argue about whether to hit ‘em with a chair or a table, because they’re out of order from the start. We say that the oppressor—fuck Judge Taney—the oppressor has no rights which we, the oppressed, are bound to follow.

If you get a chance, come see about Bobby. You oughta come see about Bobby because Bobby came and saw about you. You oughta come see about Bobby because in 1966, when we didn’t even think we were important enough to protect ourselves, Bobby and Huey got their guns and went into the community. They left college. They where pre-engineer students, that was Bobby, and Huey was a pre-law student. And what they read they put into practice. You oughta come see about Bobby because Bobby came and saw about you. I’m gonna see about Bobby and if you have anything to say you’ll come see about Bobby. Come down to Jackson and Dearborn and see about our Chairman, because he’s the Chairman of Babylon. He’s the father and the founder of the breakfast programs and the free health clinics, and there’s nothing wrong, nothing in the world wrong with that.

All power to the people. Northern Illinois power to the people that go here to Northern Illinois University.

We say that we need some guns. There’s nothing wrong with guns in our community, there’s just been a misdistribution of guns in our community. For one reason or another, the pigs have all the guns, so all we have to do is equally distribute them. So if you see one that has a gun and you don’t have one, then when you leave you should have one. They way we’ll be able to deal with things right. I remember looking at T.V. and I found that not only did the pigs not brutalize the people in western days, they had to hire bounty hunters to go arrest them. They shoot somebody with no intention of arresting them. We need some guns. We need some guns. We need some force.

Thank you. I’m going to call Chaka end Sister Joan back up here to deal with any questions that you want answered, because we have plenty of time to spend; we don’t have any time to waste. As the sister said, “Time is short, let’s seize the time.”

Thank you.

"Power Anywhere Where There's People": A Speech by Fred Hampton (1969)

The following is the full transcript of a speech given by Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. at Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago in 1969.

Power anywhere where there's people. Power anywhere where there's people. Let me give you an example of teaching people. Basically, the way they learn is observation and participation. You know a lot of us go around and joke ourselves and believe that the masses have PhDs, but that's not true. And even if they did, it wouldn't make any difference. Because with some things, you have to learn by seeing it or either participating in it. And you know yourselves that there are people walking around your community today that have all types of degrees that should be at this meeting but are not here. Right? Because you can have as many degrees as a thermometer. If you don't have any practice, they you can't walk across the street and chew gum at the same time.

Let me tell you how Huey P. Newton, the leader, the organizer, the founder, the main man of the Black Panther Party, went about it.

The community had a problem out there in California. There was an intersection, a four-way intersection; a lot of people were getting killed, cars running over them, and so the people went down and redressed their grievances to the government. You've done it before. I know you people in the community have. And they came back and the pigs said "No! You can't have any." Oh, they dont usually say you can't have it. They've gotten a little hipper than that now. That's what those degrees on the thermometer will get you. They tell you "Okay, we'll deal with it. Why dont you come back next meeting and waste some time?"

And they get you wound up in an excursion of futility, and you be in a cycle of insaneness, and you be goin' back and goin' back, and goin' back, and goin' back so many times that you're already crazy.

So they tell you, they say, "Okay niggers, what you want?" And they you jump up and you say, "Well, it's been so long, we don't know what we want", and then you walk out of the meeting and you're gone and they say, "Well, you niggers had your chance, didnt you?"

Let me tell you what Huey P. Newton did.

Huey Newton went and got Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party on a national level. Bobby Seale got his 9mm, that's a pistol. Huey P. Newton got his shotgun and got some stop signs and got a hammer. Went down to the intersection, gave his shotgun to Bobby, and Bobby had his 9mm. He said, "You hold this shotgun. Anybody mess with us, blow their brains out." He put those stop signs up.

There were no more accidents, no more problem.

Now they had another situation. That's not that good, you see, because its two people dealing with a problem. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, no matter how bad they may be, cannot deal with the problem. But let me explain to you who the real heroes are.

Next time, there was a similar situation, another four-way corner. Huey went and got Bobby, went and got his 9mm, got his shotgun, got his hammer and got more stop signs. Placed those stop signs up, gave the shotgun to Bobby, told Bobby "If anybody mess with us while were putting these stop signs up, protect the people and blow their brains out." What did the people do? They observed it again. They participated in it. Next time they had another four-way intersection. Problems there; they had accidents and death. This time, the people in the community went and got their shotguns, got their hammers, got their stop signs.

Now, let me show you how were gonna try to do it in the Black Panther Party here. We just got back from the south side. We went out there. We went out there and we got to arguing with the pigs or the pigs got to arguing-he said, "Well, Chairman Fred, you supposed to be so bad, why dont you go and shoot some of those policemen? You always talking about you got your guns and got this, why dont you go shoot some of them?"

And I've said, "you've just broken a rule. As a matter of fact, even though you have on a uniform it doesn't make me any difference. Because I dont care if you got on nine uniforms, and 100 badges. When you step outside the realm of legality and into the realm of illegality, then I feel that you should be arrested." And I told him, "You being what they call the law of entrapment, you tried to make me do something that was wrong, you encouraged me, you tried to incite me to shoot a pig. And that ain't cool, Brother, you know the law, dont you?"

I told that pig that, I told him "You got a gun, pig?" I told him, "You gotta get your hands up against the wall. We're gonna do what they call a citizens arrest." This fool dont know what this is. I said, "Now you be just as calm as you can and don't make too many quick moves, cause we don't wanna have to hit you."

And I told him like he always told us, I told him, "Well, I'm here to protect you. Don't worry about a thing, 'm here for your benefit." So I sent another Brother to call the pigs. You gotta do that in a citizen's arrest. He called the pigs. Here come the pigs with carbines and shotguns, walkin' out there. They came out there talking about how they're gonna arrest Chairman Fred. And I said, "No fool. This is the man you got to arrest. He's the one that broke the law." And what did they do? They bugged their eyes, and they couldn't stand it. You know what they did? They were so mad, they were so angry that they told me to leave.

And what happened? All those people were out there on 63rd Street. What did they do? They were around there laughing and talking with me while I was making the arrest. They looked at me while I was rapping and heard me while I was rapping. So the next time that the pig comes on 63rd Street, because of the thing that our Minister of Defense calls observation and participation, that pig might be arrested by anybody!

So what did we do? We were out there educating the people. How did we educate them? Basically, the way people learn, by observation and participation. And that's what were trying to do. That's what we got to do here in this community. And a lot of people don't understand, but there's three basic things that you got to do anytime you intend to have yourself a successful revolution.

A lot of people get the word revolution mixed up and they think revolutions a bad word. Revolution is nothing but like having a sore on your body and then you put something on that sore to cure that infection. And Im telling you that were living in an infectious society right now. Im telling you that were living in a sick society. And anybody that endorses integrating into this sick society before its cleaned up is a man whos committing a crime against the people.

If you walk past a hospital room and see a sign that says "Contaminated" and then you try to lead people into that room, either those people are mighty dumb, you understand me, cause if they weren't, they'd tell you that you are an unfair, unjust leader that does not have your followers' interests in mind. And what were saying is simply that leaders have got to become, we've got to start making them accountable for what they do. They're goin' around talking about so-and-so's an Uncle Tom so we're gonna open up a cultural center and teach him what blackness is. And this n****r is more aware than you and me and Malcolm and Martin Luther King and everybody else put together. That's right. They're the ones that are most aware. They're most aware, cause they're the ones that are gonna open up the center. They're gonna tell you where bones come from in Africa that you can't even pronounce the names. Thats right. They'll be telling you about Chaka, the leader of the Bantu freedom fighters, and Jomo Kenyatta, those dingo-dingas. They'll be running all of that down to you. They know about it all. But the point is they do what they're doing because it is beneficial and it is profitable for them.

You see, people get involved in a lot of things that's profitable to them, and we've got to make it less profitable. We've got to make it less beneficial. I'm saying that any program that's brought into our community should be analyzed by the people of that community. It should be analyzed to see that it meets the relevant needs of that community. We don't need no n*****s coming into our community to be having no company to open business for the n*****s. There's too many n*****s in our community that can't get crackers out of the business that they're gonna open.

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That's what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.

We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don't care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!

A lot of us running around talking about politics don't even know what politics is. Did you ever see something and pull it and you take it as far as you can and it almost outstretches itself and it goes into something else? If you take it so far that it is two things? As a matter of fact, some things if you stretch it so far, it'll be another thing. Did you ever cook something so long that it turns into something else? Ain't that right?

That's what were talking about with politics.

That politics ain't nothing, but if you stretch it so long that it can't go no further, then you know what you got on your hands? You got an antagonistic contradiction. And when you take that contradiction to the highest level and stretch it as far as you can stretch it, you got what you call war. Politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with bloodshed. If you don't understand that, you can be a Democrat, Republican, you can be Independent, you can be anything you want to, you ain't nothing.

We don't want any of those n*****s and any of these hunkies and nobody else, radicals or nobody talking about, "I'm on the Independence ticket." That means you sell out the republicans; Independent means you're out for graft and you'll sell out to the highest bidder. You understand?

We want people who want to run on the People's Party, because the people are gonna run it whether they like it or not. The people have proved that they can run it. They run it in China, they're gonna run it right here. They can call it what they want to, they can talk about it. They can call it communism, and think that that's gonna scare somebody, but it ain't gonna scare nobody.

We had the same thing happen out on 37th Road. They came out to 37th road where our Breakfast for children program is, and started getting those women who were kind of older, around 58---that's, you know, I call that older cause Im young. I aint 20, right, right! But you see, they're gonna get them and brainwash them. And you ain't seen nothin till you see one of them beautiful Sisters with their hair kinda startin getting grey, and they ain't got many teeth, and they were tearin' them policemen up! They were tearing em up! The pigs would come up to them and say "You like communism?"

The pigs would come up to them and say, "You scared of communism?" And the Sisters would say, "No scared of it, I ain't never heard of it."

"You like socialism?"

"No scared of it. I ain't never heard of it."

The pigs, they be crackin' up, because they enjoyed seeing these people frightened of these words.

"You like capitalism?"

Yeah, well, that's what I live with. I like it.

"You like the Breakfast For Children program, n****r?"

"Yeah, I like it."

And the pigs say, "Oh-oh." The pigs say, "Well, the Breakfast For Children program is a socialistic program. Its a communistic program."

And the women said, "Well, I tell you what, boy. I've been knowing you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, n****r. And I don't know if I like communism and I don't know if I like socialism. But I know that that Breakfast For Children program feeds my kids, n****r. And if you put your hands on that Breakfast For Children program, I'm gonna come off this can and I'm gonna beat your ass like a ...."

That's what they be saying. That's what they be saying, and it is a beautiful thing. And that's what the Breakfast For Children program is. A lot of people think it is charity, but what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that's revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change. Honey, if you just keep on changing, before you know it, in fact, not even knowing what socialism is, you dont have to know what it is, they're endorsing it, they're participating in it, and they're supporting socialism.

And a lot of people will tell you, way, Well, the people dont have any theory, they need some theory. They need some theory even if they don't have any practice. And the Black Panther Party tells you that if a man tells you that he's the type of man who has you buying candy bars and eating the wrapping and throwing the candy away, he'd have you walking East when you're supposed to be walking West. Its true. If you listen to what the pig says, you be walkin' outside when the sun is shining with your umbrella over your head. And when it's raining youll be goin' outside leaving your umbrella inside. That's right. You gotta get it together. Im saying that's what they have you doing.

Now, what do WE do? We say that the Breakfast For Children program is a socialistic program. It teaches the people basically that by practice, we thought up and let them practice that theory and inspect that theory. What's more important? You learn something just like everybody else.

Let me try to break it down to you.

You say this Brother here goes to school 8 years to be an auto mechanic. And that teacher who used to be an auto mechanic, he tells him, "Well, n****r, you gotta go on what we call on-the-job-training." And he says, "Damn, with all this theory I got, I gotta go to on-the-job-training? What for?"

He said, "On on-the-job-training he works with me. Ive been here for 20 years. When I started work, they didn't even have auto mechanics. I ain't got no theory, I just got a whole bunch of practice."

What happened? A car came in making a whole lot of funny noise. This Brother here go get his book. He on page one, he ain't got to page 200. I'm sitting here listening to the car. He says, "What do you think it is?"

I say, "I think its the carburetor."

He says, "No I don't see anywhere in here where it says a carburetor make no noise like that." And he says, "How do you know its the carburetor?"

I said, "Well, n****r, with all them degrees as many as a thermometer, around 20 years ago, 19 to be exact, I was listening to the same kind of noise. And what I did was I took apart the voltage regulator and it wasn't that. Then I took apart the alternator and it wasn't that. I took apart the generator brushes and it wasn't that. I took apart the generator and it wasn't that. I took apart the generator and it wasn't even that. After I took apart all that I finally got to the carburetor and when I got to the carburetor I found that that's what it was. And I told myself that 'fool, next time you hear this sound you better take apart the carburetor first.'"

How did he learn? He learned through practice.

I dont care how much theory you got, if it don't have any practice applied to it, then that theory happens to be irrelevant. Right? Any theory you get, practice it. And when you practice it you make some mistakes. When you make a mistake, you correct that theory, and then it will be corrected theory that will be able to be applied and used in any situation. Thats what we've got to be able to do.

Every time I speak in a church I always try to say something, you know, about Martin Luther King. I have a lot of respect for Martin Luther King. I think he was one of the greatest orators that the country ever produced. And I listened to anyone who speaks well, because I like to listen to that. Martin Luther King said that it might look dark sometime, and it might look dark over here on the North Side. Maybe you thought the room was going to be packed with people and maybe you thought you might have to turn some people away and you might not have enough people here. Maybe some of the people you think should be here are not here and you think that, well if they're not here then it won't be as good as we thought it could have been. And maybe you thought that you need more people here than you have here. Maybe you think that the pigs are going to be able to pressure you and put enough pressure to squash your movement even before it starts. But Martin Luther King said that he heard somewhere that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And we're not worried about it being dark. He said that the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward heaven.

We got Huey P. Newton in jail, and Eldridge Cleaver underground. And Alprentice Bunchy Carter has been murdered; Bobby Hutton and John Huggins been murdered. And a lot of people think that the Black Panther Party in a sense is giving up. But let us say this: That we've made the kind of commitment to the people that hardly anyone else has ever made.

We have decided that although some of us come from what some of you would call petty-bourgeois families, though some of us could be in a sense on what you call the mountaintop. We could be integrated into the society working with people that we may never have a chance to work with. Maybe we could be on the mountaintop and maybe we wouldn't have to be hidin' when we go to speak places like this. Maybe we wouldn't have to worry about court cases and going to jail and being sick. We say that even though all of those luxuries exist on the mountaintop, we understand that you people and your problems are right here in the valley.

We in the Black Panther Party, because of our dedication and understanding, went into the valley knowing that the people are in the valley, knowing that our plight is the same plight as the people in the valley, knowing that our enemies are on the mountain, to our friends are in the valley, and even though its nice to be on the mountaintop, we're going back to the valley. Because we understand that there's work to be done in the valley, and when we get through with this work in the valley, then we got to go to the mountaintop. We're going to the mountaintop because there's a motherfucker on the mountaintop that's playing King, and he's been bullshitting us. And weve got to go up on the mountain top not for the purpose of living his life style and living like he lives. We've got to go up on the mountain top to make this motherfucker understand, goddamnit, that we are coming from the valley!

What Kind of Message Does the Biden/Harris Campaign Send to the Black Lives Matter Movement?

By Matthew Dolezal

On August 11, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced that he had chosen former presidential candidate and California senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate. In a campaign email, Biden proclaimed that Harris “is the best person to help me take this fight to Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021.” In an overview of the news, CNN highlighted Harris’s “multi-racial background”, indicating that the Biden campaign’s decision may have partially stemmed from a desire to embrace the reinvigorated movement for racial justice in these tumultuous times.

Following the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25, the nation erupted in protest, demanding justice and accountability. These massive, ongoing, nationwide uprisings are primarily a manifestation of the renewed Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. As American police departments responded by doubling down on their flagrant brutality, the movement coalesced around efforts to “defund the police.” This was encapsulated in a July 6 post on the official BLM website:

“We know that police don’t keep us safe — and as long as we continue to pump money into our corrupt criminal justice system at the expense of housing, health, and education investments — we will never be truly safe. That’s why we are calling to #DefundPolice and #InvestInCommunities…”

On the surface, Biden’s VP pick may appear to be an olive branch to the BLM movement, as Harris’s identity as a black woman has been given significant attention. This is certainly a noteworthy development in the 2020 election season, as Harris is the first woman of color to run as VP on a major party presidential ticket (though others, such as Angela Davis, have run as third party VP candidates). Despite the historic nature of this news, we must also observe Harris’s troubling decade-long record as a prosecutor in the state of California, a topic that law professor Lara Bazelon summarized in a New York Times op-ed. For instance, during her tenure as San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions” and “championed state legislation under which parents whose children were found to be habitually truant in elementary school could be prosecuted, despite concerns that it would disproportionately affect low-income people of color.”

When Harris later became California’s attorney general, she fought to continue the death penalty, opposed investigating police shootings, opposed statewide standards for regulating police body cameras, and remained neutral on an initiative that was approved by voters in which certain low-level felonies would be reduced to misdemeanors. When asked by a reporter if she supported marijuana legalization, Harris laughed (marijuana prohibition is a major focus of the disastrous and racist War on Drugs). And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, as Briahna Joy Gray observed last year, we should also zoom out from the troubling aspects of Harris’s record specifically and contemplate her decision to become a prosecutor in the first place.

Regardless of the extent to which Harris’s policies disproportionately harmed people of color and other marginalized populations, her record pales in comparison to that of her running mate. As a young Delaware senator, Joseph R. Biden supported racial segregation efforts in public schools, particularly in the area of busing. Janell Ross summarized this history last year by writing, “[Biden’s] legislative work against school integration advanced a more palatable version of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine and undermined the nation’s short-lived effort at educational equality, legislative and education history experts say.” Biden went on to become a primary architect of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (often referred to as the “crime bill”), which resulted in what we now call “mass incarceration” — a devastating phenomenon that has had a vastly disproportionate impact on minority communities.

In conjunction with the Reagan-era “tough on crime” mentality, Biden participated in the demonization of the black community through rhetoric that included the infamous term “predator” — a dehumanizing and racist dog whistle. Unfortunately, that was the least of his racist comments; he once said he didn’t want his kids to grow up in a “racial jungle”, later referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean”, and — strangely enough — eulogized the infamous racist Strom Thurmond.

Possibly in an effort to draw attention away from this disturbing record, Biden began lying extensively about his involvement in the civil rights movement (in short, he was never involved). To further exhibit his profound disrespect for the black community, Biden recently responded to questions from black radio host Charlamagne by saying, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

In the era of the New Jim Crow, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have both spent their careers playing the role of the oppressor. The Biden/Harris 2020 ticket proves that the Democratic Party is more interested in engaging in performative identity politics to entrench its corporate-backed power than engaging with the material needs of the American people, especially the most oppressed populations. Joe Biden’s disturbing record on race and mass incarceration was already a turnoff to many progressive voters and Black Lives Matter activists. It appears that the Biden campaign sought to patch up those concerns with a quick fix, a damage-control effort not unlike its appeal to women in the wake of renewed sexual misconduct scrutiny.

This isn’t to say Kamala Harris hasn’t made tremendous accomplishments. Systemic racism and sexism are indeed harsh realities, and women of color truly do face infinitely more barriers to success than individuals from more privileged demographics. But if we place significance on Harris’s identity as a woman of color, as we should, it must be even more important to take notice of the identities of those she harmed during her tenure as a prosecutor. After all, in the realm of systemic racism and mass incarceration, prosecutors play a central role in the draconian implementation of state power.

On the ground, this state power is enforced by the police, who have recently come under unprecedented levels of scrutiny. The institution of American policing initially arose from southern “slave patrols” and has subsequently maintained its inextricable link to white supremacy. We are now experiencing historic political momentum as the American people have flooded the streets to demand racial justice and an end to the domestic terrorism of police violence.

The Democratic Party has responded with a stubborn commitment to the status quo. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have both been intimately complicit in systemic racism, mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and violent state power more broadly. Given the backgrounds of its candidates, the Democratic Party’s plea for Americans to “vote blue” in November takes on a darker meaning, symbolizing whose lives really matter in the eyes of our callous political establishment.

Declaration Against the Transgender Community

By AJ Reed

There is a movement that is before us that should give you pause—a movement that claims to be among the feminist movement, yet in disguise among the flock. One organization within the movement that claims to have "unapologetically radical feminists," is an organization called the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF). Some individuals are at the forefront alongside with WoLF. Of those is Megan Murphy, an international speaker on sex-based rights.   What separates them from the rest of the feminist movement is their stance on transgender and non-binary rights. To which claim that of "transgender ideology" as well as related acts of oppression.
 
At a speaking event in Toronto, Canada, Murphy expressed her viewpoint when she addressed an issue that was going on in Toronto. Where a women's shelter excluded trans women into the shelter, Murphy remarked that having a trans woman in such a housing option would be harmful to those in the shelter.  By all accounts, Murphy would be labeled as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF). Those, like Murphy, would push back to say they are "gender critical." In other words, they want people to see through their unique sunglasses, like a John Carpenter film. Where it is nothing more of distorted reality, another example was in 2016. WoLF filed a lawsuit against President Obama about the directive on Title IX. That directive permitted trans students to use restrooms that matched their gender identity. WoLF claims that it is not the intention of Title IX, and it would allow men into women's spaces. Thus, trans women and men would be barred from using the restroom that matches their gender. WoLF, and Murphy, is also no stranger of having different bedfellows. From the Heritage Foundation to appearing on FOX News are outlets that WoLF and Murphy use to advance their agenda. So what has been the primer for WoLF and their activists?

The Declaration of Women's Sex-based Rights launched in March 2019, is the cornerstone of the declaration is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) of 1979. That Convention defines sex as a biological characteristic. The point of contention lies in a long time debate of gender versus sex. For many years, gender was determined from a gonadal viewpoint. From there, it has defined gender roles and how we perform as "males" and "females" in society.

The activists for women's sex-based rights have pathologized trans and non-binary folx by invalidating their reality. It was the same kind invalidation when homosexuality was deemed as a mental illness by the American Psychological Association, who then reversed their position in 1974. Since then, many studies have shown the differences between gender and sex.  In neuroimaging studies, diffusion tensor imagining (DTI), shown white matter differences in the brain between sexes. One study found that the white matter tracts in the brain from female to male trans individuals were more similar to the brain of natural-born males than it is to natural-born females. Studies that looked at male to female trans individuals showed that their brain development was not fully masculinized. To that end, it has led to the understanding that during fetal development that both brain and gonadal development occurs separately and independently of one another. Which meant the degree of masculinisation of the gonads does not reflect the degree of masculinisation of the brain.

There is also a connection between residual racism and class reduction that reinforces their "radical feminist" ideology. One of the racist examples links to early colonizers that inserted their white, European patriarchy. We can see this when indigenous communities were having two-spirit tribal members forced to employ gender binary, bodily-sex-equals-gender view. The legacy of this has flowed through centuries to the present. To the point that people like Murphy would dismiss those seeking political asylum from nations in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, where they would confront death or imprisonment for being transgender. To this end, Murphy would suggest that there is a growing number of men coming into the United States. Thus would be a step backward in the name of women's rights.

An example of class reduction is by reviewing the thirty respondents to a 2015 US Transgender Survey reported being mistreated in the workplace, denied a promotion, or fired because of their gender expression or identity. Before the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, Title VII did not cover LGBTQ+ workers. The results showed that the national transgender population experienced higher unemployment, poverty, and homelessness even more for trans communities of color over white, cisgender individuals. One example of how class reduction reinforces We can also examine how a trans person living in a suburban setting has more available resources versus a trans person in a rural setting, who might have to travel an hour, or more, to the available support. This stark difference leads to issues like suicide rates and health care concerns.

Already this movement has a global outreach. What does this mean for the spirit of queer liberation? It would mean an erasure of the accomplishments that have been made since the first brick being thrown at the Stonewall Inn. It would mean that people like Megan Murphy and organizations like WoLF will advocate alongside with conservative think tanks as well as policymakers. To draft and pass legislation to stop the Ugandan trans refugee from coming into the United States. They will influence those to tell the young trans youth at the edge of the cornfields in the Midwest. That they cannot access the help they need as they develop into their transition. It will mean that kin to Murphy will continue to go to meetings to express their rhetoric on how trans people are "parasitic" and "blood-sucking" to the queer movement. While this may look bleak. Our queer liberation spirit can move us to remove these people and organizations from our organizing spaces as well as our political sphere. Murphy and WoLF have not figured out they are among many sisters to fight against the patriarchy.

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

By Mack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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