Showing posts with label Abasi Baruti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abasi Baruti. Show all posts

Monday, February 20, 2012

Meet the People Where They Are - Replace Rhetoric With Reality


Abasi Shomari Baruti

In trying to understand the weaknesses of the African Liberation Movement in the 21st century, and what needs to happen to fix those weaknesses, it is important to have a decent understanding of how things have gotten to be the way that they are. My PICC comrades and I have lain out in other places before now, what we see as the general character of the African liberation movement (ALM) at this point. Our position is that the movement is isolated from the main life of the African working class and is struggling to revive the African revolution. We recognize that there are a number of forces doing good work and we see the advances that are being made, especially in what has become an era of mass rebellion against naked imperialist robbery and rape. However, the positive tendencies are still in the minority of the ALM and those of us who are fighting to win still have plenty work to do in order to get the movement back on track.

One of the things that we are faced with in our struggle to re-mount the African revolution are the traps we set for ourselves. After severe repression by the U.S. government, and some real backwards nonsense coming from within the movement, the masses of African workers do not relate to revolutionary ideas in a serious way. In fact, if you have tried to recruit our people into revolutionary work in the last ten years, you have probably heard all kinds of responses about why our people just do not unite with "that black power shit.” This attitude is reflective of the effect of U.S. government propaganda, but it is also tied to our own mistakes and errors. Many of us have either fallen into the traps set for us by our enemies, or we have shot ourselves in the foot and hindered our own progress. Of the many ways that we trip ourselves up, one is of deep importance: being so caught up in our own rhetoric that we lose the people when we talk with and try to organize them - in short we, too often, confuse ideological principles with strategic principles.

All too often, the discussions that happen among us play out like arguments in petty-bourgeois families where one spouse is a republican and the other a democrat: its bloody war to the knife. How many times have we seen it: a fervent believer, normally new to the belief, goes on a rampage like a European crusader, demanding that everyone get with their ideas or perish? How many times have we seen, right in the midst of our movement, die-hard believers dismiss everything that is not of their own understanding and leave nothing but destruction and disarray in their wake? And, how many times have we seen people dress up nonsense, negativism, and pessimism in the clothing of "passion" and "commitment"? And when it has all been said and done, usually more has been said than done. This is a real problem. What is worse, is that, while we criticize the religious believers for their vehement "bible-thumping" or even "Qur’an-thumping,” we turn right around and beat our people upside the head with our ideologies, special language, and theories. The real fact is that the leading elements of the ALM must do more of what have not been doing, and that is leading - effective leading.

I want to deal with the question of working with the masses of African people, because, in the final analysis, our ideologies, platforms, programs, rap, and fieldwork must be aimed squarely at winning our folks to struggle. There is the tendency, for some of us, to confuse rhetoric with what is real. There are comrades who are so focused on being correct in theory, that they completely miss the point of our theory, and that is to win the people. In a place like Kansas City, MO where, as far as I can tell, there has not been a truly revolutionary organization that was anything more significant than a small study group since the 1980's, the strategy and tactics that have to be used to build the movement here are far different from what must happen in a place like New York, Atlanta, or Chicago. Here, African people continually reject overt radicalism, and stay away from African revolutionary politics. We know the score, we understand the why's and what for's However, since the 1980's, organization after organization has sprung up in this town, simply to die out due to near complete isolation from the African working class. My experience, and the experience of others, has pointed to a number of problems with the previous attempts. The one problem that seems to stand out is that the revolutionaries have been so caught up in showing just how revolutionary we are that we could never really understand or get past the resistance that African people put up to the kind of organizing we have tried to establish. Time and again, we have fallen back, disgusted; rejected by phrases like
"I ain't fuckin' with that black power shit", or "Man, I'm tryin' to get this money, and that shit you talkin' 'bout ain't 'bout to make me no paper, so I ain't really tryin' to hear it"
and so on. And, almost like clockwork, the despondent revolutionary organizer blames the inability to organize the people ON THE PEOPLE!
"Niggas don't want revolution." "Niggas scared of struggle."
And so on.

Now, last I recalled, if the revolution fails, it is the fault of the revolutionaries. In other words, if we claim to be the leaders, the advanced force, the most conscious of our people, but fail to get our folks on freedom's road, then we have got to begin with a self-criticism and proceed from there. The easy thing to do is to close one's ears and eyes to the truth, regurgitate the "line" to those who already believe it, blame the people, and run in place, mistaking activity for progress. It is simple to do what we can, remain at the fringes of the African colony, talk about the '60s and hope that the ruling class will make a mistake so openly despicable that the people will come running to us, begging for us to tell them how to make the revolution. That is the easy thing to do. The only problem is: it ain't worked all this time, and, regardless of what anyone thinks, it ain't bout to start working.

Let's begin with the basics. The first problem, especially in a place like Kansas City, MO, that so many of us find out the hard way, is that the language we use is so foreign to the masses of our people that when they hear it, they immediately tune out or go into defense. We go to the streets with revolutionary jargon on our lips and come back with little more than frustration. However, when the idea is proposed that we try to talk to folks in language that they understand, it is rejected as non-revolution, backwards, and incorrect. When the idea is suggested that we begin with simple programs that the people can get with, instead of more advanced strategies, our comrades look at us as if we have lost our minds. And so, we find ourselves in a trap, running on a revolutionary tread mill to nowhere, and in the mean time, the people, the ones we are supposed to be the "vanguard" of, continue on, working out their own problems with little concern about whatever the hell we talkin' about.

What we must do is take a hard look at our rhetoric and ask the honest question: is this working? If it isn’t, then we have got to take the next step, and honestly, ask the next question: what will work better? As dialectical materialist, we talk endlessly about investigation and scientific struggle, well, the most basic thing a "scientist" or "dialectician" can do is investigate and find out the answer to those question. After some years of working in Kansas City, MO, finding a little success here, and a little success there, but mostly finding failure, I had to swallow the hard pill, and admit that if the revolution is going to happen here because of something I said or did, I had better find a better way to say it or do it. What I have come to find is that on the one hand, we don't have to be non-revolutionary in our strategy and tactics, but on the other hand, our strategy and tactics have to meet the understanding of the people. So instead of focusing on producing a revolutionary news paper that talks about the merits of scientific materialism and the dynamics of socialist economic theory, for instance, we need to produce something that is begins with how dope, unemployment, and the democrats are all linked together. Instead of putting on programs that castigate the people about being unhealthy and points the finger of blame at the people and our self-destructive habits, we need to build programs that seek to demonstrate a better way through servicing the real needs of the people. We begin with a simple screening, then talk about some simple ways get the high blood pressure under control, and continually follow up. At some point during our interaction with our people, we can discuss Monsanto and why HMO's are a bunch of crooks and how genetically modified foods are harming our people. Once the people trust that we are serious about what they are serious about, we can some real success in winning our people to pick up a healthier lifestyle. In short, the African working class in this town is like any other group of people, if they don't understand it or don't see their self-interest in it, they ain't getting ready to deal with it. If we want the people here to not only deal with, but commit to revolutionary struggle, we have got to start with words and actions that don't require a whole lot of explanation, that the people understand right away, and build from there.

When we let the letter of our ideals and positions become more important than the realization of the content, we are, in the illustrious words of my Uncle Gregory, "baggin' the fuck up" - we're losing. But when we get serious about dealing with the reality as it is, then we can start winning, and then it won't be long before Kansas City, MO becomes a place where a revolutionary is born every day. When we let being ideologically pure and squeaky clean in the way we approach the mission become more important than actually accomplishing the mission, what we are doing is being the dogmatists we claim to hate; we are setting ourselves up to be isolated and marginalized. If it is the masses of the people that make the revolution, then the last place the revolutionary organizer can afford to be is on the sidelines.

The Chinese Communist Party, before it became the vanguard of Chinese imperialism, developed a slogan that I think is one of the best formulas a revolutionary could ever adopt: "From the People, to the Party. From the Party to the People." In other words, we have to go to the people and see what THEY want, take that back to the huddle, sharpen it, and take a position and program back to the people that reflects the their  point of view and interests. When we do this, we can start winning the people to basic work. Once we win them to basic work, then we set ourselves up to winning our people to intermediate work. Once we get them into intermediate work, then winning them to become advance, revolutionaries is not far off.

In the end, we must never forget that our task is to meet the people where they are, win them to unity right where they are, and then walk with them, arm-in-arm, to where we all need to be - free from oppression and exploitation for all time.

Uhuru Sasa! Uhuru Daima!


Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Pan-African Internationalism - 21st Century Pan-Africanism, Part 2

 

Life, Struggle, and the Pursuit of Liberation The Dynamics of the African Condition

Abasi Shomari Baruti
January 4, 2012

Overview
It is all too common today to hear people talk about “the” problem with African people. Attempts to identify “what’s wrong with black people” have become both the subject of routine discussions from the confines of barbershops to the ivory towers of academia. There is no mystery as to why people routinely ask and pontificate over this question. The fact is African people live in some of the worst conditions that exist. As a nation of people, African people are on the bottom of society wherever we find ourselves. Politically speaking, we watch what passes for political leadership prove to be corrupt, incapable, or unwilling to fight for the interests of African people and the African Diaspora. Economically, African people are still among the poorest in the world, wherever we are. We suffer from diseases and medical ailments which have long been eradicated in other populations, but that continue among African people due to economic deprivation. Socially, we are characterized as morally bankrupt, super-predators, a “permanent underclass,” and generally seen as the dregs of society. Our culture is used as the stuff of entertainment to the world, but not in a way that upholds the beauty of African culture; on the contrary, our culture is ridiculed as buffoonish and not worth of serious consideration. Violence committed against African people by other African people is held up as “senseless” and a further indicator of the generally low moral character of African people. African students are the most likely to be the least educated and most incarcerated. The list of examples goes on. For the most part, the problem is summed up as being our own fault, and no one else's. We are tried and convicted by outsiders and our own selves as worthless. It is common to hear African people refer to our own kind in the worst kind of ways. No excuse is acceptable to explain the conditions and habits of African people if it does not place the blame and responsibility squarely and only on the shoulders of the masses of African people.

For literally centuries now people have engaged in analysis of what plagues African people and is at the bottom of the abject conditions in which we live and die. Political theorists, sociologists, clergy, economists, and professional thinkers of all stripes have had their say, and what they have come up with, for the most part, has been anything but effective and the symptoms of the problem has been intellectualized to death. Whole industries have sprung up around the diagnosis and treatment of the symptoms of the African condition; many have found their fortunes selling solutions that are supposed to cure what ails us. The bulk of these ‘solutions’ have amounted to so much snake oil. However, it is important that a review of the various notions about what has and continues cause African people to constitute the “wretched of the earth.” The significance of identifying the various lines of analysis about our people lies in the importance of philosophy as a major element of African degradation and liberation.

One line of thinking, one of the oldest and longest surviving theories is that African people are inferior by design. That “God” or “Jehovah” or “Allah” or some deity simply decided to make African people the footstool of the world. From the 14th century to this day, this theory still survives. It textbooks, advertising, military analysis, and all sorts of places, the notion of inherent African inferiority prevails on in the twenty-first century.

Christian philosophies have summed up African people as being everything from the accursed, hybrid  descendants of renegade angels  to the descendants of Ham, and cursed by his Noah to become the servants of the rest of humanity; especially white humanity. There are even theologies invented by African people which echo these sentiments, capturing the essence of self-hatred and elevating it to a level of universal, cosmic, spiritual truth. 

There are other philosophies which get closer to objective truth, but that still miss the mark by more than a mile. The theories identify that slavery and colonialism has so deformed the African. These ideas recognize the vicious impact that colonial domination and chattel slavery have had on African people as being a real reason for the way African people are today. However, instead of continue to follow this line of thought to its logical conclusions, it doubles back on itself and says that, even in the face of unprecedented social destruction of African people by others, that because slavery and colonialism ended so long ago, that the African should be “over it by now”. This line of thinking attempts to make the case that while African people are largely “disadvantaged” that we should still simply be able to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and become productive members of society. The people who push this brand of social theory, which is so much snake oil, would have us to believe that because African people are no longer subject to outright enslavement on a plantation, that the only explanation as to why we still suffer can only be found in our own midst, and nowhere else.

Then, there is a third line. A truly vicious line in that is has been so thoroughly ingrained in the minds of African people that it plays havoc on our own ability to get a grip on ourselves. There is the position that “Black people are our own worst enemy.” We have been taught, and are now the main carries of, the infectious nonsense that somehow, the main impediment to African development is African people. A significant portion of our community has come to accept that African people cannot “get it together” and offer no better reason that “just because.” We accept the fallacies that come from outside our communities and that traitorous forces, who look just like us, enthusiastically work to transmit these falsehoods into our communities. We hold onto, in lieu of a better set of ideas, these notions about our inability to find unity, to spend our money wisely, to govern fairly, to support each other, and so on, and so forth, and we are convinced that this is evidence enough. These self-hating philosophies are so common among our people that even those of us who are supposedly enlightened, conscious, or even revolutionary still cling to the unconsciously.

What is clear about all of these theories of what constitutes “what’s wrong with black people today” is that they all begin from a particular point of view, and what must be exposed is that these basic points of view stand in opposition to the truth of the matter. Because these ideas about us, most of which begin outside of the African world, are stand on false foundations, we must come to understand that they do not, and cannot effectively answer the question. Because these diagnoses are based on incorrect analyses, they can, at best, only serve to numb us to some of the symptoms of the main problem African people suffer from. At worst, these theories actually contribute the main problem either by keeping it concealed or feeding into it, further compounding the main problem.

What must become clear is that the conditions that African people find ourselves in have a definite cause and a definite solution. Pan-African Internationalism is the distillation of a clear understanding of the dialectics which have led African people to where are and what must be done to transform our collective lives.

The Historical Basis of the African Condition

It has been said that if you do not know your history, you are bound to repeat it. This idea of history being cyclical is not completely true; however, we must come to understand the grain of truth that it reflects. The fact is that, embedded in history are the recollections of how things have happened, and the point from which we have to begin in order to understand the present and the basis from which we work to create the future. 

It has become common for people to talk about the African condition as if it has no historical roots, as if African people simply woke up one day and found ourselves such as we are. In working to figure out the why of our conditions, many of us have completely thrown out the investigation of our history as the correct place to begin understanding, and so we tend to develop ideas that miss the mark. The inescapable reality is that the modern African condition is nothing if it is not the present expression of our historical development. In the final analysis, if we are going to solve our problems, we must begin by knowing our roots and finding out where in the growth of our nation the blight of underdevelopment began and how it has grown up around the trunk of African life. When we do this, we give ourselves the ability to identify the source of our problems and to overturn them.

African history is as old as humanity itself. We are the originators of the human species and are responsible for populating the earth. On this basis, it becomes clear why African civilization and culture was one of the most, if not the most, developed social phenomena in the world. The length and breadth of our history has filled volumes of books and is too far reaching for the purpose and space of this work, however, it must be stated that African history did not begin in a cotton patch in Alabama nor did it start after non-African people came to Africa. 

African people, up until about the 14th century, were building complex, sophisticated, civilizations and cultures which were reflective of the uniqueness of the African cultural genius. There were differences in the way we built our various sub-African cultures; however, ingrained in each of them were certain identifiable cultural practices that united our overall culture and guided our understanding of humanity and its place in the world.

Out of this process of nation building, African society became a significant and critical factor in world trade. We had consistent contact with peoples from as far away as China all the way to the Americas. As a natural part of our participation in commercial and cultural trade with the rest of the world, Africa had been in contact with Europe since long before Rome and Greece. This connection would prove to be the most critical in terms of the future development of Africa. In the mean time, we must be clear that African development had two major aspects that are critical to understanding our present state. First, African people, by the time of the Roman, Han, or Mayan empires, had already establish numerous high-level civilizations, and we were continuing the process of development. Second, African social development was bringing the disparate cultures of African people into closer contact, causing the integration of once isolated peoples on various levels, had this process continued undisturbed by outside forces, it is highly likely that Africa would have consolidate continental wide- nation of some  sort by this point in history.

What this should tell us is that the notions about the “inherent inferiority” of African people are false, and in fact, it is clear that African culture reflects all the hallmarks of any advanced civilization and did so long before other advanced civilizations were born. Furthermore, it should overturn the notion that contact with Europe somehow made things better for the African, when the fact is European invasion retarded and completely stifled the natural and historical development of Africa by African people.

But the question remains: how did we go from the heights of human progress to an overall condition of being at the bottom of society wherever we find ourselves, and on an international scale? This question is the one that both demands we understand history and use it to guide our understanding, as opposed to mythology, fantasy, and cynicism. And it exposes the true nature of our current conditions, which is what we need to deal with the solution to our problems.

Invasion, Enslavement, Dispersal and Colonization

By the 14th century, Africa was thriving. In every corner of the continent, from the Nile valley, to the Niger delta, to the Cape of Good Hope, Africa stood tall. There were communal societies that had survived for centuries and were beacons of true democracy and egalitarianism. There were warrior kingdoms that had demonstrated such military prowess as to become examples to other nations in waging war. There was scientific greatness such as the Kemetic development of geometry, the Dagon development of Astronomy, the Zimbabwean mastery of architecture, and the masterful grasp of spiritually by the Yoruba. Everywhere you turned, Africa was on the move. We had been engaged in trade with India, the Mediterranean, and even South America for centuries. We had master the art of metal crafting, glass working, and achieved a level of advanced scientific skill in agricultural that produced the kind of abundance that promoted a truly humane society. Again, Africa was on the move. However, over the course of the 14th century, African came under assault by European power and this was the course of events that would forever change the way African people related to the world.

By the later part of the 14th Century, Europe began what would become a blood war of dominance against the whole world. Once a place of unending, internecine strife, what came to be known as Europe consolidated, through sheer force of arms, its society into a world menace. Driven by the dynamic tension of its internal contradictions and the growing awareness of wealth beyond its borders, Europe developed a tenuous nation unity based on the shared objective of capturing wealth. Incapable of producing its own wealth and stretched to its own capacities, white imperialism began to seek out wealth elsewhere. It discovered the trading of enslaved Africans, largely being carried out by Arab nations at the time, and negotiated its way into the process. Shortly afterwards, white explorers stumbled upon what they would call “the Americas” in their greedy pursuit of domination over the ancient trading route, known as the silk road. Once they came to understand that they had not found a back route to India, but instead landed on the shores of a land completely new to them, they immediately turned to the task of subduing it. Initially interested in gold and precious metals, the feudal nobility of Europe began to perceive the Americas as a potential source of untold wealth. Eventually, after realizing that they could not martial or sustain the labor power needed to cultivate their newly seized colonies from among their own population, they turned to the enslavement of the native peoples. However, when the filth and disease of the European continued to wipe out the original peoples of the Americas and the stiff resistance of the natives became apparent, the European turned to the African. Long aware of the intelligence and capacity of African people, particularly in agriculture, European imperialist initiated what would become the most gruesome, heinous, crime against humanity that word has ever witnessed in the form of the Great Maafa. Known as the “African slave trade” or “Trans-Atlantic Slavery,” the process of raping Africa and kidnapping scores of millions of people was the first step in the process of European ascendancy as global imperialist. After ravaging the African continent and destroying the fabric of African society, European imperialism then came to realize the wealth of African land itself and completed its domination of African people through the violent colonization of Africa and the brutal extraction of material wealth from the continent and control of African people. “The Scramble for Africa” was the stroke of death for African independence and natural development. The result of this savage attack on African life was, first, the dispersal of African people throughout the world, the destruction of African society and sovereignty, and the subjugation of African people through various forms of colonialism. This process led to the establishment of the parasitic system of international capitalism.

Everywhere African people found ourselves we were the colonial subjects of a hostile and rapacious European imperialism. Out of a desire to justify all of this to European society, the bourgeoisie intellectuals begin to develop the theories that would come to characterize the African, theories that have become entrenched today among us. 

The combination of practical and ideological domination, total domination of every aspect of African life by European imperialism is where our problems begin. Every single problem that African people face in the 21st Century is tied directly back to the overthrow of African self-determination by European imperialism. Every single manifestation of dysfunction among African people, the world over, is the direct result of enslavement and outright subjugation. Every issue that we face runs right back to the forcible destruction, dispersal, containment, and exploitation of our people and land for the purposes of European profit mongering. This process is known as primitive accumulation, and it is on this pedestal of slavery and colonialism that capitalism stands. It is on the enforced misery, the genocidal attack, and ongoing, forcible domination of African people and other oppressed peoples of the world that European dominance stands. What this means is that the conditions of the world in the 21st Century are directly tied to the assault on African and the destruction of African civilization that began centuries ago and which exists today.

The Parasite and the Pedestal of Slavery: What’s Really Wrong with Black People Today

To put it another way, what is truly wrong with black people today has little to do with some inherent defect. Our problem is that a parasite has attached itself to us and is draining away our lifeblood, as a nation of people. The parasite is tricky to diagnose, but once it has been identified, we are on the right track to solving our problems. A parasite, like a leach, or a tapeworm, or cancer lives by feeding on the body of its host. A person can go out every day and labor to produce food, bring the food home, prepare the meals, and eat, but you continue to get weaker. The harder you work, the weaker you become. You consult your friends, your pastor, or imam, you talk to your politicians, and they all give you different advice, but none of it seems to work. You eat and you eat but you steadily get weaker and weaker. The problem is the parasite and its relationship to you. Its whole existence, its very life is predicated on not working or laboring, but attaching itself to you and livening of the energy you expend to feed yourself and feed it. It does nothing to aide you; it does not give you strength, or enhance you in any kind of way. It continues to feed on you, unmercifully, and if you do not figure it out soon enough, it kills you. In fact, the parasite is so dead set on doing nothing for itself that it will die with you once it has bled you dry!

Regardless of the good intentions that people may have, no amount of praying, no amount of compromising with the parasite, no amount of singing to it is going to get the parasite out of your system. And so finally, you go the doctor and the doctor tells you the real problem is that you are infected with a bloodsucking, life-draining, parasite. Some of us, even after we know about the parasite continue on praying, voting, signing, drinking, and smoking in hopes that we can get the parasite out or at least learn to live with. However, until the correct antidote is applied to the situation, you cannot e rid of the parasite, and to try to live with it is to practice insanity. To attempt to negotiate a life with a bloodsucking parasite attached to your body is to spend the remainder of your life adjusting to growing pain, weakness, and misery. However, when you take the right kind of medicine, the parasite will be forced to detach itself and it can then be “flushed down the toilet stool of history.”

This is the nature of white power, of European capitalist imperialism. It came into existence as a force that required the blood of others to survive and thrive. It required that African people be enslaved, that the first nations of the western hemisphere be eradicated. It required the resources, technology, ingenuity, and life of other peoples be appropriated, stolen, for its own use. 

Capitalism was born into the world on the backs of everyone and everything not a part of the European ruling class. Had it not been for the brutal rape of Africa, the ungodly destruction of the native peoples of the Americas, capitalism could not have made it past its infancy. Had it not been for the conversion of Asia into one huge drug house, had it not been for the eradication of the Taino peoples of the Caribbean, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, Europe would not have been able to pass from a place of death and misery, a place of poverty to the most power nation in the world.

What we must understand first, before we can solve the problems we face as a nation of people, is the misery of African people is the basis for European bourgeois luxury and vitality. In order for capitalism to exist as it does, it requires, and if need be demands, that there be poor people that it can exploit. It requires a pedestal to stand on. It could not have even existed had it not first accumulated the basic wealth it needed to come into existence full blown. African people are the pedestal upon which white power stands and extends itself throughout the world, and if we are going to improve our conditions this must change.

In the final analysis, the problem with African people today is capitalist imperialism, a rotten, parasitic system that has as its basis the enslavement and colonial domination of African people. Until we regain our ability to be self-determining, until we again totally control our collective destiny, the symptoms of the problem will remain.

Destroy the Barrel: The Answer to Our Problems

In the tradition of the African, particularly in the United States, there is the notion of “crabs in a barrel” which tries to characterize the conditions of African people. The saying is that African people are like crabs in a barrel trying to get out. Whenever one gets to the top of the barrel and is likely to pull itself out, it is pulled right back down by the other crabs. This saying is used to sum up the notion that Africans can move forward because we hold ourselves back. On top of this truly false claim are the even more ludicrous claims about what we must do in order to solve our problems. The religious sector tells us that a focus on our spiritual lives and our “personal relationship with God” is the answer. The politico’s tell us that we have to vote more and continue to try to integrate into the political powerhouse of establishment politics, and our conditions will be forever changed. The economic sectors of our communities tell us that we need to get more jobs, develop businesses, and generally be better capitalist than the capitalists and we can buy our way out of misery. And finally, but not be outdone, there is the social sector which lays the blame on everything from teenage mothers, to children born out of wedlock, to youth fashion, to gang affiliations as our main problems. If only we could get African children to wait until they were older to have babies, get married and stay married, wear conventional fashion in conventional ways, not join gangs, everything would be o.k.

This is utter, unadulterated, nonsense and so a historical and illogical as to humorous if not so tragic.
It must be recognized that in each of these proposed solutions to the crabs in the barrel mentality, which is supposedly at the heart of our struggle as people, represents a grain of truth. However, the simple fact is that none of these things are responsible for our conditions, and so none of them taken separately or even taken together, will end the ongoing destruction of African people.

Beginning from the part of the folk wisdom, which is actually true in the notion of crabs in the barrel, we can see two very simple things. First, no amount of praying, paying, or conforming is going to get crabs out of a barrel. The second thing is this. Crabs only find themselves in a barrel because of someone putting them there, and generally for using the crabs to satisfy their own needs, at the expense of the crabs’ lives. This being the case, no outside force can be expected to liberate the crabs. If the crabs want to get out of the barrel, they must break the barrel up or overturn the barrel. Either way, until the confines of the barrel, the immediate cause of the problem is dealt with; the crabs can never escape their fate as the dinner of the crab catcher.

In addition to this, what the purveyors of the crabs-in-a-barrel philosophy fail to mention is what awaits the crabs on the other side of the rim. Assuming that the crabs could escape the struggle of being in a barrel, just on the other side is the crab catcher – the force responsible for the conditions of the crabs in the first place. To think that somehow or another the critical task of the African is simply to escape falls flat when we come face to face with the existence of the crab-catcher. This is where we begin to see the limitations and outright dishonesty of this line of thinking. It is clear that no matter the individual accomplishments of anyone of us, no amount individual advance is enough to improve our total condition. The crab catcher intends to have a meal of the crabs. For us, capitalist imperialism is the crab catcher, and even if we could get out of the barrel, white capitalism is there, just beyond the gates of our immediate prison, watching to ensure that any one of us who escapes does not intervene with its intentions to have us for its benefit. Furthermore, our history is littered with the broken shells of other “crabs” that got out of the pot, only to be the first ones into the frying pan. The myth of social mobility breaks its head on the glass ceiling of racial caste. In addition, once out the barrel, what crab really goes back in to rescue the other crabs? How many times have we heard the implicit promise to come back and lift up our people from those of us hell bent on “getting over”? Furthermore, the majority of Africans in the pursuit of upward mobility have completely accepted the status quo. To this day, in any section of the African world, you see the lucky few openly unite with keeping the rest of the crabs in the barrel, and actually help guard the pot! So whether we are inside the barrel or out, the conditions are not transformed. Between the crabs in the barrel, the crabs outside the barrel and the crab catcher – the one responsible for the whole thing in the first place – the crab is not safe, and will not be until the barrel is removed, along with the crab catcher.

So for the African, the aim for us has to be to smash the barrel. In other words, reforms, spiritual intercession, economic thrift, or any other form of action is going to solve the problems we face. We must rid ourselves of the bloodsucking imperialism, smash the confines of the barrel of colonial domination, and eradicate the crab catcher one and for all.

Revolution is the Only Solution

In understanding the real problem that we face, we must come to understand, further, that nothing less than complete destruction of capitalism and bourgeois society will suffice to resolve the problem of African degradation, for good. Until the entire edifice of capitalist imperialism is completely done away with, we cannot proceed to the work of building a world that is truly equitable and just. 

However, one of the main issues we face was fumed up by the courageous, indomitable Harriet Tubman. When asked about how many enslaved Africans she led to freedom, she famously replied, “I’ve freed hundreds of slaves. I could have freed hundred more if only I could convince them that they were slaves (check for accuracy of quote).” What must be clear is that a significant part of our struggle to overturn our current conditions and achieve the best life possible for our people is the fight to win back the hearts and minds of African people. There is a psychological phenomenon known as the Stockholm syndrome that illustrates a critical aspect of the African condition. The psychological ailment is, to put it simply, the process of a kidnapping victim developing such a warped connection to their captures, out of an instinctual drive to live, that causes the kidnap victim to actually become a defender of the kidnaper. Instead of resisting the kidnaper, after a period of time, the victim begins to relate to the victimizer in a positive way. The victim begins to identify with its victimizer, and defends the kidnapper against anything and everything that would harm the kidnaper. Another form of this syndrome is the Battered woman Syndrome, where a woman who is being severely, and sometimes brutally, abused physically, psychologically, and emotionally begins to protect her abuser. In both cases, the conditions that the victim finds themselves in are so severe, and the manipulation of the aggressor so effective, that the natural drive for life is perverted into an unholy desire to protect the criminal from justice. This is an almost exact reflection of the mental state of massive numbers of African people.

After centuries of such thorough and routine physical and psychological violence by our oppressors, we have come to identify our oppressors as the pinnacle of humanity. Many of us desire nothing more than to emulate our oppressor and so no longer resist our oppression, but merely plead and beg our romanticized masters to be kinder and gentler. However, in every generation, there is the rebel, the incarnation of the righteous indignation and relentless drive for freedom. It is this section of the dispersed African nation that keeps the subjugation of Africa and African life from being complete.

For the African that would resist, it must become understood that until resistance is elevated to the highest principle of the African view of our bondage, we cannot let up in our struggle. We must fight to make revolutionary struggle the main trend among African people. We must master the work of convincing our people that the only way to fix things for ourselves is to transform society, completely. We must overturn any notion that society, as it is, can be “fixed” or reformed. We must win our people to the position that status quo is rotten, decaying, and on its last legs, and that until it is forced to finally pass away, we can expect no lasting peace, no genuine relief. We must also be clear that until those of us who dare to struggle for freedom become the leaders of African society, the culture of resistance that must overtake African people everywhere cannot ascend. African freedom m fighters are the highest development of African life at this point in our development; the “best sons and daughters of Africa,” and if we are to achieve our historical task of winning the masses of African people to unite with the unequivocal necessity of African independence through self-liberation, we must unite ourselves. This unity must come on the basis of a clear-sighted view of the world that truly equips us with the ideological weaponry we need to manifest our patriotism to Africa in the real world and a decisive way.

Pan-African Internationalism is the application of correct revolutionary philosophy to the struggle for total African liberation, an objective that is critical to the final destruction of all forms of oppression and exploitation. In short, it is scientific revolution within the context of the African world. Above all things, it is a guide to action. In its theoretical form, it is the refinement of ideas, based on the practical experience of the past, into the correct understanding of the present and the future. In its practical form, it is the manifestation of African independence through self-liberation. It is, on the one hand, clear about the conditions necessary for African emancipation in the current period, and on the other hand, the basis for the continued development of effective revolutionary ideas and action.

Pan-African Internationalism is not a dogma but a living strategy; rigorous struggle in the real world is the only thing that makes it valid. The demands of our work are the sole standards that will determine its relevance. If, in the crucible of struggle, we find it to be fatally flawed, then it is no better than spitting in the wind – an exercise in futility, and we must immediately discard it. On the other hand, with a strong faith, informed by clear analysis, that Pan-African Internationalism is the correct way forward, once it has achieved its end – once Africa and her peoples are truly free and self-determining – it must meet its natural demise. At that juncture, it must give way to a new theory that is in step with the rising tide of a new period of life; a reality that all genuine Pan-African Internationalist revolutionaries should be fighting for.

In the final analysis, our task is clear and the only thing that can truly keep us from our end goal is ourselves. Hundreds of years removed from the first blow struck for African liberation, the struggle has continued to rage on. The warriors, known and unknown, who went before us and who struggle today have cleared a path for our freedom. It remains the duty of the present generation to end our struggle. Equipped with the razor sharp sickle of Pan-African Internationalist theory and the devastating hammer of a conscious and mobilized African working class, we can and we must smash the shackles of oppression for all time.

Pan-African Internationalism - 21st Century Pan-Africanism, Part 1

 Summing Up the African Liberation Movement in the 21st Century
Abasi Shomari Baruti
January 4, 2012
Just over a decade into the 21st century, things are critical for African people. Capitalist Imperialism has continued to experience the crises that have convulsed it since its initiation as a dominant global political economy. Each period of instability following on the heels of the previous crisis with shorter and shorter intervals. The march of capitalism in the form of rehashed variations of the ideologies of exploitation has continued and has completed its dominance of the globe. All of this has had a brutal impact on the masses of poor and working people in every section of the world with any semblance of industrial development, and now threatens even the most remote cultures that have yet to be overwhelmed by the avaricious passions of the profit machine. The propaganda of the bourgeoisie has proclaimed the ongoing supremacy of capitalism and western decadence and dared anyone to opposed what it would have us to believe is the finality of its existence. Central to the continuation of this culture of death, destruction, rape and robbery, stands the African. 

Long the recipient of the rawest end of bourgeois social organization, we have witnessed the continuation of the special predilection of the ruling classes for African blood, sweat, and tears. In the forty odd years since the military defeat of the African revolutionary struggles of the 1960s and ‘70s, the counterrevolution has refused to let up in its policy of containment and destabilization of the African working class. It has continued to spit on the legacy of our thrust for freedom, and kick in the teeth of the generations that have followed in the wake our Diaspora-wide resistance. The grand strategy of counterinsurgency seemingly perfected, the vicious ruling class throughout the white world has dug in and made industry out of the demoralized African masses, even finding a handsome profit in the process. As slick as first-rate con men, the sell-out class has produced two generations of neo-colonial stooges who have gladly helped to hold up the empire as the surrogate masters of their working class brothers and sisters. With little shame, the negro-colonialist have fine tuned the hustle of upward mobility and advanced the cause of assimilation and integration into an almost sublime art form of the most grotesque proportions. And on the periphery of the African world stands the remnants of the revolution, struggling to find its feet. Rudderless, torn into innumerable splinters, the ghost of the African liberation movement has been able to do little more than replenish its ranks with an insignificant number of forces. Even the vast majority of these forces have been little more than placeholders, forcing the truly sincere and committed to bear the brunt of the temporary failure of our struggle for freedom. In addition, even in the face of our most valiant efforts, the African liberation movement has has held back the threat of becoming irrelevant, we have avoided becoming merely a footnote in the historical development of the dispersed African nation.

Yet, forty years later, the surviving revolutionary soldiers of our parent’s generation languish, even transition into the next form of life, in the worst torture camps capitalism has ever dreamed of, adding further injury to injury. The African woman continues to be the subject of triple oppression with no relief in sight. The African child is now the object of a well-oiled from-the-cradle-to-the-penitentiary-to-the-grave machine. The vultures and bottom feeding parasites of bourgeois society continue their brazen, parasitic political exploitation of the African masses, while the lumpen petty-bourgeoisie grow fat and wealthy on the trap of economic extraction in the form of advanced merchant capitalism, usury, the illegal drug trade, and so on.

In the final analysis, the African nation and it’s revolution is in critical condition; after a nearly four decades of stagnation, it is short on vitality, long on decay, and rife with abject confusion – the leacy of vicious counterrevolution from outside and within. Nonetheless, the masses of our people look on, uncomprehending and uncaring, focused on how they can be the next to win the lottery of status upgrade and just maybe get an opportunity to at least pretend to live the high life. This is one side of the dialectic that characterizes, in part, our struggle for freedom this side of the glorious period of the 1960s. 

It is out of this recession in the African revolution that the living tendency, long held hostage by its own desire to honor the past, is beginning to emerge. Opposite the dying tendency is the living tendency. In spite of the contradictions, we have been able get into the arena and help win victories that have sustained the relevance of the African liberation struggle. We have been able to feed and protect the ideals of the past and, in some cases, even develop them into ideological tools better shaped to guide our action today. In many places, the emerging, but unconsolidated, vanguard of this period of our fight has been able to push the decrepit elements of the struggle to return to form, even if briefly. We have lit a fire under the complacent and have openly derided the embarrassing and clownish personality cults parading as true leadership. This new tendency has taken up the old guard’s vigilance against the negro-colonialist’s attempts to leverage our struggle and exploit the misery of our people for their own personal benefit. We have stood face to face and billy club to bullhorn with the armed wing of the state, showing no fear and defying the will of the bourgeoisie; reflecting the best spirit of our elder warriors. The emerging heart of the African freedom fight has resolved social contradictions that remained to us to figure out. In spite of the growing reaction within our own movement, from Oakland, California to Soweto, Azania, in the face of the backsliding, formerly honored leadership of yesteryear, this courageous new tendency has demanded life and fought to get a foothold in a struggle that has listed and lulled for half most of our lifetimes.

We have refused to let the failures demoralize us; we have been continually encouraged and emboldened by the victories that have defined the struggle in the late 20th and early 21st century. We have refused to allow the sectarian political tribalism to determine the depth and breadth of our political lives. Objective conditions have continued to set the stage for a resurgence of the African revolution, and it is the living tendency, the other end of the dialectic of African liberation, which is positioning itself to achieve the goal of “Freedom Now!”

Within this new, living, vibrant current is where a contingency of forces have begun to nail down the blueprint for African revolution in the 21st century. From the iron clad commitment to advance the struggle combined with the first steps of a new tendency, a spark promises to ignite the African liberation movement and return it to the raging fire of revolutionary struggle. Pan-African Internationalism, 21st Century Pan-Africanism, stands on the foundations of our ancestors who carried the work of developing revolutionary theory, strategy, and tactics before they were cut down by the counterinsurgency or transitioned into the next life. It has finally arrived at the point where it can say to the past, “we have learned from you and now we are ready to add to you.” Pan-African Internationalism stares the future straight in the face and gives full expression of the real interests and articulations of the struggling masses of African people. It is a clarification of the contradictions and missteps of the past and attempts to better illuminate those spaces where the pace and intensity of daily struggle kept our forbears from giving their full attention. It is a testament to and distillation of the best ideas and practices of the previous periods and a synthesis of praxis with a clear understanding of the needs of the struggle in the present and in the future. It is a critique of the logic of African liberation theory thus far, and a specific renovation of Pan-Africanist thought and practice. In the end, Pan-African Internationalism claims to be the highest expression of African revolutionary theory and the best refinement of the strategy and tactics of African liberation, in short, the best way forward.

As the guiding ideology of a small section of the emergent tendency of the African liberation movement, Pan-African Internationalism sets as its task the establishment of an effective vanguard formation capable of leading the struggle for independence in an effective and sustainable way. We commit to the work to resurrect the fighting spirit of the masses of African working people and develop it past the high water mark of the previous periods. Pan-African Internationalism takes on the critical tasks of organizing the Diaspora into a tight-knit, global revolutionary movement, liberating Africa, and realizing the objective of revolutionary nationalism as a basis for the effective development of proletarian internationalism. We expose our strategy for establishing dual and contending power, a sorely missing element in our historical struggle and the infrastructure necessary to advance the movement in quantity and quality. And finally, Pan-African Internationalism lays out what we understand to be the best methodology for direct and decisive engagement with the exploiting classes within and outside of the African nation, with an aim of achieving final victory. If we are correct in our analysis, Pan-African Internationalism is not only highest expression of African liberation theory and the aspirations of the masses of oppressed, exploited African workers; it is a blueprint for the building of the final phase of our struggle. We take the position that Pan-African Internationalism is the razors edge of the sickle that will finally reap freedom in the hands of a conscious, mobilized African working class: a hammer in worldwide anti-capitalist revolutionary struggle.

Friday, December 16, 2011

The Revolutionary and the Family - A Question of Loyalty and Comitment


By Abasi Shomari Baruti
I have been thinking about this subject for a while, and initially had come to understand it because with the direction of one of my brother-comrades. I was finally inspired to write this note after a dear sista-comrade and I had a discussion on what I had been referring to as the hierarchy of loyalty that I try to maintain as a revolutionary. Initially, I thought it was something that needed to be said because it seemed to me that there was and still is some serious confusion about what the difference is between a comrade and a friend. After engaging in this discussion over the course of some years, I was able to sum it up for myself and put out what, in my view, was the correct position on what and who a revolutionary owes their loyalty to and in what order.

Well, the sista-comrade asked a question that immediately made me reconsider this hierarchy: what about family? It was such a critical question but one I had completely left out. In my development as a political force, I have witnessed all kinds’ political relationships and all kinds of subjective (personal) relationships that political forces have. I have seen two revolutionaries live, struggle, and love each other with what appeared to be no breaks or gaps. just as well, I have witnessed to two revolutionaries who made excellent comrades and terrible partners. I have witnessed revolutionary men and women raise children, paying as close attention to the rearing of their babies as they do the wording in a leaflet or the security for an event. On the other hand, I have watched some of the best political forces allow their children to languish and grow up to eventually hate all things political and despise all things revolutionary. Along with all of that, I have witnessed organizations which encourage subjective (personal) relationships and work to support family, marriage and these kinds of things, as a rule and practice. However, I've witnessed organizations tear people apart, and demand that partners act in ways that undermine their commitment to each other; I have watched as the relationship eventually fails, or the couple leaves the organization. In short, I've seen it really good and I've winced as I've watched it get really bad.

The issue here is that in understanding our new found roles in the struggle, we cannot lose sight of the most basic element of our day to day lives: familial relations. Some of us, for various reasons (some malicious and others not-so-malicious) take the stance that revolutionaries, somehow, should not have families or should not respect the institution of family-hood the same way they respect the struggle. They believe that somehow family competes with the commitment to fight tirelessly, that family creates a contradiction which can only be resolved by the revolutionary forgoing the basic human desire to love and procreate. I also know of instances where the unspoken order of the day is to abandon family: the family which we come from and the family we create. I've seen comrades make it a point of honor that they have left their wives and sons, husbands and daughters, in order to pursue the revolution. I have to say, that this is utterly backwards. The revolutionary is just as much, if not twice as much, responsible for building strong, healthy relationships within her or his family unit, as much so as he or she is for advancing the struggle. To neglect the family is to deny that the basis of all human social organization is the family unit, and in the end to undermine their own efforts.

Revolution is about, in part, creating the new woman, the new man. Part and parcel of the struggle for a new, just world is the struggle for people who are fit to inhabit that world and ensure that it can continue to exist and develop. This means that not only are we responsible for tearing down the machinery of oppression in the form of the State, but we are just as responsible for tearing down the horrible, ugly, poisonous social practices which come out of our condition as oppressed people and which feed right back into it. This being the case, if there is one place that the revolutionary is truly exposed, in terms of his or her real ability; it is in the family unit.

On the one hand, there is the family which produced us (mother, father, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, etc.), then there is the family we create (husband, wife, children). Each section of our family unit has its differences, both objective and subjective, but no matter what, it our obligation to understand what makes them tick and then to make unrelenting struggle to win them over. Now, a big part of this discussion has everything to do with influence. One of the main problems which causes the African revolution to be so weak is that we have lost and had destroyed the influence we once held as a movement. After the defeat of the African revolution of the 60's and '70s we were thrust into the corner of political action and were scrambling for our lives in far too many cases. The struggle had been dealt a vicious blow and in the place of righteous leadership and effective organization, our people were fed mis-leadership in the form of sellout-traitors, and given the pipe-dream of wealth and abundance in exchange for unity with our oppressors. Veiled behind these false hopes and false leaders was the threat of violence. When put together and used in the absence of revolutionary leadership and organization, they made for a potent and almost completely effective weapon to lure our people away from the struggle for freedom. A significant part of that was the undermining of the revolutionary as a viable political force and the revolution as a viable political option. So, in short, we have lost our influence to a significant degree, and we struggle to regain it and regain the position as the leading forces in our community. This relates directly to how we interact with our families.

So many of us, have had to go through the rough and tumble of making known our revolutionary positions to our families and the consequent ridicule, disdain, dismissing, and general rejection that comes with it. Most of us grew up in families that were nowhere near revolutionary or who had at best been on the fringes of the Black Power movement and fell away. Very few of us have had the opportunity to be a part of a family unit which has been consistently attached, in some way, to the struggle. As a result of this, we tend to develop a rebellious, fuck-you (excuse my Swahili) attitude towards our family because of the pain of rejection. That rejection mixed with our unswerving faith and commitment to revolutionary struggle, when left unchecked, too often leads to extremely unhealthy family relations with the families which produced us. On the other hand, because of our experiences with our family, and other things, we develop relationships with the families we produce that are also unhealthy. By unhealthy, I mean a relationship which does not improve the people in it. The most extreme version of this is the abandonment of our children, and this abandonment is not always physical, it is also spiritual and that is just as heinous as if we would up and leave, and never come back.

What must be made clear is this, as committed to our ideologies, organizations, and comrades as we are, we must be just as committed to our families. We must learn to use our families for our own good. One reason I love the family which produced me so much, other than the fact that they made it possible for me to be here, is that all of their rejection, ridicule, and so on made me a better revolutionary. Instead of becoming emotionally unhinged and losing myself in an argument, I learned to respond. It made me have to study my ideology more, get better at expressing my position, learn to see the errors in theirs, and to make good struggle. They forced me to learn diplomacy, and how to maintain a warm relationship with people in spite of our disagreements. It made me a better organizer in that I had to learn how to approach people, how to disagree with people and still be able to win them to some level of unity and work for our people. It made me learn how to deal with African people from all walks of life, which in turn, gave me the capacity to go out and win total strangers to our work. On the other hand, when we create families, we must understand that that kind of family is partly our creation and our responsibility. Again, it is here that we learn to win people and how to develop people. Whether our mates are revolutionaries or not, we must learn to relate to them in a way that is good for the struggle. Constant discord, bitter feuds, and unending arguments don't contribute to anything, and in fact sap our energy and strength to fight. Furthermore, as with the families which produce us, it pushes our people away from struggle. When we are antagonistic with our families, especially the ones we create, we continue to undermine our own influence.

The key thing is to win the trust of our families develop influence with them on the basis of that trust. The only way to develop trust and influence is by acting. Instead of looking to win an argument with words, we must win with actions. We must use our understanding of the world to PROVE to our families that what we believe and do is worth paying attention to and supporting. Our work has to be seen to benefit our families by our families if we are going to ever win them. Our children will follow us at first out of instinct. They can't help it, they have an instinctive need for protection and care, so they follow us without thinking about it (that's why they end up in the bathroom with you when they are toddlers). However, at some point, their natural intelligence will begin to override that instinct and they will question everything you do. It is at this point that our work with them will tell off. If we have been working to imbue in them revolutionary principles from the beginning, when they get to the point where they begin to think for themselves, they will see the world through the lens we have given them. However, if what they see is that the revolution makes life unbearable, they will associate pain and discord with revolution and will be forever lost to the struggle. Again, what I am saying is that we must develop influence, even with our children. We must, inch-by-inch, day-by-bloody-day, show and prove, and we must win the trust of and then influence in our families which will then translate into their unity with the struggle. What better recruiter is there than the family member who is a shining example of what Africa's best sons and daughters look and act like? Where is there a better testament to the correctness of revolutionary struggle than the father, sister, aunt who lives in a principled way and who's actions benefit the family, unselfishly, in the true spirit of socialism? There are none.

In the end, the key thing is this: we must treat our families like we should be treating the people, because they are the people. If you don't believe the people are the ones who will make the revolution, with the revolutionary guiding the way, then you should go back to the drawing board. However, if you know and understand that to be the case, then you can only fail when you refuse to apply that to your family. Regardless of how they perceive it, we should never stop being good African people to our people. We should never stop being good socialist to our people. We should never stop defending our people, and that means our families too. It has long been noted that the hardest people to win to struggle is our family, and I find this to be somewhat accurate, however, this can only mean that at the point where we have developed the ability to do so, we have become some of the best organizers there are. If you love African people, but not your family, you have fallen short and must rectify that error. As it pertains to the families we create, it is part of your primary duty to ensure that the family you produce is given what they need not only to survive but to unite whit the work to be free.

If you build the revolutionary family, you build the revolution.

I am and always will be,
Abasi Shomari Baruti
Uhuru!

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

From the Ground Up: The Strategy and Tactics of Pan-African Internationalism in the Current Period

 

Overview

The struggle for African liberation is a long one. It has spanned centuries, its history full of victories and defeats. In every period of struggle, we have witnessed our fight for freedom move forward and then pushed backwards. At each stage, we eventually learn from our mistakes and expand on our strengths in ways that ultimately produce the next surge of forward movement. Generally, these surges forward begin on a small scale and if given the right kind of input, develop into large-scale mobilizations of African people towards the end of freedom.

At this point in the history of our struggle, we find ourselves between the close of the last period of our resistance and the beginning of the next major surge. It has become common among the revolutionary and progressive sectors of the African liberation struggle to speak of what must be done next, and there is no lack of ideas and programs being developed and pursued to answer that question. Pan-African Internationalism is among the proposed answers to the question.

It is clear that there is a growing tendency among African people to reject the ideas and way of life pressed on us by forces other than ourselves. This tendency, along with the growing crises of the capitalist-imperialism, continues to prepare the ground for the African liberation movement to make its next great leap forward. Pan-African Internationalism is a part of this tendency, and seeks to advance the cause of our people in a significant way; it seeks to open a new era of struggle and achieve the kind of progress that our movement must have.

However, what separates Pan-African Internationalism from the vast majority of other ideas within the African liberation movement is its ability to see the reality of our struggle clearly and without dogmatic adherence to philosophies and opinions which are no longer, if ever, valid. Pan-African Internationalism recognizes that the attempt to make struggle in this period in the same way it was made in the last period, is a mistake. The practices which characterized the African revolutionary period of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, while still having some value, are no longer capable of propelling us forward. What we know and believe about waging struggle must be updated to reflect the reality we live in now, while retaining a clear understanding of what happened in the past.

What this means is that, in order for African people to advance into the next stage of our struggle, we must rework our strategies and tactics and wage our fight in ways that are best for current times, as opposed to trying to turn back the hands of time and relive the struggle of the 1960’s.

However, before a new set of strategies and tactics can be developed, we must first establish a clear view of where we are now, and under what conditions we must wage our fight. In this way, we can be sure that the conclusions we come to about what must be done are correct because they are based on realistic judgments and not romantic idealism that is divorced from the real world.

Summing Up the Current Period

The African liberation movement, as it is right now, must be summed as being weak. While there are pockets of strength in various places, the main character of our movement is that it lacks the strength necessary to overcome the obstacles which stands in our path, and resolve the internal problems which slows us down. The historical ability of the African liberation movement to organize and mobilize great masses of people has been so eroded that it is difficult for the movement to organize more than a hundred committed people, much less mobilize anything close to thousands in a sustainable way. What we are left with is a movement full of all kinds of contradictions and that spins its wheels more so than it moves forward. 

To some, this assessment may seem cynical or defeatist. It may strike a chord with the sincere and committed forces that labor daily to make advances. It may insult the sentimentality of our comrades in struggle. The hard fact is, regardless of our feelings towards our work we must be rigorously honest with ourselves and spare no feelings in summing up our general reality. If we are going to build a successful revolutionary movement, which brings the masses of African people into direct conflict with our oppressors, we must have a winning strategy. If we are going to develop such a strategy, then we must have the best possible understanding of where we have been and where we are now.

The African Liberation Movement: Headless and Divided

The weakness of the African liberation movement have two main aspects: reactionary counterrevolutionary struggle waged against us by the bourgeoisie and the absence of deep, principled unity throughout the movement.

The first aspect is not so well understood, as some forces would claim. The fact is the counterrevolutionary struggle that the ruling class has waged against us was no simple matter. More correctly, it was a multi-level complex system of attacks that amounted to the military defeat of the African revolution and the ongoing repression of anything that might become revolutionary. This process is correctly defined as counterinsurgency warfare, and it has effectively sought to root out our struggle at the most basic levels. However, the very fact that the bourgeoisie ruling class exists means that there will never be a time when the germ of revolutionary resistance does not exist, no matter how small because as long as there is exploitation and oppression, there will be rebellion and resistance. Still, we must be clear that the ruling class engaged in total war against the African revolution and once it liquidated the major revolutionary forces and organizations of the last period, it turned its attention to the repression of the masses of African people.

To this day, a significant part of understanding our struggle is the task of understanding our opposition. We must firmly understand that the ruling class has been continuously undermining all attempts to win the people to struggle via political repression, economic bait and hooks, and social integration. The sophisticated machinery of the capitalist-imperialist state, along with their neo-colonial sub-states and representatives, has made revolution look either impossible or undesirable to our people. The weakness of the African liberation movement cannot be correctly summed up without identifying the counterinsurgency war as the main force that holds back our progress.

On the other hand, we must also sum up the internal contradictions that contribute to the current weakness of the African liberation movement. This internal weakness appears as a deep level of disunity and disarray. It is no secret that there are probably as many different organizations as there are ideologies within our movement. The disunity among the best forces of our movement in addition to the existence of significant fringe ideologies, plus the under-organization of the masses of our people amounts to what academics call hyper-pluralism. There is an overabundance of factions in our movement, and all of them vie with each other for influence and seek their own interests. This creates the current situation where one the hand, there are a large quantity of organizations but a low quality of work being produced. On the other hand, African liberation organizations are concentrated in certain areas and almost non-existent in others. It follows then that there are large gaps in our movement. Pan-African Internationalism understands that in order to achieve our end goal, a critical number of people from the masses of African people must be won into some form of active unity with the aims of the struggle. This being the case, it can be seen that the extremely uneven development of our struggle is a major part of our weakness.

However, what the masses of our people do is a direct reflection to the kind of leadership they unite with. It must be said, without any intention of slandering African working class people, that our people have been won over, in large part, to the uniting under the leadership of capitalist imperialism. Because of this unity, the African proletariat has become more interested in acting on the bourgeoisie agenda than acting in its own interests, as a class. This is a direct reflection of the most critical contradiction in the African liberation movement: the lack of a strong, capable working class vanguard. The lack of a leading social force within the African working class has given the bourgeoisie all of the room it needs to win our people to itself. The faithfulness that African workers demonstrated to the ruling class is not a genuine one, but a faithfulness to what our people perceive as being our best option. The lack of a vanguard force means that there is no serious alternative to the current conditions that our people can really grasp onto. While the African liberation movement offers certain kinds of alternatives to life as an oppressed worker, the fact is, we have yet to develop the infrastructure in the real world that people need to meet their basic needs. This is at the root of the weakness of the African liberation movement. The effectiveness of the counterrevolution in liquidating leading revolutionary forces and organization has left our movement without capable leadership. This lack of leadership is the basis on which the hyper-pluralism of our movement has developed.

The Main Objective of Pan-African Internationalism In the Current Period

So, with a clear understanding of the main problem that holds our movement back, we must come to a point where we recognize what we must do to solve the problem. The most important work of the African liberation movement in this period is the development of a revolutionary, vanguard force. Once the movement has developed its own leadership, one that is capable and effective, one that can lead the African working class forward in sustainable struggle, the work to rebuild the African revolution can be consolidated and our struggle will advance. This is the main objective of Pan-African Internationalism in this period. With this objective established, we must then turn to developing a plan of action that seeks to amplify our strength, and minimize our weaknesses; takes full advantage of the opportunities presented to us, and reduces or removes the threats which undermines our work.

The work to develop a vanguard force is not a simple one, yet it is not a task that is new to us. In each period, the African working class has produced its own leadership that was capable of leading the masses of African people into new periods of struggle. However, it is clear that the best forces of the African liberation movement have yet to develop the conditions necessary to produce the vanguard. This is a reflection of the fact that we, collectively, have yet to update our view of what must be done to meet the current needs of our struggle. There are forces that have the potential to be vanguard forces, yet, they have not been able to win sustained leadership of the African liberation movement. At the heart of this contradiction is the fact that our leading forces have lost sight of the need of revolutionaries to win influence among our people. Leadership is the result of having influence with the people to be led, and until we develop influence, we cannot win our people to struggle. It is the position of Pan-African Internationalism that in this period, we must develop the capacity to build the kind of institutions and infrastructure that supports the lives of our people. In doing so, we demonstrate to our people that participating in the movement is actually in their best interests. When the masses of African people begin to believe that involvement with the struggle will benefit them that they will begin to unite with participating in the African liberation movement.

Controlling the Ground: The General Strategy of Pan-African Internationalism

The main strategy of Pan-African Internationalism, in this period, is to organize and mobilize the masses of African people to fight for and gain control over the territory that we occupy. On the one hand, we must continue to engage in direct political struggle with the class and national enemies of African people, however, in this period, we must finally perfect the work of establishing dual and contending power.

Dual and contending power is the ability to establish an alternative system of political, economic, and social organization that is in direct contention with the system of capitalism. It seeks to engage oppressed people to participate in the work to develop projects, programs, and institutions that serve our needs in a revolutionary way. In doing so, we begin to undermine the ability of the ruling class to control the lives of our people through their power to administer our communities. The establishment of dual and contending power weakness the ruling class from below, in a manner that force the ruling class to reveal its true nature. As we continuously deepen this basic form of self-determination, the ruling class will perceive its own loss of influence and begin to act to antagonize our work. The combination of dual power, continued political engagement, and the open reactionary response of the ruling class will push more African people to abandon their unity with the ruling class and take up unity with the African liberation movement. As a result of their participation in the movement, more and more African workers will become developed into leading revolutionary forces. The combination of an abundance of well developed, organized, revolutionary African workers and growing material resources and infrastructure controlled by the movement will produce the conditions that are necessary to finally organize an African working class vanguard. Based on solid forces and real material capacity, this rebuilt vanguard will then be capable of leading our people in a serious, effective way.

The re-established vanguard must then combine ongoing political action, aimed at advancing and defending the interest of African people, and dual and contending power that functions to develop independence among the African working class. Once these two elements of our movement have are being conducted on a consistent basis, the various elements of the African liberation movement will either be won over to the vanguard or exposed as be counterrevolutionary, eventually leading to the consolidation of our fractured movement into a single force.


Developing influence with the African working class through the consolidation of a vanguard force which can effectively lead African working class people to establish dual and contending power alongside sustain political action constitutes the main strategy of Pan-African Internationalism in the current period.

By Bcde. Abasi Shomari Baruti

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

From the Negro World to the African World Report: Picking Up the Legacy


Uhuru Sasa, and welcome to the first edition of the African World Report – News and Information from African People, for African People. The African World Report Online (AWRO) is a production of the Ujima People’s Media Group, a Pan-African Internationalist media organization that is part of the overall African independence movement. For those who are not familiar, if you check around the site you’ll find information that will explain Pan-African Internationalism, African independence, and other subjects.

As the Lead Coordinator of the UPMG and one of the editors for AWRO, I am personally proud as today marks the beginning of a new period of our work. For little more than a year now, the members of the UPMG have worked to establish the AWRO and after some significant struggle and a long time coming, the AWRO is finally a reality. On this day, August 17th, 1918, almost one hundred years ago, another publication was launched that would forever change the way that African people struggle for our freedom and independence: the Negro World.

The Negro World was the main news organ of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, organized and lead by Marcus M. Garvey. After having struggled to establish an organization like no other in the U.S. and the Caribbean, the UNIA went on to begin publishing its newspaper, the first of a number of do-for-self projects that would separate the UNIA from other black organizations during that time. Engaged in the fight for African human rights, dignity, and independence, the Negro World, under Garvey’s leadership, would become a significant weapon to combat the ideology of racism and its destructive effects on the African community. It would go on to assist the UNIA in exposing white power and engaging it all over the globe. The Negro World was, at its height, a place where African artists, writers, and scholars were introduced to African people. It reached out to upwards of a half million people and helped to extend the UNIA’s abilities in the real world. The UNIA tool on the struggle to build factories, commercial businesses, and so on, it employed thousands of African people during the height of the “Great Depression”, and made the first steps towards an African Unity throughout the Diaspora. Every step of the way, the Negro World was there and at critical points, it was the deciding factor in the success of the UNIA programs. The Negro World would become one of the first institutions that would proclaim the beauty of being black, the dignity of being African, whether by birth or descent. And so, as the first organization to seriously organize and mobilize the African working class continued to make leaps towards ending the oppression and uniting the African world, it was the Negro World that was one of the weapons the UNIA used to achieve its success. It is this great legacy that the African World Report Online attempts to pickup and carry forward.

It is common knowledge that African people are still locked in a fight for our dignity, for our freedom, and for our independence. We have been struggling for this for centuries, and until we reach the objective of true justice, we will continue. A big part of this struggle is the struggle for the hearts and minds of African people, and the African working class in general. Daily, our people are bombarded with the ideas of white supremacy and capitalist imperialism. We are, every moment of our lives, overwhelmed with the ideas of the forces that are responsible for creating the current situation we find ourselves in. Throughout our struggle we have fought these ideas and developed better ideas that have served our interests and helped us to move forward. A main battleground in this war of ideas has been the news media.

Since the inception of corporate media, the news has been used to undermine African people while winning us to unite with our oppressors. The task of the AWRO is to reverse that trend. We don’t pretend to be unbiased or without slant. In fact, we are clear from the very beginning that reporting the news is never done without some kind of bias. Every news outlet answers to someone and the people that the media answers to dictate the agenda for the news media it controls. We answer only to African people, and so we take it as our job to tell the truth about what is happening in the world and to show how current events affect the lives of African people. The AWRO joins the ranks of the information warriors who battle daily to defeat the ideas and practices of white supremacy, exploitation and oppression. We salute those who have been carrying this struggle forward and look to add to the impact they are making.

So, in celebration of the founding of the Negro World, we are proud to bring you the African World Report. We hope our contributions are helpful.

Uhuru Sasa!
(Freedom Now!)