A Black World Revolution

OUR STRATEGIC THEORY, DILUTED

Awhile back, I stopped reading Sons of Africa because there was too much useless info filtering in there. It’s a great site, and there is quite a bit of important news and updates which come in, yet there is a great deal of irrelevant nonsense, too. Much of the informative stuff I can get on sites with fewer posts. As for discussion, Hands Off Assata (Assata Shakur Forums)  is the best place with a black working class feel. There, people mix it up in lively discussions around any number of topics, and there are different areas where you can find the type of discussion which best suits you. But SOA, like any Yahoo group including mine (URC Discuss), doesn’t have a feature which allows moderators to file posts under different headings.

Now, people cannot focus on the main points of our struggle so as to form a strategy when they believe they are outflanked, out organized and out gunned. And for this reason, due to the variety of wild ideas in the name of Pan Africanism, the discussion in our community has become as diluted as it has from substance abuse or neo-colonialism or any other cause. One claimant to Pan Africanism on SOA, one Chief Elder Osiris Akkebala, justified introducing a rabid neo-nazi onto the board by alleging in effect that he will join with anybody to elevate his cause. We have to remember this is a polemical struggle involving actionable ideas, history and movements.

On the other hand, those of us who think along strategic lines — rather than subscribing to the panic theory, the hopeless theory, the otherworldly theory, and anything else which makes the mind putty in the hands of the oppressor, to paraphrase Steve Bantu Biko — we may better recognize the pressure points in Imperialism and what WE must do to turn pressure points into cracks, cracks into fissures, and fissures into the ruin of white power. Black Panther Party Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton said ‘we don’t fight racism with racism anymore than we fight fire with fire; we fight racism with Solidarity,’ by recruiting the staunchest anti-racist elements of the white community. And we don’t fight racism by joining with the most bloodsucking, marginal supporters of Imperialism.

So believing in the wrong knowledge is useless. Knowledge can exist without anybody having to buy into it, and we can invent ideas and theories which render exactly no service to our cause. While Santa Claus doesn’t exist, people make him real because they tell their kids there is a Santa and then their kids demand stuff at Christmas time and then parents run around like headless chickens serving a notion they planted in a child’s mind. We must calm our minds, breathe deeply, and try to look at the question as a cola nut, with a shell that protects a kernel. The kernel is what we are after because the shell is useless to us, unless we are playing Three Card Monty. We need knowledge that will render a service to our cause and the nonsense about the US being a corporation, the laws on martial decrees and citizenship, the archaic 3/5ths of a man rule and the one-drop law, the Illuminati and other passe issues are not going to liberate a single African in the Americas or in the Motherland.

One of Fanon's great works

In all these Chicken Little discussions, — which are found almost everywhere, from the barbershop to the bar and up in the churches and on the street corners — nobody has any idea about what can be done. Nobody wants to know what can be done. Its like Frances Cress-Welsing’s Color Theory of Racial Confrontation, whereby she identifies a problem (like she is the first black person to identify racism!) and then proposes no solution to the problem. Obviously, moving away from white folks is the clear solution, given her premise. But she is no Back-to-Africa advocate. So what does she propose? Psychotherapy! Guess what? If Frantz Fanon, who was a psychotherapist, had suggested psychotherapy for Algeria instead of a liberation war, Algerians would either have killed him as a collaborator or else took his advice and still be a French colony. So much for that revisionist game Three Card Monty.

The black middle class, being the class of collaborators and traitors, does not kno what it takes to build a revolution or to even make qualitative change for our community. Not every black middle class individual is a traitor. But as a class, that is its historical role. It traded in nationalism for mobility, collaboration for integration. It exists solely thru its neo-colonial relationship to international finance capital, Imperialism. In Atlanta, the Mecca of the black middle class, a war is being waged against the historical roots of the Black Power Movement. Willie Mukasa Ricks, founder of the slogan Black Power, has been assaulted, jailed and banned from Morehouse campus. Jamil Al Amin, SNCC coordinator and former Black Panther, has been imprisoned. These repressive developments are due more to the initiative of the black middle class (on behalf of Imperialism) than to any other source.

These questions without answers, that is, without solutions that can be applied as a strategy for our liberation, derive in whole from the black middle class. In fact, the question posed by the black middle class and joined by its natural ally, the lumpen proletariat (the parasite within the working class) has only deepened our oppression.

Therefore, when we discuss the contradictions within our community we see giants in the African liberation struggle having to compete with mental midgets. People prefer to read Dr York’s opinions on Africa rather than Cheik Anta Diop, John Henrik Clarke and Walter Rodney. Our community gets offered Khalid Muhammad and Malik Shabazz’s fake panthers, in substitution to Huey P, Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton and George Jackson. Folks are no longer able to make the distinction between revolutionary theory versus harebrained half-baked idle talk. This has been a petty bourgeois trend ever since Floyd McKissick stole Willie Ricks’ slogan and cried, “Black power means green power, money!”

Here, you have freedom fighters who have built up reputations, careers and movements. These martyrs have liberated minds and bodies, while on the other hand you have limelight seekers, slick talkers and masters of Three Card Monty. The New Black Panther Party doesn’t even reproduce the theory of Huey P or George Jackson or Fred Hampton. The NBPP does not understand revolutionary theory. It has no grasp of democratic-centralism, criticism/self-criticism, revolutionary class theory, the leadership role of women, community programs, the Little Red Book or anything the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense committed itself towards implementing. The FBI labeled Huey P’s organization “the greatest internal threat to the security of the United States.” Those Black Panthers were jailed, imprisoned, exiled and assassinated for their groundbreaking work. The NBPP stole their name and doesn’t even pay them lip service. On this count, the NBPP is not Pan Africanist, not revolutionary, and not a freedom fighting organization. In the sense that the Panthers read Nkrumah, Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral, they were Pan Africanists. So what is the NBPP?

Monument to Amilcar Cabral

We are engaged in a polemical struggle, combatting a crisis in thinking. Why would anybody propagate a theory which has no potential to liberate our people? We have to understand background info is used for agitational purposes. Citizenship — based on the one drop rule, based on the Dred Scott Decision, based on the Emancipation Proclamation — is nothing but background information that we use as an agitational point. We do not develop theories around background info. It is factual, that is enuf. We build theories around our current conditions, things which effect our everyday lives, and the things which tell us what is important inform us who we are speaking with.

Unemployment, homelessness, the prison system, drugs and violence, the war against our community. That is critically important to the black working class. Other things, ephemeral at times, remain of varying importance to the middle class. My struggle is immediate, right here and now. It is in my face. It does not appear to me in the form of a document, a writ, a speech, a conversation. My struggle is the struggle for survival, the struggle to change my conditions, the struggle to rise above my conditions and bring along those who have suffered with me. Not just my family, but my community. My struggle is immediate and glaring. I do not need anybody to define it for me. It is the struggle of my neighbor to feed himself, to clothe himself. It is the struggle of my stepdaughter to get thru school without being sexually assaulted, to excel at her studies, and to transform her world and her community. Nobody needs to go into an extensive expose on black citizenship or the Illuminati to do that. Black workers still have our feet firmly planted on god’s good earth turned sour under Imperialism. Peace.

Black Workers in the Financial Rip Off Game

Bail Out or Hand Out: White Supremacy in Crisis

The basic misconception about the so-called financial meltdown is that an overextended credit regime caused the problem. This simplification dumbs down the public response to what is really taking place. To understand this, we can ask a few questions. Like, why are retail prices on big ticket items such as plasma televisions, Cadillacs, etc. falling? In a crisis, prices are expected to rise due to inflation, yet the dollar has become stronger. Then, why are the banks, the highest level of business organization, claiming to be in trouble, when we see financial institutions all over the country either buying up assets or being bought. What is happening to the labor movement, and why hasn’t it taken the offensive defending the interests of working people?

To comprehend the “financial meltdown”, we must understand the history of those who engineered it. While the so-called crisis began in the Eighties, the tone for its demolishing effects was set in the Bush 43 administration. This trend was set with the rewarding of no-bid contracts to defense industry specialists, and a Washington political clique run by cronyism and the Texas mafia.

People must accept the view there is no real “bail out” of the finance industry. It is a government hand out so that the big capitalists can concentrate liquidity and thereby control the world economy. By concentrating liquidity, (remember, “Cash is king”) they strengthen the dollar’s purchasing power because it has become scarce. This has a weakening effect on other currencies. If there were a financial meltdown, inflation would have hit the dollar bill. But the American consumer is not being afflicted by inflation. In fact, prices on many consumer goods have plummeted. The dollar has become very strong in the wake of the so-called meltdown. So we can dismiss the idea of a crisis deriving from “overextended credit” as a culprit. So the economists and other financial experts who discuss the problem as deriving from a stressed out credit regime are deceiving the masses.

The extensive credit regime emerged because a process was needed to give workers the illusion of having attained middle class status. This went hand-in-hand with a strategy to weaken the labor movement, which had made the working class strong and kept the neo-conservative trend a marginal, at best, political movement.

Credit permitted people who had only dreamt of ever owning a home the ability to finally have that aspiration within their grasp. It allowed poor people to buy cars; credit extended folks an opportunity to buy furniture, education, electronics and other comforts of life. Credit also invented a new redline. The redline was originally the line drawn up during redistricting, which political parties had used to gerrymander black districts, thereby diluting black political power. Another form of the gerrymander was at-large elections that did not recognize districts. These practices effectively prevented black representation in public office. Redlining also became a practice, outlawed during the Seventies yet rarely enforced, which the banks used to deny loans to blacks and other colonized workers.

The adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) became the new redline. The ARM is a piece of work used to rip off consumers in the housing market. When credit rates hovered between 4.5% and 5.5%, black folks who had been shut out of the housing market due to any number of circumstances, did not have access to normal credit instruments. The ARM appeared to be a turning point in creating a friendly relationship between banks and the black community. However, the problem with the ARM is that after a period of time, say four to seven years, a prevailing high interest rate would lock in and become the defining feature of the mortgage package. So an ARM originally purchased at 5.5% in 1995 may rise to an 11% rate in 2000. That jeopardized many homeowners.

One historical and fundamental reason why Africans, why we black folks, had been shut out of the housing market was because a racist government agency known as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) tied up houses in black neighborhoods and refused to sell them for forty years. This effectively prevented a positive trend from transpiring, as the numerous community residents who had tried to buy those houses and rehab their own neighborhoods over that period were stopped cold. When the housing bubble hit, HUD sold these houses to deep pocket developers. So the government counterinsurgency against the black community collaborated with finance in a Sixties Era agency, reputedly formed to assist urban areas, to set up this current situation. These practices guaranteed than unemployment, drugs, health issues, crime and other problems would remain concentrated in the black community. So without government acquiescence in this and other areas, the credit regime could not have been imposed.

During this self-same forty year period, illegal redlining simultaneously prevailed without effective enforcement. However, a few other points must be stressed to give a more complete picture of the role credit has played. This has been explained in previous essays. The pundits have lied about credit having been overextended, thereby causing the so-called financial meltdown. Credit became a trend following the Savings and Loans scandals of the Eighties and early Nineties. Today, many banks supposedly are surviving thru drug money laundering and other illegal activities. Yet that was the cause of the S&L crisis, wherein over 600 institutions went out of business and the FDIC covered their savings. Not one person was prosecuted. No major investigations were started, revealing another case of government collaboration with the finance sector. What did happen, a huge amount of liquidity (cash) became concentrated in the hands of movers and shakers in the financial sector. Remember, concentration of wealth for private ownership and control is the major feature of capitalism.

Following the S&L scandals, another scam arose to rob the working classes. This was the stock-based retirement plan. Now, investment portfolios are not made for the working class. They do not exist for the middle class, for the most part. Anyone watching a PGA tournament can get an idea what investment capital looks like: $250k to spend in the money market. Otherwise don’t pick up the phone.

But to get their hands on lots of easy money to build million dollar portfolios, investment bankers brought in human resource managers and other people to sell workers on stock-based retirement plans. These plans, conveniently packaged in the form of 401ks, KEOGHs and IRAs, might be worth $50 to $200 per month per worker. Hence, multiply that by the number of workers who bit, and it became a tidy bit of change. Add to that retirement packages put together by unions, guilds and other bodies, and the financiers were getting totals in the tens of millions every month. So when organizations like Enron, MCI-Worldcom, Tyco, and others went under, they dragged all those stock-based retirement plans with them. For instance, the Pennsylvania Teachers Retirement Fund lost $55 million in Enron alone.

Workers’ money placed in stock-based plans is money taken out of circulation. That is money which a worker will never see, will never spend, and amounts to nothing more than a gift to the rich. That money is not being used on anything which benefits the working class; in fact, that money is being concentrated in the hands of a class at war with the working class. Since cash had begun to dry up, it became necessary to extend credit to further concentrate ever more liquidity into the hands of the bourgeoisie. The credit system was expanded so that all Americans had access to credit who wanted it. This forced people in hoc to the bank to work at a pace that actually deprived them of the very things which makes life worth living; statistically, people in this country work harder at longer hours and for more days in the year than in any other industrialized nation. The people who value freedom so preciously have given it up to the credit system.

The analysis of the nation’s economic “pundits” seems to be the prevailing opinion without any significant challenge from either the Left or the unions, even while unemployment rises and wages are being cut. We have to challenge the notion that a financial meltdown has hit the banks. We have to show how the financial institutions have created one scenario after another to concentrate greater amounts of capital in their hands. It is important to expose that the dollar is strong because the financiers have hoarded it; they have locked up liquidity and made it tough for the masses of people. Yet they are not suffering, and the system of credit is just another regime imposed upon a duped working class.

We also have to break white working collaboration with the ruling class. The white worker no longer has any stake in the concentrated class question, aka racism. When the white worker commits national suicide and unites with the workers of the world, that will bring about the end of capitalism. Yet black and Latino workers in the US do not have time to wait for that break thru. We have to deepen our solidarity, work together to build an internationalist movement, and fight against Imperialism. Say no the the bail outs! Defend the rights of our African and Latino communities! Power to the People!