Rashid

Introduction

The object of a revolutionary organization is to unite (and unite with), mobilize, organize and lead masses of oppressed peoples to achieve fundamental economic, political, cultural, and social change and collective security.
Founded in 2005, the New Afrikan Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter arose within the most oppressed stratum of U.S society, (namely amongst prisoners), to take up the banner of revolutionary struggle in the interests of New Afrikans and all oppressed and exploited peoples. We aspire to become,
but are not as yet a formal and functional vanguard party.

We will be formally constituted once we transition to the outside, hold a founding Congress and elect a free world Central Committee  and Executive Committee (Politburo). We will be functionally constituted only when the oppressed urban masses voluntarily embrace us as their revolutionary leadership.

Even as we remain a prison-based organization, we share an important revolutionary role which is to transform these prison plantations into liberation schools. This is the first phase of our Party’s strategy, which coincides with our having been founded inside the prisons.

The second phase of our strategy, which is largely consigned to the outside Party once established will be to transform the oppressed urban communities into base areas, where a new revolutionary economic, social, political and cultural life, and collective security will take root and thrive.

These two phases tie into a broader strategy of building a worldwide united front to overthrow this capitalist-imperialist system.

At this point comrades are still in need of practical guidance, and ideological and organizational clarity on building and consolidating a solid Party structure and mass revolutionary movement around us.

These are issues relevant to both the Prison Chapter and building the outside Party. Related questions and critiques have also been presented, some long outstanding, by our supporters and detractors alike concerning methods of building an effective political movement appropriate to existing conditions.
Some of these people of course, don’t understand or outright reject the need and importance of revolutionary leadership and organization. There is also the question of who must comprise this leadership. These are the issues we would like to address here.

On Organization and Security

On the “Left” the term “organizing” is used often and loosely. Especially by those who actually oppose forming, joining or subordinating their individual interests to the collective decision making and discipline of a revolutionary organization. Although they may exhort the virtues of “solidarity” they actually practice individualism which runs counter to building and advancing a movement for collective or mass change.

Obviously one cannot be a social organizer and not belong to a social organization. One implies the other. An organization is a body of people, never one persyn acting alone, who devise goals and work together to achieve them. It is coordinated with levels of responsibility and allocation of tasks and accountability between its members, who must perform functions alloted to them according to their means and the needs and goals of the organization.

This explicitly calls for leadership and discipline. Conversely to act individually according to one’s own whims, agenda and impulses, without accountability or responsibility, is the meaning of disorganization.

Which can only lead to chaos, division, conflict and disorder. The opposite of solidarity.

Becoming or remaining a voluntary member of any organization involves important considerations, such as whether one trusts and believes in, agrees with and understands the organization and its goals.

To the more mature and committed organizers; These are questions of especial concern and influence whether they will commit themselves wholeheartedly and long term to the group’s core principles, its work, growth, development, survival and regeneration.

It is therefore important that the group and its members be transparent if people are to know, trust and understand it. Without this the group cannot have even the foundation for “security”.

Comrade Safiya Bukhari, a former BPP and BLA leader explained:

“By definition, security means freedom from danger, fear and anxiety. Individual and organizational safety and well-being begin with the knowledge of what your about, what the organization is about, your limitations, the organization’s limitations, your strengths and the organization’s strengths. Knowledge is the key to security. History has shown that the best security depends on the internal strength of the organization and the internal principles of the people who make up the organization.” (1)

As an examples of solid organizational and individual principles she uses the creed of the Republic of New Africa (RNA) which states in the relevant part: “I will steal nothing from a brother or sister, cheat no brother or sister, misuse no brother or sister, inform on no brother or sister and spread no gossip.”
These principles, she observed, express “an extremely important part of individual and collective security. The knowledge that the person next to you-the person working beside you-will not cheat you or lie and spread gossip about you is the basis for your feeling secure in your environment and within your organization. The ability to trust your comrades implicitly and to know with certainty what they will do in any circumstance is the best security.

The question then, is how do we get to this point? It begins with knowing what you’re about-what you want and what you believe and how far you will go to obtain it. The reciprocal reality is knowing what the organization is about. If the purpose and mission of the organization is clear, not subject to interpretation, then people joining will not be able to say that they thought the organization was about one thing when they joined only to find out later it was about something totally different.

That means that both the individual and the organization must be open and honest.” (2)

Our Party’s rules embrace standards akin to the RNA rules, which actual and potential members must know and obey. An important criteria of Party recruitment is that one’s internal principles be proven to be compatible with the Party’s.

They must also know, understand and commit to our Ten Point Program and Platform, which clearly sets out “what we want” and “what we believe”. They must also understand and adhere to our ideological and political line of Historical and Dialectical Materialism (HDM), instead of practicing dogmatism, sentimentalism, opportunism and subjectivism.

Before being recruited into the Party, comrades must prove to be dedicated and serious, and bring a great deal of voluntary discipline to this work; They must, having the courage of their convictions, be willing and able to stand firm in adversity, repression and isolation. And they must stand tall as “professional revolutionaries” meaning they must be committed foremost and completely in principle and practice to carrying forward the struggle against oppression and exploitation as their life’s work, instead of wavering, having divided loyalties, ulterior motives, other agendas or seeking individual gratifications and rewards. Only people of this caliber can be trusted by the masses to serve their interests without deviating. Hence it is they who must constitute the core of the revolutionary Party.

Indeed the moral stand of the vanguard must be “the masses first, think nothing of self.”

The Party must have absolutely no private agenda to pursue and work solely to serve the people.

Supervised by the people it must never alienate or isolate itself from them, nor set itself above them.

This work calls for planning, cooperation, and accountability. In a word: organization.

To proceed without order and planning is in fact counter-strategic, counter-productive and irresponsible.

Our individual moral outrage and love for the people can and should be our fuel to action, but our actual courses of action must be disciplined and informed by objective, collective, organized and scientific planning. This inherently requires and constitutes organizational leadership.

On Leadership

No revolutionary movement can proceed and succeed without a revolutionary leadership.

And no one can participate in such a movement without themselves leading or misleading it or being led. To think otherwise is a mistaken idea.

As already discussed an organizer belongs and is loyal to an organization. The function of which is to collectively devise and achieve certain goals. In carrying out such goals, the organizer is in fact a leader. This is especially true when s/he seeks to inform or influence the actions of those outside the organization.

Whether to induce them to aid, support or simply not oppose the organization’s ideas and goals.

So the organizer leads others, for good or for ill and regardless of whether they admit and accept their leadership role and its responsibilities. The same applies to individuals who seek to influence or inform others. In the case of a revolutionary organization which seeks to guide a mass movement, its leadership must be achieved by the voluntary consent of the people. It must be earned by proven merit, not by force, coercion, deception or fraud.

Our work in service to the People requires that we be educated by them-and in turn educate and elevate them-we must be both students and teachers.

As students we learn from them their conditions, needs and concerns, and being of the oppressed masses ourselves, we live and struggle alongside them daily, we must attentively listen to their views, remain close to them, and learn from their strengths.

If they are wrong we must explain their errors, but only after patiently hearing them out. But we don’t know everything and therefore must be good at listening and learning, accepting criticism and correcting our mistakes.

As teachers we take the masses raw and unorganized ideas and applying revolutionary theory-HDM-and understanding of the oppressive system as a whole, return their ideas to them in the form of programs, practical solutions and examples, which involve and enable them to solve their own problems. To do this Party cadre must be throughly versed in the science of HDM and be able to apply it to solving problems.

In this dialectical relationship of student and teacher, we don’t quibble over the question of leadership.

Because it is inherently impossible to teach or guide or influence people’s thoughts, decisions or actions without assuming the role of leadership. And since we are always teaching or learning, setting or following examples, we are either leading or being led.

So unlike those “Leftists” who shun the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary line; we don’t reject the role and responsibility of leaders and leadership. Indeed we recognize that in class divided society, the thinking of every person and group reflects the perspective of the class which has influenced and molded them.

And as soon as that persyn or group opens their mouth or puts pen to paper to share their perspectives, or take actions observed by or setting an example to others, the assume the authority to influence others opinions and actions according to the values of the class which has influenced them. They then teach others. And every teacher is a leader.

Their words and actions will affect the words and actions of others who hear and observe them.

Again, whether for good or for ill, whether conscious or not, and whether they accept or deny the fact of being a teacher, leader or authority. In fact it is through perceptions of our environment and others in it that we learn and form ideas, opinions, theories etc, which in turn inform our actions.

Intelligent life reflects reflects and follows the example and influence of others, especially the more advanced members of its species.

Who among us that oppose the oppressive system, when we speak or write critical articles, poetry etc, don’t aspire to influence the ideas and by extension the actions of others in relation to the system?

We therefore deceive ourselves and others when we profess to eschew leaders and leadership.

And a grave injustice is committed by those who raise rejecting leadership and “authority” to the level of  political principle. There is actually a class basis to this thinking which we will further discuss below.

Furthermore, consider how absurd it would be for a teacher to challenge and change your beliefs and understandings with new perspectives (say about capitalism for example), that affect how you perceive and relate to the world at the most fundamental levels, but then tell you not to act on this information.
And not to look to them for guidance or examples in resolving the problems and contradictions they opened your eyes to, or which arise as you struggle to apply your new understanding and values.

To abandon you in this manner would be to leave you at the mercy of a society and system organized to counter all that you have just learned, inevitably compelling you to resort to it or continue upholding it just as you have always done.

This is an erroneous line which leaves many a radical to ultimately integrate into the system.

Here is what distinguishes genuine revolutionary leaders from elitist philosophers. The revolutionary leader not only consciously teaches what is wrong with the system, but also leads in teaching the masses through example and participation how to correct what is wrong.

Mao Tse Tung summarized this revolutionary Marxist line thusly:

“Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying these laws actively to change the world…only social practice can be the criterion of truth.”

This is where the traditional “Left” falls short. In the manner of petty bourgeois intellectuals, they analyze, criticize and interpret the world in various ways, but they fail to bring their analysis down to the level of practice to change its oppressive conditions.

At best they resort to individualist rebelliousness or counter cultural or academic retreats, which does nothing to benefit the oppressed multitudes. And why?
Because their class stand prevents it. Which is a principle reason many of them reject the need for and function of revolutionary leadership. While in truth they act as leaders and teachers of the class stance of those who talk about but don’t dare organize to solve the problems of the oppressed.

Namely the petty bourgeois. Actually deep down many of these people don’t really want to fundamentally change conditions because they have privileges to protect and fear the exercise of power from below.

So while they arouse the discontent of many, they leave them to fall on their faces when it comes to leading the masses to organize to resolve the conditions that oppress them. This leaves the People to a fate of spontaneous, unorganized rebellion which will be co-opted and or violently repressed, leading to business as usual for their exploiters and mass conformity and demoralization.
This is why the People need a revolutionary vanguard. And “vanguard” by the way simply means leadership which is what building the NABPP-PC is all about.

On Cadre Practice

A revolutionary organization is only as strong or as solid as its members or cadre, who must be rooted in the masses. Thus it is imperative that cadre be good at communicating and connecting with and solicitous of the needs and ideas of the People.

Her/his love of the People must run deep. As Che Guevara once stated: “Let me say at the risk of seeming ridiculous that a true revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love.” But the work of revolutionaries is not to be measured by motive alone.

“How can we tell the good from the bad-by motive [the subjective intention] or by the effect [social practice]? Idealists stress motive and ignore effect, while mechanical materialists stress effect and ignore motive. In contradistinction to both, we dialectical materialists insist on unity of motive and effect. The motive of serving the masses is inseparably linked with the effect of winning their approval; the two must be united.

The motive of serving the individual or a small clique is not good, nor is it good to have the motive of serving the masses without the effect of winning their approval and benefiting them. In examining the subjective intention of a writer or artist, that is whether his motive is correct or good, we do not judge by his declarations but by the effects of actions (mainly his works) on the masses in society.

The criteria for judging subjective intention or motive is social practice and its effect.” (3)

Of course not everyone amongst the People will be receptive, friendly or interested in political or intellectual growth.

We have however found that many prisoners are interested, but are hampered by limited access to information and rules which severely restricting the amount of property and publications they may have.

So collective pooling of information and cadre lead study groups within the prisons are very important.

On the other hand, many don’t find reading and study to be “cool” and shun it. But this tendency can be combated. Like all social “fads”  its subject to change under positive or negative peer influence.

Cadre must be patient, tolerant, and sensitive to the People’s needs and issues, and capable of reaching and teaching them despite the conditioned disinterest of many. Methods vary.

One method we have found highly effective is to start by showing genuine interest in what interests the persyn or people in question, this calls for being a good listener. To serve the people we must understand them and be receptive to their ideas and interests. In speaking to their interests and also what disturbs them, we should study and learn all we can about these topics and gradually connect them up to political questions showing how the liberation struggle is relevant to their interests and unfulfilled needs. One can always find connections. We should give concrete examples when able and and encourage and enable hands on participation where possible.

Not all cadre will be capable communicators, although all should struggle, especially collectively to excel in this area. It was actually in prison that Fidel Castro studied and developed his exceptional abilities as a motivational speaker. Another exceptional orator, Comrade Fred Hampton, admitted the importance of studying and practicing good oration. He once noted, “I listen to anyone who speaks well.”

It is important that we are able to speak to, inspire and touch people’s deepest ambitions, longings and feelings. Whether good speakers or not all cadre will and do have some sets of skills and abilities, and the capacity to develop others, that can contribute to the effectiveness and efficiency of the Party and its work in serving the people.

As in any organized body, everyone has a part to play.

“No one person can do everything, but every person can do something-and all jobs are more or less equally important. That is the “soldier” is no more important (may in fact be less important) then the person putting out the newsletter, or the person organizing the students, or the person agitating on issues such as no-rent housing or people’s control of the airwaves…” (4)

And not all cadre will be equally advanced in applying the principles of HDM to problem solving.

At this point we daresay many Party cadre likely have little to no understanding of this Marxist science.

A result of loose and inconsistent cadre training and recruitment we must resolutely and promptly address and correct. Because to apply any method of study, analysis and practice other then the scientific methods of HDM is to practice dogmatism, subjectivism, sentimentalism, and opportunism.

Therefore, an object of primary importance is to instruct and advance cadre in mastering and applying HDM. Like shooting a target, mastery comes with proper training and practice.

It also imperative for the organizational life of our Party, and for creating the leadership which can win the masses to change history, that we train cadre to become good organizers and excel at building and regenerating the Party and mass organizations as solid structures with strong inner unity and loyalty.
And also at bringing people together in collectives which ably pursue our work.

All of this is key to effective revolutionary leadership.

To enhance our effectiveness in serving, learning from and teaching the masses, cadre must be throughly knowledgeable in matters of political and social fact and phenomena, organizing, science etc.

We should be able to speak truthfully, knowledgeably and persuasively on a wide range of matters, since the enemy will use and actually cultivate an army of “experts” to attempt to discredit the truth and necessity of revolutionary theory and the diabolical workings of the system.

This also shows the value of collective leadership where we pool our knowledge and practice to collectively arrive at truth.

We must truly follow Sun Tzu’s edict to “know your enemy and know yourself and in a hundred battles you will never face defeat.” This applies at all levels-strategic and tactical-and on all fronts: economic, political, security, cultural and educational. It is especially important in cadre development and the roles within a revolutionary Party. Because to have cadre serve in roles most conducive to their abilities and the People’s and Party’s needs, we must be good at assessing each comrade’s strength and weaknesses. And by knowing the enemies strengths and weaknesses, we know where to assail and where to avoid him, and we will not become arrogant with a few successes nor demoralized by a few losses. This way we are objective in the face of triumph and failure and can adjust our plans and practice accordingly.

For there is no such thing as an unbeatable foe nor un-winnable war, only the use of the wrong tactics.

This often results from not having an objective study and understanding of one’s enemy and oneself.

Too, we must be careful to not hold ourselves out as authorities on matters we have not investigated throughly. “No investigation, no right to speak.” When it becomes apparent that we require more study and experience, we should seek it out without hesitation.

“To put forward a correct political line for the new Party, we must have concrete analysis of concrete conditions on the major questions: class struggle, the national question, trade union work, the women question, the international situation etc.” (5)

On Cadre Purpose

Cadre as pointed out, are the component parts of the revolutionary vanguard, the “professional” working class conscious revolutionaries, the most dedicated and loyal organizers.

Together they form the vanguard Party of the struggle which is the nervous system and organic part of the revolutionary movement of the masses.
Cadre must be prepared to do what the Party requires to the best of their abilities, and be good at building bases of support among the People (winning the masses over and organizing them to support the struggle and the Party). A revolutionary movement is only as effective as its leadership or its vanguard Party- “When revolution fails it is the fault of the vanguard Party.” Therefore cadre development is crucial. To this end.

“We must purposely train tens of thousands of cadres and leaders versed in Marxism-Leninism, politically farsighted, competent in work, full of the spirit of self sacrifice, capable of taking problems on their own, and devoted in serving the nation, the cadres and the party. It is on these cadres and leaders that the party relies on its links with the membership and the masses and it is relaying on their firm leadership of the masses that the party can succeed in defeating the enemy.

Such cadres and leaders must be free from selfishness, from individualistic heroism, ostentation, sloth, positivity and sectarian arrogance and they must be selfless, national and class heroes, such are the qualities and style of work demanded by the members, cadre and leaders of our party.”-Mao Tse tung

Cadre are an indispensable requirement for revolutionary struggle. Mao demonstrated this, so did Comrade Amilcar Cabral, Afrika’s most outstanding revolutionary leader. As the founder of the revolutionary Party of Guinea Bissau in 1956, the PAIGC (6), he saw and proved that development of revolutionary cadre is key to building a successful revolutionary movement.

Initially in 1959 the oppressed workers of Guinea Bissau plunged headlong and blindly into resistance into resistance against the Portuguese colonial oppressors.

Their disastrous failure led Cabral to reassess the situation and the errors in their tactics. He then spent three years organizing and leading patient political education and preparatory work across the country while training 1000 Party cadre in his Party school to develop in them the consciousness and methods for waging a new wave of struggles under their collective leadership. He said:

“We prepared a number of cadre from the group [of declassed semi-intellectual urban youth] , some from people employed in commerce and other wage earners, and even some peasants, so that they could acquire what you might call a working class mentality mentality…when these cadres returned to the rural areas they inculcated a certain mentality into the peasants and it is among these cadre that we have chosen the people who are now leading the struggle…” (7)

These PAIGC cadre reignited the struggle in 1963 winning and mobilizing immense and immediate mass support, which quickly liberated vast sections of the country from Portuguese control. By 1969 two-thirds of the entire country was liberated and only five years later Portuguese rule was completely overthrown. Even though Cabral was himself assassinated by Portuguese agents a year before, it was the cadre trained and prepared ahead of time, that lead the people to victory.

As we discussed in a previous article, the original Black Panther Party’s efforts to lead mass struggle here in America, met with failure largely because it neglected to train and root its members here in Amerika met with failure largely because it neglected to train and root its members in revolutionary working class ideology. Instead its cadre retained and acted upon the values of their less then revolutionary class perspectives, like that of the lumpen proletariat, the petty bourgeois etc, etc.

Indeed, BPP leaders specifically promoted a lumpen class line, and even tried to advance a lumpen (as opposed to revolutionary working class) political theory to validate this line.

The failures and reversals of revolutionary mass movements here and abroad here result from the lack of ongoing working class cadre leadership.

In the past revolutionary movements have relied on the petty bourgeoisie for leadership which has given revisionism (deviation from the principles of Marxism Leninism and revolutionary proletarian political line) and every other form of petty bourgeois deviation in reversing the advances the masses have made through struggle.

The petty bourgeois have had the advantage because of their education and access to the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. The petty bourgeois have produced some fine revolutionary intellectuals -like Marx, Engels, Lenin,Mao,Cabral, Nkrumah, and so on-but as a class they are not so ready to commit class suicide and develop working class consciousness and allegiance. Instead they impose their own class perspectives and prejudices on the proletarian movement, resisting its development into an all the way revolutionary consciousness and commitment.

However the needs of the capitalist system have created conditions (such as mass imprisonment) for some actual proletarians to get more then just basic literacy skills, and some proletarian intellectuals like Comrades George Jackson and James Yaki Sayles-have developed with access to and of revolutionary history and literature. Its no coincidence that these comrades developed within the prisons which Malcolm X once referred to as the poor man’s university.
Prisons have provided conditions for poor proletarians to have both study time and access to revolutionary literature. This is what our Prison Chapter is tapping into.

Our line of transforming the prisons into revolutionary universities is taking the revolutionary movement down a different path. Our aim is not to indoctrinate people in prison with a political line merely teaching them what to think. But to arm them with HDM-teaching them how to think and how to do so scientifically, to transform them into revolutionary cadre who can effectively lead a new wave of mass revolutionary struggle.

In training cadre we not merely give them materials and expect them to develop spontaneously. This is the importance of developing Party lead study groups and an interactive cadre study group as part of developing the prisons into liberation schools.

Cadre should be developed into critical and tactical thinkers. Therefore in training them we should balance the specifics in the application of certain tasks with encouragement to collectively think and apply critical analysis and practice; Promoting flexible thinking and work and developing tactical innovativeness. We must not encourage learning through mere memorization of general concepts but allow them to develop and experience details of tactics, techniques, historical examples, environmental effects and so on.

The Party should assimilate and circulate good ideas that develop or they will wither and die on the vine. Therefore we should develop information-sharing practices to aid in cadre and organizational development and incorporate them into our broader work.

As good organizers cadre must be good at teaching others organizing skills. They should also be conscientious in setting the best examples in character and conduct at all times. This is important because our role is not to exercise political power amongst the people, but educate, persuade, and learn from them, and set an example thereby empowering them to build their own collective institutions of political power.

Our leadership, therefore comes only on account of our unity, integrity, and ability to provide solutions to difficult problems that win mass support and through participation in the daily life, work and struggles of the masses.

This extends a great deal of prestige to the organization that must be reflected in the conduct and merit of its members. We lead by example, educate the people constantly (and should be conscious of this in our every word and deed) and must prove more principled, devoted, humble and selfless then ordinary people. This again is what qualifies one to serve as a revolutionary vanguard element.
It is also why we must guard against allowing just anyone to jump into the ranks of a vanguard or to there when proven unworthy of the people’s trust.

Also the people at low levels of political development tend to see in individuals the characteristics of an entire movement. This places a heavy responsibility on the Party, when cadre make mistakes or deviate from principles, many will attribute it to the entire movement, Party or school of thought.

Even folks on the “left” do this. How many impute errors of Joseph Stalin to all Marxist-Leninists and their ideology (although many of the critiques of Stalin are false, one-sided, or unfounded)?

Also the enemy will use our mistakes to caricature and discredit the struggle before the People.

This too is why the Party must be open and accountable to the scrutiny and criticism of the masses, transparent in its relations with them, and acknowledge and rectify its errors humbly, openly and honestly to the People.

As Cabral said: “hide nothing from the masses of our people: Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.” (9)

Cadre must be respected, respectable, reliable. They draw their moral authority to lead from the people not themselves. They mentor and are mentored by comrades and the people, and avail themselves of every opportunity to bring dedicated people into the struggle.

Conclusion

Hopefully, we have given comrades and Party supporters and detractors alike a clear picture of the importance of revolutionary organization, leadership, and cadre, how these things come together to form and serve as essential elements of building and ultimately succeeding in mass revolutionary struggle, and that they will not only think seriously over what we have said, but will unite with us and commit it to practice.

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!

Endnotes:

1: Safiya Bukhari, The War Before: The True Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith
in Prison & Fighting for Those Left Behind (C.U.N.Y Feminist Press 2010) pp 37.
2: id pp 37.
3: Mao Tse Tung, Selected Works , vol III pp 88-89.
4: James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fannon’s Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary writings by James Yaki Sayles (Montreal QC: Kersplebedeb/Chicago IL Spear & Shield 2010) p 184-185.
5: V.I.Lenin What is to Done?
6: African Independence Party of Guinea and Cape Verde Islands
7: Amilcar Cabral, The Politics of Struggle (1964)
8: Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, On the Roles and Characteristics of the Panther Vanguard Party and Mass Organizations, Right On (Vol.8, Summer 2007).
9: Amilcar Cabral. Directives of PAIGC (1965), published in Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guinea : Aspects of an African Revolution (Baltimore MD, Penguin 1969).

Introduction

On October 4, 2011 Randy Mathena replaced Tracy S. Ray as Chief warden of Virginia’s remote Red Onion State Prison. The same day Jeff Kiser replaced Richard Rowlette as the new Assistant warden. During February 2011, Kevin McCoy was promoted to Chief of security. This new administrative trio consists of veterans and key players of Red Onion’s notorious early years of extreme physical abuse of prisoners and unconcealed racism, which generated independent investigations and scathing reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Mathena and Kiser subsequently left Red Onion to allow for a period of damage control. Meanwhile McCoy refined his game of doing dirt and cleaning up behind himself and others and maneuvered his way up the ranks – from sergeant, to lieutenant to captain, and now security chief (major).

As explained in my recent article, Abu Ghraib Comes to Amerika, Ray came onboard as Red Onion’s chief warden in 2004 to repair the prison’s image, which saw a marked decline in physical abuse in favor of psychological abuse. However, Mathena and Kiser’s return, along with McCoy’s recent promotion, has seen an almost instant revival of the old program of overt physical brutality, racism and deliberate efforts to provoke and create situations to speciously justify physical abuse.

B-3 Torture Unit Closed Down

Abu Ghraib Comes to America brought exposure and protest of a psychological torture unit [B-3] constructed under Ray at the prison, and other illegal practices and conditions. As I discussed, Ray’s ‘justifications’ for constructing B-3 was the murder of a Red Onion prisoner during the summer of 2010. I also pointed out that B-3 was not a meaningful response, because guards frequently act to incite and facilitate prisoner-on- prisoner violence.

This was all confirmed when the accused killer Robert Glenson pled guilty to that and a prior prisoner killing, and at his trials implicated Ray and other officials as knowing about, and being complicit in, those murders. Worse still, on the very day Glenson was transferred from Red Onion to Virginia’s death row in Waverly, Virginia, another prisoner was killed at Red Onion, after he and his cellmate, who were forcibly housed together in a small cell for some 23 hours per day, repeatedly requested to be housed separately due to incompatibility issues. This death occurred in the unit adjoining B-3, with lieutenant Delmer Tate the responsible and supervising guard of both units.

Together, both Red Onion’s and Tracy Ray’s public and political images took a nosedive, leading to the return of Mathena as warden the following month.

Tate was booted out of B-building less than two weeks after the latest prisoner death, and Mathena promptly closed B-3 down, admitting the torture unit to be problematic to operate, and pointless. B-3 was emptied and formally closed on October 21, 2011.

 B-3 Reopens

Considering the great sums of taxpayer money wasted on B-3’s construction and the inefficiency of leaving an entire housing unit empty indefinitely, Mathena and Co. were destined to find some use for it. So, not even a week after its closing, I was thrown into the unit. This following Mathena’s discovering that I’d done a radio interview by phone, discussing the racism and abuse at Red Onion, and persecution of politically active prisoners. McCoy had me totally banned from all telephone use.

The pretext for the move to B-3 was obviously staged.

First, on October 25, 2011, my entire A-3 unit was subjected to a routine shakedown, myself included. Then, the next day, a second shakedown was staged–which is almost unheard of. While all others were searched by regular low-ranking guards, I was singled out to be searched by lieutenants Delmer Tate and Stacy Day. Initially, they conducted the cell search in usual fashion with me standing outside the cell restrained and watching. Then Tate claimed need to search the cell outside my presence and had me locked inside a shower stall. All my property was then removed from the cell, and I, (handcuffed behind my back and leg shackled), along with my belongings, was moved to B-3, with a K-9 guard and large menacing dog trailing closely behind me; like a scene from Abu Ghraib. Dogs are almost never used at Red Onion.

I was put into a cell with a video camera inside. I promptly pressed complaints on the move as punitive, retaliatory and unjustified. Both Mathena and Kiser admitted as much, both having come into the A-3 unit and spoken to me briefly while I was locked inside the shower stall. Inside B-3 I am banned from all contact with other prisoners.

Later that day, Donell Blount, a frequent and effective litigator against abuses at the prison, was brought into B-3, also by Tate. The pretext for moving Blount in was a nail being missing from a fixture inside a cell that Tate had him put into in another unit! Coincidentally: Blount has lawsuits pending against Tate.

A third prisoner was also brought into B-3 for allegedly flooding his cell in another unit.

The next day, a fourth prisoner, Michael Boone, was brought in, after being assaulted by guards, and throwing a liquid substance on them to prevent a second assault attempt by them. (Incident detailed below).

Both Boone and Blount had just been moved out of B-3 on October 20, 2011.

That evening a mob of some forty guards swarmed into B-3, and took up positions around our cells. All wore “strike force” uniforms and no identifying name tags as the rules require. Many aren’t employed at Red Onion. In abusive tones and language we were each demanded to submit to being restrained and having our cells searched. My third shakedown in three days

Instead of searching my property, the guards dumped and threw it all around the cell. Then they walked on my scattered belongings, sheets, bed, pillow, etc., leaving filthy bootprints. Upon returning into the cell I was kicked twice in the leg by the guards.

The series of confrontations were obviously calculated to provoke a response whereby the guards could ‘justify’ violent reactions.

On October 28, 2011 a fifth prisoner, Damion Land, was brought into B-3, for protesting guards refusing another prisoner’s breakfast meal in another unit. (Incident detail below).

October 30, 2011, I was subjected to my fourth shakedown in less than a week.

Assaults and abuse

On being moved from B-3 to another unit on October 20, Michael Boone witnessed two guards, Coyle and Looney, slam a prisoner, Harold Carpenter, to the concrete floor for no reason, then pile on and smash his face to the floor in B-5 unit. The next day he witnessed a guard, Turner, repeatedly slam a steel tray slot hatch and box onto another prisoner, Brian Farabee’s, arm. These incidents alerted Boone to a sudden propensity of guards to openly assault prisoners.

On October 26 in the B-4 unit Boone was himself targeted in a premeditated assault at lunch. One guard, J. Hammond, commented to another, J. Dickenson, upon reaching Boone’s cell to serve his meal, “You wanna handle this or do you want me to?”  Dickenson replied, “You go ahead” and proceeded to position the food service cart to block the unit surveillance camera’s view of Boone’s cell door. When Boone reached out of his door’s slot to retrieve his lunch tray from inside a steel tray slot box used to serve meals, Hammond snatched the steel box from the door and repeatedly slammed it down onto Boone’s arm, trying to break his arm.

During the attack Mathena was in an adjoining unit, and came into Boone’s unit a few minutes afterward. Boone summoned and described to Mathena what happened, showing his injured arm. Mathena blew Boone off, stating he’d “look at the camera”. Nothing was done. Medical staff found Boone’s arm to have multiple lacerations, swelling, and bruising, and ordered x-rays, noting a possible break or fracture.

That same day at dinner, the same guards attempted to set Boone up for another assault. Initially another guard, Hall, came to serve Boone’s dinner. But, when they got to his cell, another guard, Creed, went into another unit and got Hammond and Dickenson, who came and stood on the sides of Boone’s door. The guards then opened Boone’s slot and waited for him to reach out to retrieve his tray, specifically threatening to assault him again. Instead, Boone admittedly sprayed a liquid substance out the slot on them to get them from around his cell. In response, Mathena had Boone confronted with teams of guards in riot armor and strapped down by his extremities to a steel bedframe. The next day Boone was moved to B-3. Nothing was done to, or about, the assaulting guards.

On October 28, 2011 in the A-4 unit a guard, Holdbrook, refused to serve a prisoner, R. Luffin, his breakfast tray. Four prisoners in the unit covered their cell door windows in protest, and to get a supervisor to come to the unit. These prisoners were Gail (cell 413), Wilson (414), Brown (416), and Damian Land. A sergeant, Phillips, came to the unit, refused to do anything, then called another sergeant, Payne. Payne likewise refused to correct the denied meal, and summoned a lieutenant Stanley. Stanley announced that Luffin would receive no meal because Holbrook lied, claiming he’d refused his own breakfast. Luffin then allegedly flooded his cell. Mathena then entered the unit and went into an office with Stanley. A counselor and mental health worker were called in but spoke to none of the prisoners.

Meanwhile Payne repeatedly sprayed Gail with tear gas from a 36 ounce container until Gail vomited. Gail is an asthmatic who is not supposed to be gassed, yet all involved officials along with medical staff deliberately targeted only him to be gassed. Gail could have died. Luffin was then brought out of his cell to be moved to another unit, at which point Mathena directed guards to provide him a breakfast tray.

Stanley emerged from the office with Mathena and led a group of riot armored guards to Land’s cell. Land was given no instruction nor opportunity to submit to being voluntarily handcuffed. Instead, Stanley had the cell door opened abruptly without warning, and the armored guards rushed in to physically subdue, handcuff and shackle Land, (no gas was used on him, as is standard procedure for “cell extractions”), and move him to B-3. Land then received a bogus disciplinary infraction for “ringleading” a “group demonstration”. Whereas the entire incident had been obviously created and calculated by officials to create a ‘disruption’ and make it appear as some premeditated group rebellion.

On October 31, 2011 Dickenson left his post in the B-4 unit and brought the nurse into B-3 to conduct a.m. pill rounds, with the obvious intentions of targeting Boone for attack. I witnessed this entire incident. Dickenson put the steel tray slot box into Boone’s door, the nurse, Trish Cox, placed Boone’s medication into the box, then Dickenson opened the slot. When Boone reached into the box to retrieve his meds Dickenson took the box off the door and repeatedly slammed it down onto Boone’s arm. Boone sat with his arm passively on the slot allowing the numerous surveillance cameras mounted around the B-3 unit to film the attack.

Once Dickenson was tired and realized Boone wasn’t going to resist nor move his arm despite being beaten, and thus he couldn’t shut the slot with Boone’s arm obstructing it, he called a sergeant Thompson to the unit. A portable audio-video camera was also brought to Boone’s cell, whereupon he, I and others described what had occurred. Dickenson left the unit with nothing done to him, and the nurse examined Boone’s arm, finding a new series of bruises and lacerations and again, suspecting a fractured or broken bone, recommended x-rays.

Later that day Mathena came into the unit. Both Boone and I described the assault to him. Again he claimed he’d check the cameras. I brought up the interesting fact that during Red Onion’s early and most openly abusive years, he presided as Assistant Warden. And suddenly upon his return guards suddenly felt open license to overtly assault prisoners and provoke incidents that would obviously lead to guards’ uses of violence. He couldn’t deny this trend.

On November 1, 2011 Boone was taken to see the doctor, who also ordered x-rays. He has as of this November 14, 2011, date received no x-rays. No effort was made to investigate the assault either, until he pressed complaints and grievances. His arm was only photographed as a result on November 8, 2011, yet no investigation has been conducted and no investigator has spoken with him to ascertain any facts.

On November 4, 2011, Brian Barabee was moved into B-3 for the grave offense of having been on a hunger strike since October 28, 2011. Guards also turned off his cell’s water so he couldn’t drink. The B-3 cells are extremely cold (one typically bundles up in all his clothes and blankets inside the cell for warmth), with no fixtures nor furniture except a steel bed and toilet /sink combination unit.

Farabee, extremely emaciated and dehydrated, was allowed only boxers in the cell, and given a mattress only from approximately 10 pm to 6 am. He was otherwise left in a cold empty cell (all his property was taken) with no means of maintaining body heat, and made to sit, stand and lie on cold steel and concrete surfaces during the day. In his weakened state Farabee’s metabolism was obviously very low and his need for sources of retaining body heat much greater than that of the average healthy person. Yet he received just the opposite, in an effort to torture him off the strike. Indeed, on November 7, 2011, guards dressed up in riot armor and removed his mattress by force because he was too weak to bring it to the cell door. I filed emergency grievances on witnessing this blatant torture. Ultimately he was moved out of B-3 to the medical unit on November 7, 2011. On November 14, 2011 he was moved back to B-3 still on hunger strike.

On November 7, 2011, Philip Crayton was brought into B-3 by Tate, and strapped down by his extremities to a steel bedframe, for allegedly flooding his cell in another unit. While being strapped down, notoriously abusive guards, sergeants Payne and Wright, along with a guard Whisehunt, repeatedly bent Crayton’s fingers back, bent his foot at painful angles against the steel bedframe, etc.

At the very moment I was writing this Farabee repeatedly asked to be given a mattress because of extreme cold. This began at around 7:00 pm. Guards refused so he covered his cell door window with wet toilet paper. Various supervising guards came to his cell including lieutenants Mullins and Artrip and sergeants Artrip and Salyers along with numerous guards. Farabee was told he would not receive the mattress until 10 pm and if he did not uncover the window he would be gassed and cell-extracted. He was then ordered strapped down to a bedframe for allegedly scratching his wrist. All because he sought a mattress and heat-source in the cell. Both he and I protested his being tortured having nothing but boxer shorts in an empty cold cell while his body metabolism is extremely low. The guards’ reply was the mental health department, warden and others automatically impose this status when prisoners go on hunger strikes, and they were only following orders.

The same defense Nazi soldiers raised during the Nuremberg trials for torture and sadistic abuses of defenseless people.

Prior Assault in B-3

One particularly brutal assault occurred in B-3 on September 3, 2011. The victim Kelvin Canada is a politically active prisoner who’s been an especial target of abuse at Red Onion. The September 3 assault being the third attack on Canada. The first occurring on April 10, 2011 and described by me in an earlier report, involved a guard, Fannin, opening the locked door to Canada’s segregation exercise yard cage and attempting to attack Canada while he was unrestrained, and in complete violation of prison policy and security.  Canada defended himself but was shot even after he’d surrendered to other guards upon their orders. The second assault occurred November 18, 2011 when guards set him up for a cell extraction, cut the cameras off and brutally beat him after he was restrained.

The B-3 incident involved guards Davis, Fields and sergeants Payne and Wright and Captain Turner attacking him while he was held kneeling with shackles on. He was thrown to the floor and piled upon, beaten, and Davis repeatedly dug fingers into Canada’s left eye – a frequent assault technique at Red Onion. Canada suffered a dislocated right shoulder and blackened left eye with a large red hemorrhage across the white of his eye. Although he has been found to have a dislocated shoulder, it still has not been treated to date.

Conclusion

Abusive conditions, sadistic violence and outright physical torture are now on the rise at Red Onion. No efforts are made to even pretend at investigations or redress. With the return of Mathena, Kiser and the promotion of McCoy to security chief at Red Onion, conditions are reverting back to the prison’s early years when it won almost instant national notoriety as one of Amerika’s most abusive prisons. While U.S. officials are quick to self-righteously condemn government torture and violence against defenseless populations abroad, they consciously avert public attention away from the fact that they practice the same right here. Especially within the hidden confines of U.S. prisons. It has been my aim therefore to open cracks in these walls to allow the public a peek inside of a world they are compelled to support at great financial expense, where criminally inhumane abuses are carried out in their names

As western societies matured, their populations became less accepting of officials conducting gruesome tortures in public, because they came to see that the object was to terrify them into submission to tyrannical power, and unquestioned ‘authority’. The roles of prisons in Amerika and the brutal conditions within them serve the same purpose today, only more subliminally. We must end all forms of torture. This begins with exposure and resistance to its practice. Mass resistance. Otherwise, as with the case of Red Onion, the cycle of abuse will just repeat itself and will spread until no one will be left unaffected.

Dare to struggle; Dare to win!

All Power to the People!

 

By Kevin Rashid Johnson

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” – Frederick Douglass

Six thousand six hundred California prisoners participated in a 3-week-long hunger strike in July, seeking relief from unjust and inhumane conditions. In the face of California Department of Corrections (CDC) officials failing to honor settlement negotiations, the hunger strike resumed on September 26^th, with nearly 12,000 prisoners participating in thirteen of that state’s prisons.

It is a truism that oppression breeds resistance. Indeed, the U.S. Declaration of Independence enshrines the right and duty of the oppressed to resist their oppression.

In this era of capitalist oppression on a global scale, the hunger strike exhibits the very same humyn spirit, courage and outrage that drove millions across North Afrika and the Middle East this year, to take to the streets in protest against oppressive governments. U.S. rulers, in the face of pretending to champion and support human rights, democracy, and the demands for basic rights by people half a world away, can’t admit they practice abuses just as vile against their own subjects – right here in Amerika.

Hosni Mubarak, the U.S. puppet and Egyptian dictator who was driven out of Egypt by mass protests this year, was notorious for torturing his own people. But so too are U.S. officials. Indeed, one of the key protest issues of the California prisoners is the acute psychological torture of sensory deprivation in the CDC’s Security Housing Units (SHUs) – Pelican Bay’s SHU in particular. This torture can’t be honestly denied.

It has long been the game of U.S. officials, especially since the 2004 Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib torture scandals, to pretend that psychological torture isn’t really torture at all. However, they secretly know the exact opposite to be true. According to torture experts, psychological – or ‘clean’ torture – is the most destructive, sadistic and inhumane type of torture. Among the most proven effective methods is the very sort inflicted by design in the isolated cells of the SHUs, namely sensory deprivation.

Noted psychologist and torture expert, Dr. Albert Biderman, long ago found as to sensory deprivation, “the effect of isolation on the brain function of the prisoner is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved or deprived of sleep” [1]. The very same U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that employed Biderman as one of its torture researchers and experimenters, encoded these findings in its 1963 “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” torture manual, confirming that:

1. The deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress;
2. The stress becomes unbearable for most subjects;
3. The subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and
4. Some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, which produces delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects.

What’s more, over a century ago the U.S. high court found and denounced the same in U.S. prisons, in the face of In Re Medley, 134 U.S. 150 (1890) [2]. These findings have been repeated in U.S. courts today in response to the conditions of SHUs and super-maximum security prisons that have swept Amerika since the 1970s, alongside massive imprisonment of the poor and people of color. In one case concerning Pelican Bay’s SHU, the California federal courts found “many, if not most, inmates in SHU experience some degree of psychological trauma in reaction to their extreme social isolation and the severely restricted environmental stimulation in SHU.” Madrid v. Gomez, 889 F. Supp. 1146 (1995).

So it’s no wonder thousands of prisoners have been driven to starve themselves in desperate efforts for exposure and redress, and to show they are worthy of basic humyn rights and dignity.

But the typical response of officials is to discredit the resistance of those who suffer at their hands by villainizing (or “dirtying up,” as Johnnie Cochran used to called it), the victim. It was done to Civil Rights activists from the 1950s-1970s who opposed and exposed racism – U.S. officials projected them as fronts for foreign communists, and denounced as “Soviet propaganda” graphic photos of Southern lynching that appeared in world media.

Whatever happens to be the popular official enemy and bogeyman of the day, is the label used to discredit those who resist official oppression. During the Cold War, the ‘enemy’ was communists. Then it was terrorists. In the era of mass incarceration and ongoing persecution of Black and Brown youth, it’s gangs. These labels are used to provoke visceral reactions in the population at large of fear, hatred and consequent disregard for and alienation against the oppressed. And true to form, the hunger strikers have been “dirtied up’”as the work of prison gangs:

“The CDCR has continued to lie about the hunger strike – saying it was organized by gangs and attacking representatives of the strikers and others, depicting them as the ‘generals’ of the prison gangs and the ‘shot callers’ who order other prisoners to engage in gang violence.

“Dolores, whose son has been in the SHU for 10 years, said “If that is their [the prisoners’] way of thinking, then why did they just conduct a hunger strike willing to risk their own lives, to suffer on a daily basis in a nonviolent demonstration that spread across California prisons involving thousands and thousands of men crossing all racial lines? It’s because they are human beings. They do have dignity, and they want to be heard.” [3]

Not coincidentally, another of the hunger strike’s main protest issues is the CDCR’s labelling prisoners as gang members upon the flimsiest grounds, then confining them in SHUs until they “debrief” – that is, finger other prisoners as gang members to be thrown in the SHU. Thus the only way to leave SHU is as a known informant to be ostracized and targeted as such by others.

The Real Purpose of SHUs and Super-maxes

The true purpose of SHUs isn’t to control gangs and racial violence. In fact, the CDCR has long instigated and facilitated prisoner-on-prisoner violence. From the notorious ‘gladiator fights’ – where guards at CDCR’s Corcoran State Prison set up prisoner fights, gambled on the outcomes, and then shot the prisoners for fun, killing 8 and shooting 43 just between 1989 and 1994 – to massive numbers of prisoner-on-prisoner clashes instigated and manipulated by the notoriously corrupt California prison guards’ union, to generate public support for building more prisons to increase prison jobs and dues-paying membership.

In 1999, prisoners at the New Folsom Prison went on a hunger strike protesting being forced onto prison yards with rivals. CDOC Ombudsman Ken Hurdle rejected negotiations, stating “Then you’d have two groups normally aligned on the yard together. They would have only staff as their enemy” [4]. This admits officials deliberately facilitating prisoner-on-prisoner violence as a technique of prison control. This is what they fear in the unity shown by the hunger strikers. And it undermines the disunity they need to project them as animals.

Officials welcome and incite gang violence. It creates jobs, justifies their oppression, and enhances their ‘control.’ Even Crips co-founder Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, who was killed by the CDCR exposed this [5].

More revealing is that then-California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, rejected massive international pleas to stay Tookie’s execution on grounds that Tookie dedicated his book, Life in Prison, to Black revolutionary George Jackson, who was murdered by CDOC officials in 1971. Schwarzenegger said the dedication “defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed.” Which brings us closer to exposing the real reasons SHUs exist.

The actual “leaders” officials fear, and who are the prime targets of SHUs and super-maxes are those who are politically conscious and prove able to unite prisoners across racial and other lines.

The proliferation of SHUs and super-maxes began with the Marion Control Unit, which opened in 1972, following the murder of George Jackson and the peaceful 1971 Attica uprising that officials ended with the coldblooded murders of 29 prisoners and 10 civilians, and systematic humiliation and torture of hundreds of prisoners, provoking international outrage. Like the brutal government responses to mass protests in Asia and Afrika this year, when the prisoners of Attica took to the yard in protest, with grievances articulated and represented by politically conscious prisoners, the official response was murder and torture, then high security torture units. In one of the few admissions on record, Ralph Arons, a former warden at Marion, testified in federal court: “The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison and in society at large” [6]. Yet U.S. officials deny confining or persecuting people for political beliefs.

In fact, Pelican Bay officials recently banned my own book, Defying the Tomb, as “gang material,” a book of political writings and art, which many readers and reviewers have compared to George Jackson’s writings, whose books CDOC banned in the 1970s as well. And with the resurgence of prisoners’ political consciousness, they’ve recently begun confiscating this book as “gang material.” Like Nazi book burnings and concentration camps, the object is to censor and persecute political consciousness and revolutionary culture amongst the most oppressed peoples. And ‘gang’ labels are used to “dirty up” the people, practices, and ideas they seek to repress.

Just as I am confined in a remote Virginia super-max, under ‘special’ conditions of a SHU because of my political beliefs and having co-founded the New Afrikan Black Panther Party as a Party of the oppressed, so too you’ll find in these units across Amerika those who hold and practice revolutionary political views and affiliations that are supposed to be constitutionally protected, not persecuted. As the high court once proclaimed:

“Our form of government is built on the premise that every citizen shall have the right to engage in political expression and association. This right was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Exercise of these basic freedoms in America has traditionally been through the media of political associations. Any interference with the freedom of a party is simultaneously an interference with the freedom of its adherents. All political ideas cannot and should not be channelled into the programs of our two major parties. History has amply proved the virtue of political activity by minority, dissident groups…” [7]

But contrast these political ideals with the political reality that such parties face at the hands of officials, as admitted by Justice Hugo Black: “History should teach us…that…minority parties and groups which advocate extremely unpopular social or governmental innovations will always be typed as criminal gangs and attempts will always be made to drive them out” [8].

This is the function of the SHUs like those that California’s prisoners are protesting, and the ones used as a weapon to censor and repress political consciousness.

Resistance to the oppression of these units is the meaning of the hunger strikes. Amerika’s oppressed and disenfranchised victims of modern penal enslavement and the New Jim Crow, are struggling like those of generations past for recognition and respect as humyn beings. As a Party of the oppressed, especially the imprisoned, the NABPP-PC stands in unity with the heroic struggles of California’s entombed, and call on all freedom-loving people everywhere to take up their cause.

Dare to struggle! Dare to win!

All Power to the People!

Notes

1. Albert D. Biderman and Herbert Zimmer, eds. The Manipulation of Human Behavior (New York: Wiley, 1961), 29.
2. The court found under conditions of solitary confinement “A considerable number of prisoner fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to remove them, and others became violently insane; others still committed suicide, while those who stood the ordeal better were generally not reformed, and in most cases, did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.”
3. “Hunger Strike to Resume September 26 – Support the Just Demands of the Pelican Bay Prisoners,” Revolution #243, September 25, 2011.
4. Quoted from Sacramento Bee, December 8, 1999.
5. “Yes America, as unbelievable as it may seem, ‘hood cops, with impunity, commit drive-bys and other lawless acts. It was common practice for them to abduct a Crip or Bounty Hunter and drop him off in hostile territory, and then broadcast it over a loudspeaker. The predictable outcome was that the rival was either beaten or killed on the spot, which resulted in a cycle of payback. Cops would also inform opposing gangs where to find and attack a rival gang, and then say ‘go handle your business.’ Like slaves, the gang did exactly what their master commanded. Had they not been fuelled by self-hatred, neither Crips, Bounty Hunters, nor any other Black gang, would have been duped: “The ‘hood cops were pledged to protect and serve, but for us they were not there to help, but to exploit us – and they were effective. With the cops’ Machiavellian presence, the gang epidemic escalated. When gang warfare is fed and fuelled by law enforcement, funds are generated for the so-called anti-gang units. Without gangs, those units would no longer exist.” Blue Rage, Black Redemption (2004).
6. Stephen Whitman, “The Marion Penitentiary – It should be Opened-Up Not Locked-Down.” Southern Illinoisan. August 7, 1988, p. 25.
7. NAACP v. Button. 371 U.S. 415, 431 (1963).
8. Barenblatt v. U.S., 360 U.S. 109, 150 (1959) (J., Black, dissenting).

By Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson

First appeared in Right On! #19

“[T]rue revolutionary leaders must not only be good at correcting their ideas, theories, plans or programs, when errors are discovered… but when a certain objective process has already progressed and changed from one stage of development to another, they must also be good at making themselves and all their fellow revolutionaries progress and change in their subjective knowledge along with it….” -Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction  

Introduction

Some time ago comrades of the New Afrikan Maoist Party (NAMP) expressed a desire to reconcile contradictions between their line and the line of our New Afrikan Black Panther Party—Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC) on the question of Black National Liberation in the 21st Century. On this question, NAMP along with several other organizations—including the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO), the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, the Maoist International Movement (MIM) and others promote the Black Belt Thesis (BBT) as it was set out by the Comintern (Third Communist International) in the 1920s.

The NAMP comrades are correct in pointing out that our respective organizations have a major line contradiction on this question. We have as yet not publicly fleshed out our line on this, in contrast to that of NAMP and others, so it is time we did so in a formal position paper.

In developing our line on the Black National Question in the U.S. we have applied the method of historical dialectical materialism and deepened the analysis put forward by Huey P. Newton of the original Black Panther Party (BPP). This means we do not hold dogmatically and idealistically to outmoded ideas and formulations that no longer fit the current situation. Instead we base our analysis on the study of concrete conditions in the context of their actual historical development, realizing that everything is in a state of motion and development from a lower to a higher level, and that correct ideas develop in struggle and contradiction with incorrect ones.

The Black Belt Thesis and the New Class Configuration of the New Afrikan Nation

The BBT was developed by the U.S. “Black Bolshevik,” Harry Haywood, in his 1928 and 1930 “Comintern Resolution on the Negro Question,” which was adopted by the Comintern and the U.S. Communist Party with support from V.1. Lenin. It holds that Blacks in Amerika (New Afrikans) constitute a nation within the territorial U.S. and that we should establish our own sovereign national territory in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina (the “Black Belt” also  known as the “Cotton Belt”). The states were chosen because we slaved there and developed and evolved as a national group and “internal colony” where Blacks made up the majority. The principle factors which supported the BBT were economic and demographic that existed in the 1920s but no longer exist today.

No one can sensibly deny that Black people were forged into a “nation within a nation” because of their loss of Afrikan national identity under slavery and exclusion from the white Amerikan nation under conditions of “Jim Crow” segregation. Nor can one deny that this nation is bound to its Afrikan origin and defined by the imposed value that a drop of Afrikan blood sets one outside of the “melting pot” of white Amerikan society.

But where the BBT breaks down is that our present situation doesn’t fit into the neat definition used by the Comintern in the 1920s. The reality is more complex today.

At the time the BBT was developed, Blacks in the “Black Belt” were a predominantly peasant (sharecropper) nation tied to cotton production. This condition was also shared by many poor whites and some Indians and mixed bloods. The BBT was based on Comrade J.V. Stalin’s analysis of the National Question as essentially a peasant question. Unlike the analysis put forward by Lenin, and more fully developed by Mao, Stalin’s analysis limited the National Question to essentially a peasantry’s struggle for the land they labored on geographically defined by their having a common language, history, culture and economic life together. Hence the slogans “Free the Land!” and “Land to the Tiller!”

Indeed, ALL the national liberation struggles of the 20^th Century occurred in peasant-based societies in opposition to colonial or neo-colonial domination and feudal or semi-feudal class oppression. Today, however, the Black population within the U.S. is no longer a rural peasantry. It is overwhelmingly a proletarian nation (wage slaves) dispersed across the U.S. and concentrated in and around urban centers in predominantly Black or multi-ethnic oppressed communities.

The trend since World War I has been towards migration away from the “Black Belt” South and from the rural to the urban setting (even within the South). Check this out from “1001 Facts” on Black History:

“African Americans continued to move northward and cityward after World War I in 1918. In fact, the migration increased during the 1920s as another million southern African Americans picked up their bags and left southern living conditions. The migration expanded in the 1930s as the New Deal Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 forced many more to migrate once the AAA paid white southern farmers not to produce crops and made it profitable to dispense with Black sharecroppers. Technological advances such as the cotton picker machine made large numbers of unskilled agricultural laborers obsolete in southern agriculture. Then, as World War II began, Black mass migration exploded and nearly 5 million African Americans left the South for the North from 1940 to 1960… [This] Second Migration created huge ghettos in all the major American cities. Whereas in 1890 close to 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South, by 1960 only 50 percent of African Americans still resided there. Moreover, the movement north was also a movement toward urban rather than rural living. By 1990 over 84 percent of African Americans lived in urban areas, making ‘African American’ and ‘urban’ almost synonymous in modem America.”

Therefore, without need of pursuing a struggle to achieve a New Afrikan nation state, we have achieved the historical results of bourgeois democracy, at least as far as transforming ourselves from a peasant to a predominantly proletarian national grouping through the “Great Migration.”

Of course the Amerikan liberal democratic revolution begun in 1776, which was continued by the Civil War (1861-1865), remains unfinished—in particular as far as Black people are affected. Pre-capitalist forms of exploitation continue to exist, such as the “slave status” of U.S. prisoners, institutionalized torture, legalized “lynching” as embodied in the racist death penalty, and all manifestations of racism, sexism and discrimination that prevent all from enjoying the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” promised by liberal democracy.

To complete the liberal democratic revolution and move forward to socialist reconstruction the proletariat must lead the struggle which is stifled by the increasingly antidemocratic, fascistic and reactionary bourgeoisie. The bourgeois are no longer capable of playing a progressive role in history.

The Revolutionary Advantages of Our Proletarian National Character

That we New Afrikans are now a predominantly proletarian nation—and one without a national territory—is an advantage to the cause of building a multi-ethnic, multiracial socialist Amerika. Indeed, it thrusts us into playing a vanguard role in leading the whole working class and the broad masses in pulling down the capitalist-imperialist system and achieving social justice for all.

This conception of our historical role corresponds with Lenin’s and Mao’s lines on the National Question which we contrast with Stalin’s and dogmatic continuation of the BBT. Lenin and Mao saw the national question primarily as a matter of building the ranks of the proletarian revolution to pull down the system of imperialism. In fact, in all of his writings on Black liberation in the U.S. Mao consistently talks about merging the Black liberation struggle with the proletarian revolutionary struggle in the U.S. He doesn’t mention the land issue once. In A New Storm Against Imperialism, (April 16, 1968), he stated:

“Racial discrimination in the United States is a product of the colonialist and imperialist system. The contradiction between the Black masses in the United States and the U.S. ruling circles is a class contradiction. Only by overthrowing the reactionary rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and destroying the colonialist and imperialist system can the Black people in the United States win complete emancipation. The Black masses and the masses of white working people in the United States have common interests and common objectives to struggle for.

“Therefore, the Afro-American struggle is winning sympathy and support from increasing numbers of white working people and progressives in the United States. The struggle of the Black people in the United States is bound to merge with the American workers’ movement, and this will eventually end the criminal rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class.”

In his August 8, 1963 article, Oppose Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, Mao’s emphasis is on racial discrimination, not “Free The Land!” He sees Black liberation as driving forward the United Front Against Capitalist-Imperialism and pulling white workers and other strata towards socialist revolution in the U.S. The issue is not integration versus separation but revolution.

Even Malcolm X came to embrace this position. In fact, every popular, independent Black leader who came to hold this view and actively advanced it was promptly assassinated. Why? Because neither separation nor integration threatens the imperialist system—socialist revolution does!

Separation, Integration or Revolution?

Take Brother Malcolm; in his early stages of political development, he promoted Black separatism. Based upon his observation of independence struggles across the predominantly peasant-based Third World of the 1950s and early 1960s, he adopted the view that revolution was about land, and he embraced the slogan “Free The Land!”, which he elaborated on in his Message to the Grassroots speech given in 1963. However, in an April 6, 1964 speech given in Harlem, he expressly rejected both Black separatism and integration, in favor of revolutionary change of Amerika as a whole. He stated:

“We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition… for the right to live as free humans in this society” [my emphasis]

Malcolm increasingly came to identify capitalism and imperialism as the ultimate enemy—embracing the need of Afrikan people everywhere to consolidate their struggles into a united Pan-Afrikan movement, and for Blacks in Amerika to unite in a common struggle with all the “have-nots”, regardless of their skin color, against the common exploiters who try to divide everyone and play us against each other. It was at this crucial stage of his development as a revolutionary that he was silenced with a bullet.

A few months before his assassination, Malcolm X criticized his earlier views on separatist Black Nationalism, finding that:

“I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary…. I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of Black Nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black Nationalism? And if you notice, I haven’t been using the expression for several months. But I would still be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of Black people in this country.”

At the opposite pole, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—who was initially pro-integration and pro-capitalist—also came to identify capitalism and imperialism as the ultimate enemy, expressly rejecting integration and privately promoting socialist revolution in Amerika as the way forward. He stated in November 1967: “Something is wrong with capitalism as it stands here in the U.S. We are not interested in being integrated into this value structure.” During later 1967 and 1968, shortly before his assassination, King repeatedly promoted socialism to his inside circle, but he refused to make this stand publicly for fear of government assassination. But his private statements, public opposition to U.S. imperialist wars abroad, and support for the rights of the poor and workers’ strikes were enough for the imperialist ruling class to mark him for death.

George Jackson, pursuing the same path and arriving at the same conclusions in a more developed way, was likewise cut down by an assassin’s bullet. He observed:

“It’s no coincidence that Malcolm X and M.L. King died when they did. Malcolm X had just put it together…. You remember what was on his lips when he died, Vietnam and economic, political economy. The professional killers could have murdered him long before they did. They let Malcolm rage on Muslim nationalism for a number of years because they knew it was an empty ideal, but the second he got his feet on the ground, they murdered him.”

Despite Malcolm X’s and even King’s clearly-stated revolutionary positions that New Afrikan liberation lies neither in assimilation (accommodation) nor separation (running away), but in fundamentally changing Amerikan society as a whole, so that we can live as a free people right here, the Black Movement, and those purporting to lead it, have remained deadlocked between these two less than revolutionary positions. The original Black Panther Party has been the notable exception.

The Panthers recognized that the New Afrikan Nation can neither effectively separate from nor integrate into capitalist imperialist and white supremist Amerika. Neo-colonialism precludes the former and racist national oppression precludes the later. Our path to liberation—which even the Panthers found a bit difficult to consistently articulate—is to overthrow U.S. imperialism and play a leading role in the global proletarian revolution and socialist reconstruction. We must be the tip of the spear and rally everyone who has contradictions with imperialism to unite with us.

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who were greatly influenced by Malcolm X, were organizing in this direction, in implementing the BPP’s 10 Point Program and Serve The People (STP), survival programs while carrying out revolutionary agitation, education and political organizing to build community-based people’s power. Huey saw that Blacks were an oppressed nation inside Amerika, but his ideas on charting our path to liberation took a quantum leap forward when he visited and toured Mao’s revolutionary China. There he found that numerous racial and ethnic minorities had attained genuine liberation within China’s socialist state, without separating or integrating in the classic sense.

What Huey observed in China gave him a blueprint for organizing Black folks to become self-reliant in the very urban communities where they were concentrated in preparation for revolution in the U.S. The BPP’s implementation of these ideas quickly earned it the label of the “greatest threat to imperialism’s security, and the U.S. government concentrated its forces in an all-out campaign to destroy the Panthers. Here’s what Huey found in People’s China that inspired the BPP’s STP survival programs and illuminated his ideas about Black liberation in Amerika:

“I saw, crystal clear, how we can start to reduce the kinds of conflicts that we’re having in [Amerika]. I saw an example of that in China… what I saw was this: when I went there, I was very unenlightened and I thought I knew something about China. I thought, as it has been said so often, that China would be a homogeneous kind of racial/ethnic territory. Then I found that 50 percent of the Chinese territory is occupied by a 54 percent population of national minorities, large ethnic minorities. They speak different languages, they look very different, and they eat different foods. Yet there is no conflict. I observed one day that each region—we call them cities—is actually controlled by those ethnic minorities, yet they’re still Chinese…. I’m talking about a general condition in China where ethnic minorities I’ve observed control their whole regions. They have a right to have representation in the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time they have their own principles…. The cities in this country could be organized like that, with community control. At the same time, not Black control so that no whites can come in, no Chinese can come in. I’m saying there would be democracy in the inner city. The administration should reflect the people who live there.”

While Huey proved less than adept at linking together, organizing and leading a multi-racial anti-imperialist united front in Amerika, Fred Hampton, the leader of the BPP in Chicago, successfully pulled together a revolutionary coalition of poor whites (Rising Up Angry and The Young Patriot Party), Puerto Ricans (the Young Lords Organization), Mexicans (the Brown Berets) and various student groups known as the “Rainbow Coalition.” He was being considered for promotion to national leadership when he as killed in his bed by FBI and Chicago police in a planned assassination.

Around the country the Black Panthers did inspire and forge alliances with many different ethnically-based groups including the White Panther Party, I Wor Kuen (Chinese), Ang Katipunan (Filipino), the American Indian Movement (AIM) and many others. This was paving the way for a revolutionary united front against imperialism rooted in the oppressed communities.

The NABPP-PC also finds relevance in Huey’s theoretical concept of “Revolutionary Intercommunalism”, which recognized that the U.S. no longer fits the classical definition of a nation state nor do the countries under its neo-colonial domination. Using “Dollar Diplomacy”, along with covert operations and outright invasions, the U.S. has successfully imposed itself upon all of the former European colonies and overthrown the socialist-oriented governments brought to power by national liberation struggles in the 3ed World. This paved the way for the U.S. becoming the world’s sole imperialist superpower. Amerika’s consolidation of global power since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the increasingly globalized economic interdependence gives greater credibility to Comrade Newton’s theory of “Intercommunalism,” but we embrace this theory conditionally, recognizing that nation states still exist in the geo-political sense under various political and military set ups of “reactionary intercommunalism,” although they exist within a system of relative dominant and subservient positions with the U.S. in the position of “Top Dawg.” The shackles of bourgeois nationalism still bind the productive forces of the various nations to some degree, from which world proletarian socialist revolution will liberate them, creating the conditions for “revolutionary intercommunalism.’

Reassessing the National Liberation Question

As every national liberation struggle in the 20th Century has demonstrated, genuine national liberation and self determination have been unattainable. In each case the capitalist-imperialists have created and appealed to aspiring native bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements within the oppressed national groups and used these puppets to derail their own people’s liberation struggles. They have used “Dollar Diplomacy” to forge neo-colonial bonds upon these new republics.

Through their neo-colonial designs, the budding socialist and non-aligned Third World blocs were undermined and overthrown (sweeping the tillers off the land) and their natural resources and productive forces were brought under U.S. imperialist domination (with other imperialist powers getting a share). In this world of U.S. imperialist hegemony, any New Afrikan struggle for independence and separation from the U.S.—along the lines of the BBT—would suffer the same fate in spades. Even if we did manage to reconstitute ourselves as a territorial nation in the “Black Belt,” we would only join the ranks of imperialist dominated Third world nations—and with the imperialist U.S. right on our border.

At a time when few within the Third World national liberation struggles foresaw the danger of U.S. neo-colonialism, Amilcar Cabral sounded a warning to other leaders of anti-colonial national liberation movements in the Third World. He questioned whether the national liberation movements were altogether born of the colonial peoples’ determination to be free or if they were also to some degree instigated by imperialism to create and “liberate” Third World bourgeois and aspiring petty bourgeois forces to serve as imperialist agents and “front men” to impede and counter the growth of world socialism and create global U.S. imperialist hegemony. Few took heed to his words—then or now. Here is Cabral:

“In Guinea, as in other countries, the implementation of imperialism by force and the presence of the colonial system considerably altered the historical conditions and aroused a response—the national liberation struggle—which is generally considered a revolutionary trend; but this is something which I think needs further examination. I should like to formulate this question: is the national liberation movement something which has simply emerged from within our country, is it a result of the internal contradictions created by the presence of colonialism, or are there external factors which have determined it? In fact I would even go so far as to ask whether, given the advance of socialism in the world, the national liberation movement is not an imperialist initiative. Is the juridical institution which serves as a reference for the right of all peoples to struggle to free themselves a product of the peoples who are trying to liberate themselves? Was it created by the socialist countries who are our historical associates? Let us not forget that it was the imperialist countries who recognized the right of all people to national independence.”

Cabral went on to point out the inherent contradiction in the imperialists “promoting” Third World national independence if indeed such struggles were a threat to imperialism:

“This is where we think there is something wrong with the simple interpretation of the national liberation movement as a revolutionary trend. The objective of the imperialist countries was to prevent the enlargement of the Socialist Camp, to liberate the reactionary forces in our countries which were stifled by colonialism, and to enable these forces to ally themselves with the international bourgeoisie. The fundamental objective was to create a bourgeoisie where one did not exist, in order specifically to strengthen the imperialist and the capitalist camp.”—Amilcar Cabral. The Politics of Struggle, (1964)

Cabral found that “what really interests us here is neocolonialism,” which he observed was a new phase of imperialism devised after World War II to replace the old colonial system, by “grant[ing] independence to the occupied countries plus ‘aid.”

Witnessing the failed promises of ‘national liberation’ Cabral recognized that to be genuinely revolutionary and ‘liberating’ the struggles for national independence had to be joined with the struggle of the international proletariat. He concluded:

“… that imperialism is quite prepared to change both its men and its tactics in order to perpetuate itself. it will make and destroy states and. as we have already seen, it will kill its own puppets when they no longer serve its purposes. If need be, it will even create a kind of socialism, which people may soon start calling ‘neo-socialism.’ if there has been any doubts about the close relations between our struggle [for national liberation] and the struggle of the international working class movement. neo-colonialism has proved that there need not be any.” -Ibid.

Even the U.S. imperialists admitted using such “new tactics” of neo-colonialism as Cabral observed in supporting Afrika and Asia’s various national liberation movements. In the words of Vice President Richard Nixon on his return from a 1957 tour of Afrika:

“American interests in the future are so great as to justify us in not hesitating even to assist the departure of the colonial powers from Africa. If we can win native opinion in this process, the future of America in Africa will be assured.” Quoted in Dirty Works 2: The CIA in Africa, edited by Ellen Ray, et al. (Seacaucus; Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1979, p. 58)

Accord this statement of the U.S. National Security Council:

“We must recognize, although we cannot say it publicly, that we need the strong men of Africa on our side. It is important to understand that most of Africa will soon be independent…. Since we must have the strong men of Africa on our side, perhaps we should in some cases develop military strong men as an offset to Communist development of the labor unions.” Quoted verbatim from the record of a January 14, 1960 meeting of the NSC

So clearly the U.S. government favored pushing its European rivals and their colonial governments out of Afrika by supporting the Afrikan national liberation struggles, by backing or placing native puppets at the head of those anti-colonial movements. In doing so:

‘The stage was set for the transition to neo-colonialism: formal political independence for the African countries, but continued economic domination by imperialism, with imperialist political control exerted indirectly through bureaucratic African governments more or less subservient to imperialism, and military control exerted indirectly through covert links between imperialist powers and African military/police hierarchies” Daniel Fogel, Africa in Struggle: National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution, (ISM Press: CA, 1982, p.116).

National ‘Liberation’ has therefore proved empty of substance to oppressed Third World peoples, absent the defeat of imperialism, just as it would be in a struggle for New Afrikan national ‘liberation’ in the southern U.S. territory absent the defeat of imperialism.

Moreover, any such struggle would almost certainly degenerate into an imperialist-sponsored race war, similar to what went down in the Kosovo conflict (1998-1999), and present day Sudan. In any such struggle, Blacks would be at a decided disadvantage—witness our helplessness in the face of the Hurricane Katrina Crisis and attendant martial law in Louisiana and Mississippi (both “Black Belt states). And in that crisis we didn’t have to contend with angry and desperate whites fighting to keep their land and homes. Or do our proponents of the BBT expect whites in the “Black Belt” to passively concede the territory and leave? Or do they think we will just grab the imperialists by the throat and demand that they give us five states, make all the arrangements, and then let us run the show there without interference?

And what about the white proletarians who live in the “Black Belt?” What stake would they have in this? Or would we want to just push them into the arms of the reactionaries opposing us? Such a plan would only divide the proletarians along racial lines, set them against each other and give the imperialists a free hand to play the “Divide and Rule” game ‘Willie Lynch” style.

Furthermore, our migration back to the “Black Belt” would be “a leap from the frying pan into the fire” for how would we survive in the already poor economy of the rural South? “Returning to the Land” may sound romantic, but trying to bust a living out of the depleted soil of the Deep South was a dead end that caused the “Great Migration” in the first place.

And what a loss it would be to the international proletariat for us to give up our strategic positions within the urban centers across Amerika. Of course revolutionary work should be done among the people of the “Black Belt” South (including the poor whites and others) as well, as part of building the revolutionary movement to overthrow capitalist-imperialism.

The BPP did not promote a mass exodus of New Afrikans back to the “Black Belt; rather they correctly looked to New Afrikan self-determination right in the oppressed urban communities where Black people are concentrated. It really wasn’t until Harry Haywood’s book Black Bolshevik was published in 1978 that the BBT was revived among the New Communist Movement in the U.S. The name New Afrikan was adopted by a convention of 500 Black Nationalist leaders in Detroit in March of 1968 at a Black government conference.

For the NABPP-PC “New Afrikan” is more than the latest in a series of monikers given to Black people in Amerika. Afrika is our common heritage. It (not the “Black Belt) is our common historic homeland. When a Black person comes to Amerika from the Caribbean, Brazil or from Afrika they become a part of the New Afrikan Nation in Amerika—and suffer national oppression and discrimination—even though their ancestors never set foot in the “Black Belt.”

As proletarians, our relationship to production and the world economy makes us “New” and different from the peasantry of the Third World and our ancestors in the Old South. Even if we could go back it would be a retrogressive step—and we doubt this is what the Black masses want.

We Have Not Liquidated the National Question

By our pointing out that the shift from peasantry to proletarian and from rural to urban has fundamentally changed the National Question for New Afrikans, we expect some critics will accuse us of having “liquidated” the National Question. For those who dogmatically apply Stalin’s analysis, the problem is: “How can we be a nation without a land base?”

We reiterate that the issue is a bit bigger and more complex than that.

If we look at the New Afrikan Nation as being part of a greater Pan-Afrikan Nation, inclusive of the peoples of Afrika and the Afrikan Diaspora (as Malcolm X did, and this liberation struggle in the context of world proletarian socialist revolution, then we shall see the issue a bit differently. Then we can also see our struggle within the context of a future socialist Amerika that is multi-ethnic and a strong ally of the oppressed peoples internationally.

The proletariat fundamentally has no country and seeks to create a world without boundaries or nation states. So to the proletariat national liberation is not an end in itself but a stage to pass through on the road to World Communism. It is a stepping stone to greater unity and the ending of all oppression.

There are many white comrades (Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Radicals and Progressives) who are committed to supporting Black liberation because it serves the cause of liberating all of humanity from imperialism and exploitation, and because it strengthens the workers’ movement. The cause of uniting the Black liberation struggle with the proletarian class struggle is a step towards the total liberation of humanity and the whole world becoming one people.

Just as the proletariat seeks to abolish itself as a class by abolishing all classes, we must seek to abolish ourselves as a nation by abolishing all nations—all national divisions and all national oppression. But this has to begin with liberating ourselves as nations from the grip of colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism. Just as the proletariat must rise as a class and “pick up the gun to put down the gun” (what is the state but a special body of armed men and wimyn?), we create nation states only to render them obsolete and allow them to fade away when they are no longer necessary. The transitory nature of nation states under socialism is clear.

Comparing Racial and National Oppression

We can only speak of New Afrikan national liberation because we suffer from national oppression. National oppression is linked to but not the same as racist oppression. The people of Haiti don’t just suffer national oppression as citizens of a Third World nation but also racist oppression because they are black. Iceland is a small island nation too, but if an Icelander family emigrates to the U.S., they will be accepted as whites. If a Haitian family moves here they will face racial oppression. All people of color, to one degree or another, suffer racist oppression because of the institutionalization of the ideology of white supremacy.

The Haitian family will suffer oppression and discrimination in the U.S. because they are immigrants, because they are Black, and because they are not white. A Korean family will have to face the first and the last but not the specific oppression and discrimination leveled at Blacks (New Afrikans in Amerika). This oppression is rooted in the history of slavery (not just in the “Black Belt” South) and colonialism that spawned the white racist mentality.

Whereas in Amerika, the oppression of the indigenous people is a bit different. People with Indian features (“Skins”) suffer   from national oppression and so do Indians with black or white-skinned features. Black Indians are also oppressed as New Afrikans. White-skinned Indians (if they are identifiable by their dress) may be subjected to racial slurs and discrimination, but this is really national oppression. There is a difference between “white Indians” and “white people” in Amerika, but the difference is national rather than racial.

Within the Indian nations there are divisions between “Bloods” and those who are perceived as “Black Indians” and “White (or mostly white) Indians.” These contradictions (which can be antagonistic) between “Red: “White” and “Black” members of the same oppressed indigenous nations are a reflection of the culture of racism that permeates Amerikan society (a colonial settler state) and projects throughout the world.

We do not (as many Black nationalists do) confuse race with nationality. Nationality is not confined by race. One can change their nationality. One can also have dual or multiple nationalities. One can be a Puerto Rican and a New Afrikan (and also a Taino Indian). One can be a Palestinian, an Arab and a New Yorker all at the same time. National identity is a complex issue.

Do not some New Afrikans identify primarily as Amerikans? What is Obama trying to sell us? Yet look around any prison and what do you see? Look at the statistics on poverty, infant mortality, hunger, unemployment, and violent deaths. These tell a very different story—one of continued (and intensified) national and class oppression for the Black masses in the U.S.

I have written before that:

“As revolutionary New Afrikan nationalists, we realize that there is a contradiction between race and nationalism, and moreover, that there is no nation composed of a single race. All existing nations, like the Indian nations here in North Amerika, include whites and mixed bloods, even though there are contradictions. It was the policies of white colonialism created by the ruling class that produced these contradictions, and indeed the New Afrikan Nation. In this regard, we say all people of Afrikan heritage, regardless of skin tone, are part of a single New Afrikan Nation a Pan-Afrikan Nation. Indeed, most “Blacks” in Amerika are “mixed bloods; mixed with white and/or Indian bloodlines.

“We therefore move beyond black and white dogmatism Native Americans have always done this in adopting any “race” of people into their nations who embrace and respect their heritage and culture. All non-chauvinistic nations have done this. We also accept that nationalities can overlap and are not merely an either/or situation. People the world over embrace multiple nationalities, and so can New Afrikans. One can be a Venezuelan and a New Afrikan, or a Lenape and a New Afrikan, etc. This concept becomes practical revolutionary internationalism that has all nationalities struggling for both national self-determination and united multi-national, anti-imperialist cooperation…

“From our point of view, the key question is building alliances between the oppressed nations [and nationalities] within the U.S. and abroad and the multi-national proletariat.”—Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, On the Questions of Race and Racism, Revolutionary National Liberation, and Building the United Front Against Imperialism, 2007  U.S. Revolution as an Advance Towards Global Communism

The success of socialist revolution in the U.S. would “break the back” of global imperialism and create conditions for successful revolution in every other country. This eventuality will create the conditions for a global dictatorship of the proletariat and move the struggle decisively towards rendering nation states obsolete. What then will be the need for national boundaries or militaries?

Could we not then move forward towards classless society at an accelerated pace? Could we not, for example, create a single international currency and globalized planning of production and distribution of goods? Would it not be possible to have a World Health Organization that really provides for people’s health needs and a global commission with clout to address the issues of ecological preservation and balance? Could we not standardize wages and prices and ensure a decent standard of living for everyone on the planet—eradicating poverty?

Conclusion 

Most theories on the National Question do not address the dialectical relationship between New Afrikans in the Diaspora and Afrikans in Afrika, the contradictions between Afrikans everywhere and imperialism in the Age of Neo-Colonialism and the Crisis of Capitalist-Imperialism, and between New Afrikans in the U.S. and the white-supremacist, imperialist U.S. ruling class. These questions demand a reanalysis of the BBT and our strategy for Black Liberation.

Kwame Nkrumah’s concept of an AII-Afrikan (Pan-Afrikan) Revolutionary Party (supported by a military arm) is the correct answer to neo-colonialism. We can take a lesson in this from the struggles going on in South Asia. India contains many nationalities with their own languages and regions, yet they are being led by a united Communist Party of India (Maoist). Likewise we can look to Nepal where the Maoists have won the support of many national minorities and have created autonomous regions. In Afrika, neo-colonialism had an advantage because it was able to play the various budding nation states and tribal groups against each other. Our strength is based on unity and common purpose.

Our concept of Afrika as a Pan-Afrikan nation departs from the Comintern’s definition of the National Question which confines the nation to the boundaries already in existence (even though these only reflect the imperialists’ carving up of Afrika). We don’t expect that the New Afrikan Nation will ever constitute itself again in the “Black Belt,” but we can play a significant role in the constitution of a Socialist Afrikan Union, and in the creation of a Socialist U.S.A.

We believe that it is the historic destiny of the nation of New Afrikans in Amerika to play a leading role among the oppressed peoples of the World in overthrowing capitalist imperialism and advancing humanity to a higher stage of political-economic organization based on the principles of social justice and equality.

Our unique history and position within the “Belly of the Beast” gives us the opportunity to deal the coup de grace to U.S. imperialism. Our long suffering at the hands of white supremacist Amerika gives us a bond with all who have suffered racist and national oppression and enables us to be truly internationalist in outlook.

As Mao predicted:

“The struggle of the Black people in the United States is bound to merge with the American workers’ movement, and this will eventually end the criminal rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class.”

This is the mission of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party Prison Chapter and our position on the National Question.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win! All Power to the People!