2018 is a watershed moment in our struggle for national liberation and sovereignty. We are now 50 years past the formal declaration of our independence from the empire that is the United States of America. That we have yet to attain our freedom should not be viewed with trepidation. As we study the annals of history, we take note of the fact that it often takes centuries for oppressed peoples and colonized nations to develop the capacities and varied forms of organization needed to emancipate themselves from the grip of their colonizers and oppressors. Like it or not, our case is no different. Our declaration of independence was only a starting point. We have many capacities yet to learn and many self-sustaining and self-sufficient organizations yet to build to be able to successfully win our freedom.
Given how and where our people started on Great Turtle Island and where we’re presently at, it should be crystal clear that we still have a long way to go. But, to move forward, It is critical that we take stock of the past and present and make an honest and critical assessment of where we’re at in terms of: a) articulating and developing the national consciousness of our people on a mass level, b) developing the necessary skills and capacities amongst the people that are needed to advance our cause, and c) building the necessary institutions and resources that will enable us to get there.
We have to start our assessment with the articulation and development of our national consciousness and identity. For starters, there are few Black people at present who describe themselves as conscious New Afrikans and citizens of the Republic of New Afrika, with New Afrikan meaning in broad, but simple terms, a person of Afrikan descent who recognizes the nationhood of the Afrikan people held captive and colonized within the US empire, and who fight for the self-determination, independence and sovereignty of this nation without compromise. This author would wager that there are fewer than 20,000 Black people in this empire at present who define themselves as New Afrikans, and this is perhaps being generous. But, even if I’m wrong, and there are perhaps 1,000,000 Black people in this empire who define themselves as New Afrikans, we have to recognize that this would be insufficient, grossly insufficient, towards accomplishing our mission. We have to develop the capacities, programs, and institutions that can reach millions of our people, convince them to join the independence movement, organize them into institutions and social processes that build the overall material and political capacities of the movement, and democratically coordinate our actions to advance our mission.
If we acknowledge the above to be true, it is then incumbent upon those of us who are conscious citizens to be more strategic in our work and develop the skills and capacities necessary to organize millions of people over the long haul. That we are presently few in number should not be a deterrent. Revolutions rarely start with masses of people. They start with small groups of people who lay the foundation with sound socio-cultural and material assessments of their context and new ideas around how society must be reorganized and why. These then are advanced when they are backed up with programmatic action that compel people to reassess and reorganize their overall productive (how people produce and secure their material needs) and reproductive (how people sustain themselves and their children, parents, etc. through care work like cooking, childcare, health care, eduction, etc.) relations over time. To this end, some of the primary skills and capacities this generation of New Afrikan revolutionaries must develop specifically pertain to a) developing concrete “transitional” strategies that can programmatically be advanced to scale (meaning organize and mobilize people in the tens of thousands) over the next 10 to 20 years, predominantly within the New Afrikan national territory (i.e. South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana), and b) developing effective means to politically engage millions of Black people in active ideological and political struggle. It is imperative that we win the battle of ideas over the next 10 years, so we can make conscious interventions in the struggles ahead, particularly those around the climate change crisis.
Now, as it relates to the articulation and development of our national consciousness first thing that must be noted is that the New African Independence Movement (NAIM), as a tendency within the larger Black Liberation Movement (BLM) in the United States, is, at present, in a secondary position relative to the tendency aiming to transform the whole of what is now the United States settler colonial project into a socialist and/or communist society. The third major tendency of the Black Liberation Movement, the repatriation tendency, which aims to see us physically return in mass to the Afrikan continent, is by far and away the minority tendency at present. It should be noted however, that the most predominant political position held and articulated by the “organized majority” (people in some organized relationship with the Democratic or Republican Party and formations like the NAACP, Urban League, trade unions, churches, mosques, etc.) of Black people is not one centered on liberation, but rather deeper integration within the empire. And beyond that, the predominant political position held by the “unorganized majority” (including the majority of Black people who don’t participate in the electoral edifices of the empire and who operate either in informal organizations or loosely connected to organized formations such as those listed above) of Black people is one centered on survival, plain and simple.
I would argue that this latter group, the “unorganized majority” constitute between 25 - 30% of the entire Black population within the US empire. The vast majority of these individuals are drawn from the more precarious sectors of the working class, and are organized into organic formations, like street organizations or “tribes” more than anything else. Beyond this, we have to recognize that the material and cultural impositions of neoliberalism over the past 30 years have eviscerated the formal organizations of the Black working class, like trade unions, social aid clubs, civic groups, etc. If the New Afrikan independence Movement is going to grow within the next 10 years, it is predominantly going to have to come from this sector, as it is the one least attached to the spoils of empire, and the clearest in terms of understanding its own disposable status and reality.
If we are being honest with ourselves in answering why this dynamic presently exists, we have to start with the overall weakness of the New Afrikan Independence Movement. The weaknesses of our movement come from an uneven combination of external threats and internal deficiencies. The primary external threat that we have and will continue to confront is the United States government. This threat confronts us on many levels: infiltration, observation, investigation, prosecution, imprisonment and outright liquidation. The secondary external threat that we confront, but only second by minor degrees, are the forces of capital (i.e. the transnational banks, transnational corporations, major stock and bond holders, and large landowners). Capital has two aims relative to our movement. One is to contain it when and where necessary to ensure that the vast majority of our people remain in position to be exploited. The second aim of capital is to appropriate any and all of the material and cultural products we innovate to profit from them via their monopolization of the various production and distribution processes generally employed in any market exchange in this society. Profit is the dominant motivate in this dynamic, but not the only one. The other motive is to use our labor and its fruits as weapons against us culturally and psychologically to ensure that we remain divided and in vulnerable positions.
Our internal deficiencies are of another quality. Again, the number of conscious citizens of the Republic of New Africa are few. The number of people who consider themselves New Afrikans is relatively few. The number of partisan organizations within the New African Independence is declining, and the forces that we do have, like Provisional Government, the New Afrikan People’s Organization, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and elements within the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) and the Jericho Amnesty Movement to free our political prisoners and prisoners of war, are by most measures, in retreat. As revolutionaries on the quest to rebuild the New Afrikan Independence Movement, we have to interrogate why we are in this predicament, and to do so with ruthless candor and honesty if we are going to develop a concrete program and strategy to reverse our fortunes. We have to start with our internal differences. After 50 years of struggle, and being witness to the many challenges and failures of the national and social liberation movements in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America over this course of time, we have yet to fully come to grips with the “pitfalls of national consciousness” as comrade Frantz Fanon put it. We haven’t collectively synthesized the lessons from our own experiences and those of others, nor developed a coherent corrective program and course of action to address our shortcomings and pitfalls. To be concrete and clear on what is meant here, our movement doesn’t have a coherent and synthesized understanding of neocolonialism or neoliberalism in all their forms - ranging from electoralism to NGOism - and how to combat them. We do not have a shared understanding of the complexities of sex and gender in our movement, and how to deal with the power imbalances between women and men, or between heterosexuals and non-gender conforming peoples and communities within and amongst our people. Nor do we have a clear agreement regarding who we collectively think should be the primary driving force in our movement - the working class or the petit bourgeois - and what that therefore implies regarding the development of a coherent program and strategy to accomplish our mission.
Finally, in addressing our need to build effective institutions and resources that will enable us to make some serious advances over the course of the next 10 years, we have to make the time to address the critical questions raised above. Without coming to some basic unity on these questions, we will continue to march around in circles and we can ill afford to do that. The stakes are too high. To move the effort to forge greater unity in our movement forward, I want to outline a few positions in summation to open the debate and get us moving on the struggle for clarity here. Starting with the questions above, let me state the following:
1. Regarding addressing the challenges of neocolonialism and neoliberalism we must adopt a politics and set of principles that ensure that our tactical decisions align with our strategic pursuits to ensure that politics always remains in command. This means that every decision, every step must concretely reflect our end goal and clearly articulate how it will enable the goal to be achieved. We cannot wage a democratic struggle in secret, nor can we be ambiguous about what we are trying to accomplish. The masses have to know that we are fighting for and working towards self-determination, sovereignty, and ecosocialism.
2. On the question of addressing sexism and heteropatriarchy in our movement we have to incorporate the most advanced thinking and practice being derived from the social liberation movements over the past 4 years (and beyond) and embrace the diversity of our people and fight to ensure that all our people are included in all that we do and aspire for, be they queer, trans, or gender non-conforming in any way. New Afrika must and will be socially liberated, as well as politically and economically liberated.
3. On the question of the motive forces we must firmly come to grips with the fact that if our movement is going to succeed, it is going to have to be a mass movement. And it must therefore embrace the positionally of the masses and utilize this as our primary strength. This means being clear that the New Afrikan working class is going to have to lead our movement to victory and that the petit bourgeois forces inside of it are going to have to consciously and willfully commit to a program of “class suicide” as comrade Amilcar Cabral outlined.
4. Finally, I submit that our movement must adopt a clear program to build ecosocialism from below over the course of the next ten years (and beyond). On a transitional level this entails building a network solidarity economy institutions that are fortified by semi-autonomous municipalist movements and/or zones over this period time. Give the existential threat to humanity posed by climate change, we have to ensure that our projects and the semi-autonomous or liberated zones that we construct take lead on innovating sustainable economies and regenerative solutions to restore ecological balance in our communities and throughout the world. We have to turn this crisis into an opportunity for our people and our cause, particularly given how it could potentially weaken the grip of the US state and transnational capital in the years and decades to come.
I further offer this programmatic suggestion to add to the four points raised above. This quote is taken from “Until We Win”, which I wrote and released in September 2015 in Counterpunch magazine:
“Autonomous projects are initiatives not supported or organized by the government (state) or some variant of monopoly capital (finance or corporate industrial or mercantile capital). These are initiatives that directly seek to create a democratic “economy of need” around organizing sustainable institutions that satisfy people’s basic needs around principles of social solidarity and participatory or direct democracy that intentionally put the needs of people before the needs of profit. These initiatives are built and sustained by people organizing themselves and collectivizing their resources through dues paying membership structures, income sharing, resource sharing, time banking, etc., to amass the initial resources needed to start and sustain our initiatives. These types of projects range from organizing community farms (focused on developing the capacity to feed thousands of people) to forming people’s self-defense networks to organizing non-market housing projects to building cooperatives to fulfill our material needs. To ensure that these are not mere Black capitalist enterprises, these initiatives must be built democratically from the ground up and must be owned, operated, and controlled by their workers and consumers. These are essentially “serve the people” or “survival programs” that help the people to sustain and attain a degree of autonomy and self-rule. Our challenge is marshaling enough resources and organizing these projects on a large enough scale to eventually meet the material needs of nearly 40 million people. And overcoming the various pressures that will be brought to bear on these institutions by the forces of capital to either criminalize and crush them during their development (via restrictions on access to finance, market access, legal security, etc.) or co-opt them and reincorporate them fully into the capitalist market if they survive and thrive. Our pressure exerting initiatives must be focused on creating enough democratic and social space for us to organize ourselves in a self-determined manner. We should be under no illusion that the system can be reformed, it cannot. Capitalism and its bourgeois national-states, the US government being the most dominant amongst them, have demonstrated a tremendous ability to adapt to and absorb disruptive social forces and their demands – when it has ample surpluses. The capitalist system has essentially run out of surpluses, and therefore does not possess the flexibility that it once did.”
To be sure, we are NOT where we should be, nor where need to be. We have enough to regroup and bounce back, of this I am sure. But, we have some major struggle to wage to address and overcome our own weaknesses and shortcomings to get there. We have to start now to make sure that our next 50 years are more fruitful than our last 50 years. Our ancestors and children demand no less.
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