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Books by Kathleen
Cleaver
Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglass
/
Wages of Whiteness /
We Want Freedom /
Target Zero /
Black Panthers
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Revolutionary
Movements of the 60s and 70s
A
Response to "Black Fighting Formations . . . "
By Mwalimu Russel
Maroon Shoats
By
Lil Joe
My
criticism here concerns not so much Mwalimu Russell Maroon Shoat's
essay "Black Fighting Formations: Their Strengths,
Weaknesses and Potentialities," (Liberation,
Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, edited by Kathleen
Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, 1999) or even the Black Panther
Party, sometimes considered "the most significant
revolutionary organization in the later 20th century." My
overall view is that in the Movement of the '60s and '70s, the
participant organizations had no objective of taking state
power.
This
fatal flaw in the self-determined revolutionaries of the '60s
and '70s — including
the Black Panther Party and the Marxist groupings — resulted in the
defeat of the Movement, and the resultant demoralization of
American Black and working class revolutionaries and rebels.
We are
now regrouping, but we must not make the same mistakes.
Revolutions are not about "speaking truth to
power," "reparations," campaigning and voting for
"progressive Democrats" or "fighting WTO."
Progress toward revolution in America requires the
formation of a working-class party.
To that end, the process requires that we subsume all
relative interests into the universal struggle.
The economical emancipation of the working class is the
task to which all means are subordinate.
The
Continuing Need for a Class-Conscious Party
The class party in America is necessarily a labor party
that is financially based in the trade unions, exclusively and
socially based in the working-class as a whole, and struggling
to win the battle of democracy with the goal of state power. The ultimate goal is the expropriation of capital, and the
transfer of the productive forces from private to public
property.
While
it is certainly true that — as Lenin argued
in What Is To Be Done? "without
revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary
movement," — there is
epistemological context related to how revolutionary theory
evolves. Revolutionary
sociopolitical theory is not developed outside society.
Actually, there is no outside.
"[M]an is no abstract being squatting outside the
world. Man is the world of man": relations of production in
society, culture, and the state. (Marx)
Revolutionary theory is developed in the praxis of the
revolutionary class itself, as it struggles to change the world,
and, thereby, changes itself.
In the
absence of conscious, revolutionary objectives — including, but
not limited to, the acquisition of state power — philosophers,
scientists, and intellectuals from other classes defect to the
revolutionary class and bring their prejudices with them.
These defectors believe themselves to be the
"natural" leaders of the oppressed and uneducated
laboring classes and toiling masses.
The
more backward, less confident members of the revolutionary
cadres in the rising classes internalize this hogwash.
The way out of this impasse is criticism and
self-criticism. However,
during the Movement of the '60s and '70s, the processes involved
in criticism and self-criticism were ritualistic, and
degenerated into ad hominem attacks and counter-attacks,
rather than objective critiques of ideas, strategies, and
tactics. In this
backdrop, the local cops, COINTELPRO, FBI agents, and agent's
provocateurs promoted confusion and violence within the ranks of
the revolutionary cadres.
The
fatal flaw in the '60s and '70s — that the
revolutionary cadres lacked the objective to take state power — had its basis in American anti-intellectualism and pragmatism
that degenerated into activism.
This became basic rebellion, not revolution, and the
confrontations with the state (for confrontations sake) resulted
in burnouts, deaths, the imprisonment of many comrades, and the
demoralization of others. All
of this was exacerbated by the fact that the ethnic nationalist
movements (e.g., Black and Chicano) were based in shifting
communities. The student-based anti-war movement was also based
in constantly changing and unstable student populations.
Revolution
cannot be based in a single ethnic community. It must be based
in the class to which ethnic communities belong.
Revolution displaces the the representatives of the existing order,
reorganizes, and structures the new order.
The overthrow of the ruling class by the oppressed
classes is a conscious struggle for class power.
The polemics in the revolutionary class should be
directed at the objective of developing a strategy to take state
power.
It is by
this "practical-critical," "revolutionizing
practice" (praxis) that revolutionary organizations are
formed and revolutionary theory developed.
The objective of taking state power — as part and parcel
of a strategy toward economic transformation — tests ideas and
mediates behavior.
Without
class-based revolutionary objectives formulated by the
revolutionary class, there can be no revolutionary movement or
revolutionary theory.
There
is no such thing as a "community based" racial
revolution. The Chinese and Vietnamese wars of liberation were national
in scope, but class in content.
Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionaries fought to displace
"their own" bourgeois and landlord classes, and to
establish the revolutionary dictatorships of the proletariat and
peasantry. The objective was to expropriate bourgeois, landlord, and
imperialist properties in China and Vietnam.
Vietnamese workers and peasants did not struggle for
"community control" of schools or of police, but
struggled for state power by which to transfer private owned
productive forces to public property.
Additionally,
the Chinese and Vietnamese national liberation wars and social
revolutions had the support of the Soviet Union.
It was not [just] the "spirit" of the Chinese
and Vietnamese people that enabled them to defeat militarily
U.S. imperialism, but the material support of the Soviet
Union. In each
case, the Chinese and Vietnamese workers and peasants came to
power as Communists. The
military and political victory of the Vietnamese Tet Offensive
broke the confidence of U.S. Anglo-Saxon patriots.
With
the material support of the Soviet Union, the Chinese People's
Liberation Army drove the Chinese nationalist bourgeoisie from
mainland China to Taiwan. The
victorious Vietnamese workers and peasants came to power in the
South, reuniting North and South Vietnam.
The Chinese People's Liberation Army came to power as
Communists.
Samples
of Class Conscious Struggles in 1968
However,
consciousness was not sufficient to overcome material limits.
The material conditions did not enable the state-monopoly
capitalist economies of China or the Soviet Union to survive.
In each of these countries today, privatization is
replacing nationalized industry.
The
study of any revolutionary cadre formation at war with the state
in the '60s and '70s (like, for example, the Black Panther
Party) must be explicated in the context of world events — including the predominantly peasant struggles in China, Vietnam,
the Philippines, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, and the proletarian struggles in South
Africa, France, Mexico, and Germany.
The year
1968 was one of great international turmoil, e.g., the May-June
General Strike in France
(where the troops supported the striking workers or, at least,
refused to shoot them); the Vietnamese Tet Offensive; and the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., with the resulting 120
U.S. cities in open, flaming rebellion.
It was a wonderful time to be alive!
As Stokely Carmichael said, revolution was "in the
wind!"
Or was
it? In Vietnam,
certainly. But,
winning state power was not the goal in all these cases. In
1968, the May-June General Strike in France was the most
important event in the industrialized capitalist world.
It should be thoroughly studied by American workers and
revolutionaries. In Mexico City, students battled the Mexican army, which was
victorious over the students.
But when the students protested in Paris in
1968 and
were beaten down by the Paris police, the Communist and
Socialist French proletariat took to the streets and confronted
and neutralized the police.
The police retreated.
It could also be said that the police retreated during
the Black, inner-city rebellions in 1968 when 120 U.S. cities
were in flames following the assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr.
But the
difference in the resulting outcomes of these two struggles
differed in the behavior of the [largely working class]
military when ordered by the respective governments to quell the
working class rebellions in America, and the general strike in
France. When the
American military replaced the local police in U.S. city
streets, that military violently suppressed the rebellions.
In France soldiers refused to move against
the workers and farmers, who were 10,000,000 strong on general
strike! The French
General Strike of 1968 ended by way of the Socialist and
Communist Parties using their influence in the French working
class to coax French workers back to work, while at the same
time forcing the state to capitulate to a few bullshit political
reforms.
Also in
Czechoslovakia in 1968, workers led by Alexander Dubcheck were
engaged in rebellions against the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Soviet tanks, however, suppressed these rebellions of the Czechoslovakian workers.
In the
United States, Black, Puerto Rican, Indian, and Chicano workers,
on the one hand — and student and anti-war activists, on the
other hand — confronted the state alone, and not as part of a
class. They were
isolated from racist and patriotic white workers — so-called
"hard hats" — that supported Ronald Reagan in
California. This
was the "silent majority" that twice elected and
supported Nixon on the national level.
American workers also twice elected and supported Ronald
Reagan at the national level in the '80s.
The
experiences of the American working class in 1968 differed
greatly from those of the French proletariat.
In America in
the '60s and '70s, there was no American Labor Party capable of
educating and mobilizing American workers into a class-conscious
class for itself. As
in Europe and elsewhere, the American working class must
create a Labor Party that is financially and socially based in
the trade unions. In
the praxis of electoral political struggles of Labor Party
partisans against Democrat and Republican partisans, American
worker consciousness would have fertile ground to move from
racial patriotism to class conscious communism.
When he
was assassinated in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. represented
the hope for an American working-class conscious political
movement. The
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and King were
deeply involved in mobilizing a national, multi-ethnic Poor
Peoples Campaign. When
he was assassinated, King was personally involved in a
Sanitation Workers' strike in the Southern U.S. states.
Additionally, the link was being made between the
economic struggles of Black workers (like the sanitation
workers' strike), the struggles of Black and poor workers for
food, clothing and shelter, and the anti-war movement.
Disintegration
of Class Conscious Struggle
Malcolm
X represented a "revolutionary" alternative to Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s "integrationist reformism."
However, Malcolm X was assassinated before he could lead
the potentially revolutionary Black workers' movement into a
class-conscious socialist direction.
Potentially revolutionary Black workers got stuck in
racial politics. The
Black Panther Party succeeded in filling the void left by
Malcolm X. In the
tradition of Malcolm X, Black Students Unions came on the scene
on college campuses.
Ethnic
minority revolutionary workers and student anti-war protestors
read Mao tse-Tung and Che Guevarra — as well as Malcolm X,
Frantz Fanon, E. Franklin Frazier, and Nathan Hare.
However, revolutionary Black, Indian, Puerto Rican and
Chicano workers and students — and anti-war protestors — were
unable to penetrate the trade unions.
Student anti-war protests and ethnic minority workers'
struggles were isolated from the American working class, and
suffered violent state repression.
The
leaderships and the ranks of American trade unions are
anti-communist, patriotic, and tied to the Democratic Party.
Only a trades union based Labor Party engaged in an
electoral struggle for power could provide the basis for change
in the reactionary, racial and patriotic consciousness that has
made the American working-class politically backward
— as
compared, for instance, to the French proletariat.
American ethnic nationalists, and White anti-war
activists, never thought of — let alone planned for — the
conquest of political power by which to expropriate capital.
They never strategized a workers' state that would
transfer the productive forces from capitalist to public
property.
The
militant faction of the American trade unions created an
American Labor Party in 1996.
However — much like the Black Panther Party of the '60s — the American Labor Party is directed at social issues rather
than at the conquest of political power.
The American working-class can become a class-conscious
proletariat only by way of the struggle for class power.
The objective of that class power would be to snatch the
means of production and distribution from the clutches of the
bourgeoisie.
American
Black Revolutionaries in the '60s and '70s were influenced by
the Vietnamese and Algerian wars of independence.
However, they saw armed struggle as the common thread
instead of the struggle for class power.
The Algerian liberation warriors had fighting tactics
similar to Hamas in Palestine today, and to the Iraqi resistance
fighters in occupied Iraq today.
American Black and White revolutionaries in the '60s and
'70s picked up the gun to emulate the Battle of Algiers, but did
not recognize that the isolated Algerian underground lost.
A
Possible Revolutionary Scenario
Revolutionary
success today would be the conquest of state power on the road
to liberating the productive forces from their capital forms,
and to ending capitalist commodity production and wage-labor.
To accomplish this, the thinking of the American
working-class must be radically transformed.
This is where "winning the battle of democracy"
comes in: in effect, beating the bourgeoisie at its own
electoral game. For
a Labor Party to become a class party — exclusively and
financially based in the trade unions, and accountable to those
unions — it must be socially based in the multi-ethnic
working-class as a whole, and be cosmopolitan in its worldview.
The political objective must be state power by winning
elections to the House of Representatives.
In the
House of Representatives, our [working] class party would author
legislation for fighting unemployment by way of reducing the
hours of the working day from surplus to necessary labor time —
say to a 5 hour working day — with continual reductions
in the hours of the working day with every technological advance
in labor productivity.
Furthermore, our [working] class party
could author
legislation to open borders (that could potentially and
immediately bring immigrant workers into the trades unions),
legislate a living wage at median income (about $25 an hour),
legislate universal health care (financed by the profits of
capital, which profits, in the first place, are derived from the
exploitation of wage-labor by capital), and legislate open
enrollment of college students with resulting free college and
university education and training.
All of this legislation would be financed by the profits
of capital. The
American laboring classes would begin to benefit from the wealth
we create, and from increasing productivity.
When
the American working class views Labor Party partisans on CSPAN — fighting for working class legislation, and debating with
Democrats and Republicans — Labor Party membership and
Congressional representatives would increase geometrically.
The growth of the Labor Party would force Democrats and
Republicans out of the House of Representatives
— including the
so-called Congressional Black Caucus and the Latino Caucus.
In 10 years, the Labor Party could have the majority in
the House of Representatives.
At that time, the class war will change qualitatively as
the working-class begins to battle in the House of
Representatives and on CSPN every day.
The growth of an American Labor Party, and of Labor Party
partisans in the House of Representatives, would peak the
interests of American workers.
Class
conscious workers would then start reading the Labor Party Press, rather
than the bourgeois New York Times.
This qualitative change in class-consciousness spreading
quantitatively across America will result in quantitative
changes in Labor Party members in the House of Representatives.
Though the American Labor Party
dominated the House of
Representatives, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Judiciary
would continue to represent the capitalist class. Struggles between the House and Senate will become open class war that will further educate and evolve the American
working-class into a class-conscious proletariat.
The House of Representatives will derive the practical
necessity to legislate the abolition of the Senate, Presidency
and Judiciary, and call a new Constitutional Convention of
workers, farmers, and ethnic minorities to write a New
Constitution.
If in
the course of this struggle the Pentagon dismisses the civilian
government — and they will — the elected worker-legislators
and trade unions would have the elected authority to call a
general strike, and to call on the rank and file of the U.S.
military to reject the officer core, side with the striking
workers, and to support the duly passed legislation of the House
of Representatives.
If this results in civil war it
will be class war, and not race war.
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