Malcolm X was a legendary revolutionary who is still loved by millions of people. The anniversary of his assassination is an opportunity to reflect on his impact.
February 21, 1965, a diversionary scuffle broke out in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, known as Malcom X, addressed the people of Harlem and, as a result of his international standing, the people of the world. As the attention of the attendees moved toward the scuffle, at least two men approached the stage with weapons. Malcolm’s last words were “don’t do it.” But they did. Pumping Malcolm’s body with bullets and a fatal shotgun blast that took Malcolm from us physically.
What the assassins and the evil powers behind the assassination could never understand was that they did not kill Malcolm. Yes, the body of Malcolm, his energy, his physical presence was no longer with us. But as an African ancestor, his revolutionary spirit never left. It has been animating generations, of not only African anti-colonial revolutionaries, but anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world since that fatal day in 1965.
I have had the opportunity to move around the world through spaces occupied by revolutionary movements and states over the last 50 years. In the beginnings of my travels, I was struck by the consistent revolutionary iconography that I encountered. From the walls of huts that served as meeting places for activists in the forests in the global South, to grand spaces in the offices of movements that had gained some degree of state power in places like Vietnam, Nicaragua, North Korea, I would see consistently certain images – Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Malcolm X!
Malcolm is loved by the people of the world.
Malcolm’s uncompromising revolutionary spirit and political understanding of the fundamental interconnections of the domestic with the international influence a generation of emerging revolutionaries in the U.S. African/Black revolutionaries like Robert Williams and the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party and other formations understood that, “You can’t understand what is going on in Mississippi if you don’t know what is going on in the Congo.” That internationalist perspective and practice politically and structurally integrated the struggles of Africans in the U.S. into the global anti-colonial/anti-capitalist movement.
This development provided the continuity of the African/Black radical internationalism from David Walker’s appeal through the Pan African movement; Garveyism; the mobilizations against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the battle against fascism in Spain; anti-colonial agitation at the United Nations; the wars in Korea; Vietnam and the fight for national self-determination of African nations throughout the African world.
The anti-colonial internationalism that Malcolm embodied and our movement continued after his assassination placed Malcolm in a place of reverence throughout the colonial world. A few years ago that universal appreciation was on display in Beirut, Lebanon where anti-colonial fighters, academicians and activists joined in a week long celebration of Malcolm that included a conference that I participated in and a play written on Malcolm’s visit to Beirut in 1964 where he was first denied an opportunity to speak but as a result of the actions of students he was allowed to speak on his second visit in September of that year.
It was a moving experience to see the love and regard that people had for Malcolm, and by extension our movement.
What was Malcolm’s appeal? His simple but profound language that the oppressed and colonized instantaneously understood. On the question of liberation and human rights Malcolm reminded the oppressed that If you are not ready to pay the price required to experience full dignity as a person and as members of a self-determinant people, then you will be consigned to the “zone of non-being,” as Fanon refers to that place where the non-European is assigned. Malcolm referred to that zone as a place where one is a sub-human:
“You’re an animal that belongs in the cotton patch like a horse and a cow, or a chicken or a possum, if you’re not ready to pay the price that is necessary to be paid for recognition and respect as a human being.
“And what is that price?
“The price to make others respect your human rights is death. You have to be ready to die… it’s time for you and me now to let the world know how peaceful we are, how well-meaning we are, how law-abiding we wish to be. But at the same time, we have to let the same world know we’ll blow their world sky-high if we’re not respected and recognized and treated the same as other human beings are treated.”
The enemy of collective humanity fears liberating knowledge and the example of a Malcolm. That is why in their shortsightedness they thought that they would be rid of him if he was physically eliminated. They were wrong. Malcolm, like so many of our revolutionaries, will never die. They live in the memory and consciousness of the people and become manifest materially through the struggles of the people. Malcolm will be with us until we prevail. There are many more of us who are marked. But because we are ready to pay the ultimate price, we have no fear.
Revolutionary love brother Malcolm.
El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm X Presente!!
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
Image: ElTiempo.com
Ajamu Baraka representing BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team was invited to serve as part of an international delegation of human rights defenders that would accompany the activists, community leaders, government officials and representatives of the National Liberation Army (ELN) on an historic “humanitarian Caravan” between January 17 and the 21st to the Indigenous and Afro-Colombian areas of the Pacific coast of Colombia as part of the peace process initiated by the new government in Colombia. Ajamu was also an observer and international guarantor in Havana, Cuba during the last round of the Peace Process that produced the Ethnic Chapter of the peace agreement between the government and the FARC in 2016. This is his report back on the Caravan.
Total Peace is the Call
When the new Colombian administration of Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez took office, President Petro announced that the administration would prioritize reviving the peace processes in the country. I was there in August that unusually sunny afternoon in Bogota, a city notorious for its foul overcast weather for the inauguration of the new Petro/Marquez administration. Perhaps it was the spirit of the thousands of people jammed into the plaza, exulting in an overpowering energy fueled by hope and the belief in the possibilities of a new beginning for this country that had been mired in violence and despair for so long that it pushed back the clouds and bathed all of us in the warmth of optimism.
It was a moving day to see our Vice President, Francia Marquez come on stage. A product of the Black movement, a woman of impeccable character who embodies our resistance, the hopes of the people, a young woman who I had seen grown up, who broke bread in our house and slept in our beds, who ended up under death threats for years, having to move with security details for the last eight or more years, now confidently assuming her place as the next Vice President of the country. When she came on stage there was not a dry eye among the contingent of Black activists that I had the honor to be with as a special guest of the movement.
Francia, who ran for president but was now Petro’s Vice President, campaigned on a commitment to reviving the peace process that had been subverted by the previous government. This commitment meant there had to be a real commitment to the terms of the agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC, the leftist political movement that had been in conflict with the government for over fifty years before entering into a “peace deal” with the government in 2016.
But the commitment to peace had to go beyond just attempting to implement all the provisions of the agreement with the FARC. The situation in the territories for the people had not only not improved but in most cases the violence, displacement and general insecurity had increased.
To address this reality, President Petro announced that the new administration would advance a process that he referred to as “Paz Total” or “Total Peace.” “Paz total” was a bold initiative that called upon all armed groups to join with the government to declare a unilateral ceasefire and enter into dialogue with the government.
A significant first step in this process was to revive the negotiations between the government and the National Liberation Army (ELN), the other major armed leftist organization in the country that has been in conflict with the government since 1964.
Two FARC dissident groups – the Central General Staff and Second Marquetalia – as well as the Gaitanista self-Defense Forces (AGC), and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Self-Defense were also brought into a dialogue with the government.
The AGC is especially significant. Referred by members of the government and the people as the “Clan del Golfo,” the AGC is the largest paramilitary criminal group in the country that is responsible for a disproportionate amount of the violence experienced by people in the rural and urban areas of Colombia. Ultimately Total Peace, according to the Petro/Marquez government, would be arrived at through this process of engagement in which all of the armed groups in the country would eventually agree to terms that would result in them demobilizing or surrendering.
Humanitarian Caravan
The resumption of Peace Talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), was announced at the beginning of October 2022, and the first meeting took place in Venezuela on 21 November 2022 moderated by representatives from Norway, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, and Cuba, as well as representatives from the United Nations and the Catholic Church.
During this first round of talks, the Government and the ELN agreed to promote a system of humanitarian relief to guarantee the return of the displaced populations and put an end to situations of confinement generated by the violence in the regions.
Establishing a humanitarian caravan to assist with implementing the agreement on humanitarian relief was the first concrete agreement that came out of the dialoguesbetween the National Government and the ELN.
What was the objective? Diagnose the humanitarian situations in indigenous and African-descendant communities in the regions with the purpose of establishing the conditions for the communities to leave the confinement or, in cases of forced displacement, to return to their territories under the principles of dignity and security.
The process with FARC was a bilateral engagement between the FARC and the government. However, along with including armed paramilitary organizations like the Gulf Clan in a dialogue process with the government, the Petro/Marquez administration is attempting to bring an element into the discussions on peace by going to the territories most impacted by the ongoing violence. No other government, including the government of Juan Manuel Santos that initiated the process with ELN, had effectively included the people before.
The idea was that representatives of the communities would share their conditions and make recommendations. The impressions and written submissions will be compiled at the end of the caravan by the government and ELN delegates and shared at the negotiating table between the ELN and the government in early March in Mexico. The report will serve to adopt the specific humanitarian measures for communities at risk in the Colombian Pacific region.
The caravan began January 17 with an orientation in Cali, Colombia. Over 160 people participated in the caravan. Participants included leaders of the Bajo Calima Community Council, the San Juan General Community Council (Acadesan), the Valle del Cauca Association of Indigenous Councils (ACIVA), the Wounaan People's Council of Authorities of Colombia (Woundeko), social organizations and victims, members of the Catholic and Protestant churches, international agencies of the United Nations and the MAPP-OEA.
The caravan was accompanied by a small delegation of international human rights defender groups, peace organizations and international agencies of the United Nations. The Black Alliance for Peace was one of those groups and was represented by me, Ajamu Baraka from BAP’s Haiti/Americas’ Team.
The National Government was represented by Carlos Rosero, Dayana Domicó, Mabel Lara and Horacio Guerrero, members of the peace delegation, together with Juan Carlos Cuellar and Jairo Arrigui, from the ELN peace management team. They had the responsibility to liaison with the communities, recording testimonies and receiving proposals from the various stops.
After leaving Cali, the caravan moved en masse to the port area of Buenaventura and the town of Bajo Calima. The caravan was divided into two tours. One caravan traveled by boat to the middle and lower San Juan to visit the towns of San Miguel, Noanamá, Negría and Panamacito.
The other went by boat from Bajo Calima (Valle) until reaching Docordó (urban head of the Litoral de San Juan, in Chocó) on the way visited the communities of La Colonia, San Isidro, Valledupar, Palestina, Cabecera, Unión Balsalito and Docordó.
What did we see and hear?
Bajo Calima and Medio San Juan are areas where Africans and Indigenous peoples have inhabited for centuries. Africans escaped from enslavement and tried to distance themselves from the Spanish as far as they could. Often ending up in remote areas of the country sharing territories with the Indigenous who themselves were subjected to brutal forms of slavery and various forms of forced labor.
It has only been in the last few decades of the 20th century that the lives of the peoples of these territories have been significantly disrupted. First with the expansion of the armed struggles in Colombia, the invasion of their lands by “colonialists” engaged in illegal lumber, mining and then drug activity and then the arrival of the state, usually the military apparatus.
Today narco-paramilitaries and other armed groups associated with multinational corporations, the ELN and the state’s military and police forces are all locked in a battle over hegemony within the territories with the people paying a terrible price as a result.
Moving down the San Juan river on boats flying white flags hoping that the negotiated agreement to allow the caravan to proceed unimpeded through territories being contested by the ELN, the Clan del Golfo and the state, the story that we encountered was the same.
Meeting with the communities under tin roofs of community centers packed with members of the caravan and the designated members of the community who were elected to speak, itself a responsibility not taken on lightly since it was not clear if there would be any retaliation for what might be said to the caravan delegation and their international guests.
What the people talked about was life that had been severely disrupted by various groups imposing confinement on the communities where they couldn’t live their villages or sometimes their houses for extended periods of time. This meant they could not get to their farms to tend their crops, or fish or get to the mines. It meant economic life came to a standstill and people went hungry.
They talked about forced recruitment by the armed actors of their young people. They shared the incidents that finally forced them to flee their territories, the collective punishments, the killings that took place in public to terrorize the community. There were tears but also a resiliency that reflected that for many of these communities they had reached the point where they were willing to risk everything in order to defend their dignity, and their cultural and economic life.
And what did they think about the peace process? For some they had seen it all before. They knew about the agreements with the FARC and the Ethnic Chapter of the agreements that were supposed to make the lives of the Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples in the rural areas better. But all they say instead was more violence and more social instability when new groups of “men with guns” filled the power vacuum when the FARC disarmed and demobilized.
For many of the people, peace was still an elusive term that seemed to only exist in the minds of government bureaucrats, NGOs and the people who did not understand the realities of the territories.
Did we see hope? We did not see hope in the liberal sense of some abstract positive thinking divorced from reality. What we all saw was a determination in some communities that their plight could not be dependent on decisions made hundreds of miles from the realities of their lives in their communities. With the formation of their local guards and a commitment that they were going to live in freedom, it was clear to me that these communities were prepared to pay the terrible toll that is demanded when you struggle for freedom.
A Land of Tears and Hope
As stated previously, many of the people say they have heard it before. Once again, they are being told that there might be the possibility of peace in their territories where the guns would be lowered and removed, the displaced would return, communities allowed to go to their farms and their youth liberated from being forcefully recruited. Dignity and security were right around the corner.
That hope is reflected in the fact that the ELN and the government created a space for the people to have a voice, to participate. But those declarations of total peace will be, must be tempered by the real forces and their interests operating in those far-off spaces away from the centers of governmental power.
The people said over and over again that they wanted the men with guns out of their territories. They made no distinction between the armed factions of the ELN, the narco-paramilitaries or what they referred to as “public authorities” – the state.
But why would the men with guns leave as long as there exists the ability to make tremendous amounts of money in the territories?
Officials in the Petro/Marquez government are reaching out to impoverished coca farmers hoping to revive interest in the idea of substituting coca production for coffee and other high-value crops.
Yet, for many observers of the complex situation that Colombia offers, the Petro plan seems to defy the logic of the capitalist interests at play.
According to Mike Vigil , a former DEA agent stationed in Colombia during the Pablo Escobar era, the narco-paramilitaries will never leave on their own accord as long as illicit drugs remain such an incredibly lucrative business. For these elements, “negotiating is a stalling tactic where they buy time. They’re able to generate more money and become more powerful.”
Because control of territory and profits are fundamentally linked with the global cocaine trade, peace in the territories that does not include forcefully pushing the criminal elements out makes President Petro’s plan seem a little utopian.
The people, however, do not want to see more conflict in their regions. There was a real reluctance to allow further militarization in the territories, even by government forces. Many communities had come to the conclusion that the renewed violence between armed groups in the region and aggressive military operations that at times did not discriminate between armed combatants and the residents, demonstrated that the state could not guarantee security in their communities and territories.
Although, much of the feedback from the communities did not seem to indicate how the people thought security could be guaranteed. The commitment between the government and the ELN to address the humanitarian needs of the people will likely be ratified. But what about the other armed actors?
In the immediate future within the territories, cocaine is one of the main crops the people grow to make ends meet. But as we saw and heard on the caravan, the battle over control of that production along with the illegal mining and lumber activities has made living in the territories extremely precarious
The strategy of the Colombian government - creating partial agreements with the ELN and discussing different issues in each round of negotiations has some potential. What is much more of a challenge is are the armed groups still addicted to the cocaine trade with the material means to protect their interests no matter what the government or the people want.
However, even with the process with the ELN, the government failed to fully implement the agreements with the FARC-EP. As of late 2021 it was reported that “only 30% of the 578 stipulations in the Peace Accord had been implemented.” And while the Petro government is not the right-wing government of Ivan Duque where the implementation of the Peace Accord was almost completely abandoned, the ELN will need to have confidence that the government will deliver on its side of any agreement. The connection between successful negotiation between the ELN and the government is contingent on progress made to revive and implement the accords with FARC – EP.
In the meantime, the conditions do not yet exist for a sustainable peace and national reconciliation process. The objective economic and political interests represented in the state and the legal and illegal economic activities of various entities suggest that before peace can be achieved, the peoples in the regions may have to go through a period of further violence.
But perhaps this time it might be the communities taking the prospect of peace into their own hands by eliminating the elements that continue to bring them so much suffering.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
The Ukraine conflict was caused by the U.S. backed right wing coup in 2014 and the duplicity of Europeans who claimed to be working for peace. Anyone who supports these actions but claims leftist credentials must be challenged.
“It is urgent to end this war as soon as possible. This can only be achieved through the success of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. Ukraine is fighting a legitimate war of self-defense, indeed a war for its survival as a nation. Calling for “peace” in the abstract is meaningless in these circumstances.”(Ukrainian Solidarity Network )
“Social-imperialists,’ that is, socialists in words and imperialists in deeds ( V.I. Lenin)
“The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be considered part of the enemy.” (A.Baraka, The Western Imperial Left’s Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie )
The clear implication from this statement issued by the newly formed Ukrainian Solidarity Network is that military victory is the only solution for resolving the conflict in Ukraine. The fact that many of the individuals supporting this network self-identify as leftists, represents a new, perhaps higher form of collaboration with Western and U.S. imperialism that may have ever developed since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945. I issued an excerpt of my statement in response to the emergence of this network that caused a stir. Here is my statement in full.
One of the most positive things to emerge from the Collective West’s war in Ukraine is that it helped to expose elements of the U.S. left that have always had a soft, sentimental spot for the West. The arrogance of these Westerners who signed on to this call for more war (see below) is reflected in the fact that they don’t even feel compelled to explain how their morally superior commitment to Ukrainian self-determination against “Putin’s” war is reconciled with the various statements from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former French President Francois Hollande and before them, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko revealing that the Minsk agreement was just a delaying tactic to prepare for war.
We ask the Network as we have been asking Zelensky and Biden, the co-coordinators of the White Lives Matter More Movement, how this phase of the conflict that started in 2014 became Putin’s war? Do we just dismiss as Kremlin propaganda that the Russian Federation felt threatened by what appeared to be the de-facto incorporation of Ukraine into NATO as the Ukrainian army was built into the most formidable fighting force in Europe outside of Russia?
Did the Russians not have any legitimate security concerns with NATO missiles facing them from Romania and Poland, a mere six minutes away from Moscow, and that Ukraine was also making a pitch for “defensive” missiles in Ukraine? And how does the Network characterize the conflict in Eastern Ukraine that started in 2014 and produced over 14,000 deaths when the Ukrainian coup government attacked its own citizens, if the current conflict started in February 2022? What happened to the fascist issue in Ukraine that was written about for years but with even more urgency after the coup in 2014? Did the Kremlin plant those stories in the Western press?
We understand that these are questions that the organizers of the Ukrainian Network will never answer because they do not have to. As Westerners they can just postulate an assertion and it is accepted. The Network and the Western bourgeoisie declare that the war in Ukraine is Putin’s war and it becomes objective truth – because that is what the West can do and can get away with. It’s called power – white power perhaps?
The Ukrainian Solidarity Network is the ultimate expression of social imperialism that has become so normalized in the U.S. and Western Europe that it is no longer even recognized. An example from the statement makes the argument that Ukraine has the “right to determine the means and objectives of its own struggle.” That is a recognized left position. But the social imperialists of the West do not extend that principle and right to nations in the global South. In fact, we ask the signers of this call to explain when the coup government of Ukraine became the representatives of the Ukrainian nation and recognized the sovereign will of the people?
Therefore, it is not a mere coincidence that the main signatories of this Network statement pledging undying support to Ukraine and its project, are also some of the same “left” forces in the forefront of giving left legitimacy to the charge leveled by Western imperialism that the struggling socialist oriented national liberationist states like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia are nothing more than “authoritarian” states more interested in power than socialist construction. Some of those forces also cheered on the NATO attack against Libya, passionately defended Western intervention in Syria and have been silent on Western plans to violently invade Haiti.
For the contemporary neocons in the leadership of the Ukrainian network, their commitment to abstract principles, and certainty that they know more than everyone else, objectively place them in the same ideological camp with Obama, Biden, NATO strategists, the Zelensky clown, and Boris Johnson. But they will argue that their positions are different, since they represent something they call the left.
For a number of individuals who signed on to this pro-Western, pro-war letter, they are in a familiar place. However, I suspect a few of the individuals on that list were probably confused or not paying attention, not thinking about who they would be affiliated with when they signed on.
That of course, is not the case for some of the key supporters of this initiative. Individuals like the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, Eric Draitser of Counterpunch, and Bill Fletcher who normally I would not name specifically but because these individuals and the tendency they represent embody the worst of the arrogant, Western left that in so many cases (not all) objectively provides ideological cover ( rightism with left phraseology) for the imperialist program of Western capital – they should not be allowed continued left respectability without challenge.
These individuals certainly have not hesitated in offering criticisms of those of us who never wavered from our strategic priority to defeat our primary enemy – the Western white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy. For us everything else represents secondary contradictions at this specific historical moment. And is why we reject the arguments these forces advance about fighting dual imperialisms as anti-dialectical nonsense and a political cover.
History has demonstrated that it would be a complete disaster if the “collective West” secured a military victory in its proxy war with Russia. For the U.S. empire it would validate their doctrine of “Full spectrum dominance” and the wisdom of their commitment to a military-first strategy to support that doctrine. It would mean that war with China was a certainty.
The commitment to global hegemony by the Western colonial/capitalist elite by any means necessary is why the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination represents an existential threat to the vast majority of humanity. A “left” position on Ukraine should at best be to support a negotiated settlement to end the war before the Dr. Strangeloves making policy in the U.S. create the circumstances that will lead to a nuclear confrontation with either Russia or China.
The position of support for more war guided by the white-boy fantasy of military victory in Ukraine is madness. For Africans/Black folks, we ask, what self-respecting African would consciously place themselves on the same side with NATO, Europe, and the U.S. settler-state in any conflict? The fact that some continue to end up on the same side with our enemies only affirms that they have made a choice, and that choice is to collaborate with our enemies – which sadly, also makes them the enemy.
Image: Liu Rui, Global Times
The U.S. does not respect the right to health care, housing, employment, or education while making war on the rest of the world. What does the idea of human rights amount to in this country?
“…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world (preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
December 10th is recognized globally as International Human Rights Day (IHRD) to commemorate the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. But how does the U.S. state celebrate this day? Two days before the day of recognition, legislators in the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the $858 billion dollar National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which also specifically earmarked another $800 million for the Ukraine war.
On IHRD itself, the Biden Administration announced a new set of sanctions while also justifying the continuation of sanctions against 44 nations, thereby contradicting the entire premise of the human rights frame and idea.
The working class and poor in the U.S. never recovered from the 2008 capitalist financial crisis before having to face the devastation of the covid pandemic 10 years later. Unlike the People’s Republic of China and most of the socialist oriented societies that were able to mitigate the loss of life and economic suffering of their populations, the particularly brutal and heartless character of U.S. capitalism meant that there were very few state mechanisms in place to protect the population, especially the most vulnerable from the ravages of the pandemic and the financial crisis alike.
Tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths were the result along with millions who lost their jobs, faced evictions, lost subsidized lunches when schools closed down and got sick because there was no social distancing in houses and apartments where three generations were forced to live together because of soaring rents. For those workers who did not lose their jobs the label “essential workers” was slapped on them and they were forced to work in unsafe conditions that often led to hospitalization and even death.
Similarly, for the peoples residing in nations sanctioned by the U.S. and their Western allies, death and sickness were the results. The callous and cruel policy of denying nations the ability to secure medicines, food, and basic energy needs for their people could only be characterized as state sanctioned murder, and, yes, a violation of human rights speciously upheld by the United Nations. Sanctioned states such as Venezuela, Iran, and Nicaragua were forbidden to engage in international trade making it enormously difficult to house, cloth, educate, and feed their populations, nor adequately tend to them when they became sick.
Incredibly, the U.S. still attempts to portray itself as a paragon of human rights – and gets away with it! Why? Because liberal human rights have been politicized, distorted and weaponized.
Humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect, the 21st century version of the “White man’s burden” to save and protect the non-European natives, often from themselves, is evoked with devastating effectiveness. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the expansion of AFRICOM were framed not as the imperialist adventures that they were, but as benevolent interventions to bring God, light and civilization to the mass of savages. The U.S. proxy war with Russia and the burgeoning plans for a military intervention of Haiti are all framed as altruistic, reluctantly carried out in order to enforce global order by the global cop – the United States of America has successfully completed an elite capture of the entire premise of human rights!
The Imperative to Decolonize Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is seen as a revolutionary development that for the first time clearly expressed minimum normative standards for the protection of human rights and a measurement for assessing the performance of states in living up to those standards.
The principles reflected in that document represented the tensions and subsequent compromise between the two competing visions of human rights represented by the Soviet Union with its emphasis on collective, economic, social and cultural rights and the U.S. commitment to the “liberal” emphasis on individual civil and political rights. Both sides, nevertheless, were supposed to be committed to the further development, but even more importantly, the protection of human rights as one of the cornerstones of the newly established United Nations and its charter.
That did not happen.
Articles 22 through 28 of the UHDR enumerated provisions that reflected the basic rights that define a dignified life freed from the material deprivations that usually will compromise dignity - the right to “social security,” not just in old age but throughout one’s life, the right to a living wage, to leisure, education, housing, food, health, and even protections against unemployment – rights never recognized as rights by capitalists in the U.S. Henry Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man” was never realized and remains a perpetual dream deferred.
In fact, as the human rights framework was further defined and expanded by instruments such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (IESCR) that provided a legally binding foundation to economic, social, and cultural rights, the U.S. state adamantly refused to ratify the covenant. Anything that went beyond the basic civil and political rights - like the right to vote and free speech were not seen as rights but as “aspirations.”
The ESCR covenant as well as most of the other human right treaties like the Conventions on the Rights of the Child and on the rights of women have languished for decades in committees in the U.S. Congress.
In fact, the U.S. has actually only signed and ratified three of the more than one dozen major human rights treaties developed over the last seventy years of the United Nations. The argument the U.S. makes to explain its abysmally poor record of human rights ratifications is that U.S. laws and practices take precedent over international law, including international human rights law.
Double standards and the cynical ideological manipulation of liberal human rights has resulted in a crisis of legitimacy for many peoples and nations in the Global South. Yet, from W.E.B. Dubois and Claudia Jones, to Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and on to the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights of today, the radical Black movement still frames crucial elements of the struggles being waged by Africans within the vocabulary of human rights. Are Africans in the U.S. mistaken by using terms like human rights or are we operating from a different framework?
I have argued that from the moment that Black activists first articulated a position on human rights in 1945 that made the fundamental connection between the need to eradicate racial oppression and exploitation in the U.S. and European colonialism as a prerequisite for the realization of human rights, we were operating from a different framework, a framework I labeled as a “People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) framework. The assumption of the PCHRs frame is simple and clear. If human rights are to have any relevance for the oppressed, they must be “de-colonized” and given meaning by the oppressed themselves.
And what are People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR)?
They are, “those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.”
This definition is a description of a process and an ethical framework as opposed to a pre-figured list of items defined as representing human rights. This is one of the key differences between the liberal framework and PCHRs. The PCHR approach asserts that human rights must be created from the bottom-up.
The PCHR framework rejects the idea that human rights only emanate from legalistic texts negotiated by states, as important as some of the principles represented in some of the texts. PCHRs are a creation of struggle and emerge from the people in formation. Unlike the liberal frame that elevates mystical notions of natural law (which is really bourgeois law) as the foundation of abstract rights, the “people” in formation create the ethical foundation and are the source of PCHRs.
The Biden Administration like every administration before it made a choice: Profits over the People, Planet and Peace
The Democrats played games with the Build Back Better (BBB) legislation. The so-called progressives – current democrat party sheepdogs – helped to kill that legislation while not acknowledging the legal basis of some of the protections as human rights, still would have mitigated some effects of the economic crisis of the last few years. For example, one of the benefits that ended when BBB was not enacted into law was the Child Tax Credit. This program provided a monthly payment for the poor, primarily women with children, that lifted over four million children out of poverty and if it had been expanded to another 19 million children who had not received full benefits it would have cost just 12 billion a year. But the program was not expanded and millions of children fell back into poverty.
Recently, the U.S. was outraged that railroad workers were denied seven days of sick leave. However, there was nothing unusual about the plight of these workers. Millions of workers do not have that basic right in the U.S.
From the city streets in the U.S. to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the peoples’ money will continue to go to war and domestic repression. To Ukraine and the wars beyond, while over 140 million low-wage workers live in fear, insecurity and silence more than sixty percent of the discretionary national budget goes to nourish the war machine that feeds the rapacious and gluttonous appetite of the military/industrial/complex instead of the needs of the people.
These will continue to be the policy realities until the people understand the terms of the war that capitalism is waging against them and they decide to fight. That day, however, will never come as long as the peoples’ vision of what is possible is delimited by a rapacious ruling class that would rather destroy the world than give up power.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
Presentation at World Anti-Imperialist Conference
Ajamu Baraka, Member of Secretariat, U.S. Peace Council
Hanoi, Vietnam, November 25, 2022
History Demands: Turn Imperialist Wars Into Wars Against Imperialism
Comrades, brothers, and sisters,
As we gather today in Hanoi, Vietnam, less than two months before we enter 2023, the weight of this historical moment has been reflected in all of the sober analysis and passionate calls to action to meet the epoch-changing circumstances and conditions that what might be the final period of the Western Imperialist crisis that confront collective humanity.
We say final because the intensification of the contradictions of the global colonial/capitalist project that first made its appearance on the world stage in 1492, has reached a point in the historical dialectic where either a new epoch of economic and social conditions will emerge that will transcend and bring into being new ethics, new social-economic conditions, and new social institutions and structures dedicated to life and new forms of existence, or, the desperate attempts by international capital, through its control of various states that give it its enormous power to destroy collective humanity, will do just that, i.e., will destroy human life on our planet before it allows itself to sweep into the dustbin of history.
This is what makes this historic moment more unique than any other historical moment since 1492, when Europe began its conquest of the territory that became the Americas, and created, through that conquest and the African slave trade, the material basis for what also became Europe or the “West.”
That conquest and plantation slavery informed what Marx correctly understood as the pedestal for the emergence of capitalism and the eventual global imposition of the capitalist system through the mechanism of colonialism. It is the contradictions of this historical process that we are forced to grapple with today.
It is this material reality and the contradictory logic of imperialism at the present conjuncture that must inform our understanding of the revolutionary tasks we face.
The international bourgeoisie, under the leadership of U.S.-based capital has declared war on collective humanity–and it does not hide its intent.
Year after year it openly declares its commitment to U.S. and Western global hegemony in documents shared with the public! In its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy papers, it has never wavered from its commitment to global “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which emerged as strategy in the 1990s when the U.S. found itself without an international rival as a result of the successful counterrevolution in the Soviet Union led by the chauvinist “great Russians” that Lenin was always concerned about.
In October of this year, that process continued with the Biden administration’s release of the 2023 National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy documents.
That is why for anti-imperialists there can be no confusion regarding the primary enemy of humanity.
The abstraction of something referred to as “world imperialism” must be rejected. Nowhere there is any equivalency with Western imperialism under the leadership of the U.S., with its over 800 bases and thousands of “defense sites,” and a military budget that is larger than the military budgets of the next nine nations combined. The U.S. and Western imperialism represent the primary global contradiction that constitutes an existential threat to human life on our planet.
The historic task and responsibility for anti-imperialists should be clear for no other reason than that the enemy has declared its tasks, its programs, and its objectives that it intends to realize in order to maintain its capitalist global hegemony and the parasitic colonial/capitalist system.
It is clear who the enemy is, and so we must be clear, too. We are at war with imperialism and our task, therefore, is to win.
For the U.S. Peace Council (USPC), where I serve as a member of its Secretariat, it is also clear that while the USPC continues to build tactical unity with liberal and pro-peace organizations and movements who do not share our analysis of the objective forces that are driving the U.S. and Western war machine, we believe it is also necessary to struggle with those forces in order to move them away from the abstract, idealist framework which can easily be manipulated by imperial propaganda–with Ukrainian war being one of the most dramatic examples.
However, while there is strategic value in waging struggles within the pro-peace and anti-war movements, we understand that the development and consolidation of a more effective anti-imperialist movement that has deep roots in the working classes and anti-colonial movements must be the strategic priority.
And to accomplish that, we must be prepared to successfully wage the ideological war.
Hybrid War:
Hybrid war is real. From illegal economic sanctions, political subversion, and coups to proxy wars and direct military confrontation, the basis for either popular support or lack of opposition (same political effect) from the public can only be understood as a result of one of the most effective elements of hybrid warfare–the ideological weapon.
When George Kennan worked at the U.S. State Department at the end of the second imperialist war, known as World War Two, he concluded that with the emergence of the U.S. and the Soviet Union as the two great powers at the end of the war, representing two different social systems, antagonistic competition would characterize the relationship between the two nations.
As the strategy for managing that competition and, from the perspectives of policy makers in the U.S., the victory of the U.S. over the Soviet Union, Kennan advanced what became known as “containment.”
But unlike the popular belief that containment was mainly a doctrine of military containment, the strategy had at its center an understanding of the fundamental importance of ideology. In other words, Kennan identified ideological struggle as a key component of his strategy of containment.
What is important to note for our conversation here is that the ideological war was not just something that had to be fought abroad, but that it also had a domestic component. The confrontation with the Soviet Union in the battle for global hegemony meant that domestic ideological conformity was also necessary. This was the rationale for the McCarthy period of domestic repression in the U.S. in the early 1950s.
And while we don’t have the time here to go into all of the brilliant ideological innovations produced by imperialism since that time, it is noteworthy to mention that two of the most innovative, interrelated frames that were ever produced were the idea of “humanitarian Intervention” and its corollary the “responsibility to protect.” Purely genius: playing on liberal paternalism in the form of white saviorism and utilizing an almost reflexive anti-authoritarianism–at least as it is expressed supposedly in non-European nations. Authoritarianism is at the center of the capitalist dictatorship in the U.S., but that reality appears to be below conscious awareness.
The Disappearance of Anti-imperialism in the West
Bourgeois propaganda scored an amazing ideological victory with the end of cold war in the 1990s. They were able to almost eliminate the frame, and even the awareness, of imperialism, not only from popular discourse but also from left discourse! Imperialism was given an innocent and benevolent face with concepts like humanitarian intervention and its corollary, the responsibility to protect.
This while the neoliberal project was consolidating and extracting devastating consequences on the lives and nations in the global South; consequences that were sharpening the ongoing parasitic structural contradictions between the South and Northern colonial nations and would erupt in popular opposition in the 2000s, especially in places like Latin America.
But for the left in the U.S., the ideological weapon resulted in pushing the left to the right. Here is a dramatic, but fairly typical position among a growing sector of the “left” in the U.S. regarding the war in Ukraine and U.S. competition with Russia and China.
In an article in Socialist Forum, one of the publications of the social democratic left, entitled “Breaking Camp: The U.S. Left and Foreign Policy after the War in Ukraine,” Georgetown University Professor Greg Afinogenov argues that “the left” must abandon its opposition to American imperialism in order to confront Russia and China.
Economic sanctions, Afinogenov writes, “will not be enough to compel a retreat, let alone to overthrow Putin, and Ukrainian leaders themselves have lost hope in NATO protection.”
But while many are retreating, we must instead prepare our forces for even more intense struggle.
As the Black Alliance for Peace has correctly stated, “ Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.” We do not fight for ideas in people’s heads, we fight the structures of oppression.
Anti-imperialist revolutionaries are rational. We love peace and believe in the possibilities of the human family once freed from the anti-people and anti-life project of capitalism and the rule of the global capitalist dictatorship. But the dictatorship of capital has declared war on the people. And, as a rational people, we must not only respond but must advance our forces strategically to strike at the heart of this monster.
We did not choose this war, but we cannot afford to lose it either.
History demands: Turn Imperialist wars into wars against imperialism
“Now is the time to throw off all hesitation, open up new fronts of struggle and launch every protest, demonstration, and anti-imperialist action—from the ballot box to the barricades—as an act to deepen crisis of imperialism.” (Black is Back Coalition, USA)
Onward to victory,
For the people, for the Planet and for Peace!!
All Power to the people!!
The recent midterm election results will not bring about an improvement in the lives of the Black working class.
The 50-year old neoliberal agenda explains why political choices in this country provide little change that benefits the masses of people. The recent midterm election results will not bring about an improvement in the lives of the Black working class.
The agenda was set with the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971. Written at the request of the United States Chamber of Commerce, probably the most influential structure of capitalist rule at the time, the concern for the Chamber was the need to find a more coherent counter-offensive to the attacks against the system over the previous years. At the center of the anti-system attacks during the 1960s was, of course, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War movement.
Powell made the argument that the capitalist class had to recognize that their very survival was at stake and that meant capitalists had to understand that as a class their interests transcended their individual enterprises.
And while the tone of Powell’s memo was “professional” and lacked rhetorical excesses, the need for a more intentional and strategic class war was the call that leaped out from the Powell memo.
“The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation's public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.”
The policy implications were obvious. The U.S. ruling class concluded that it could no longer afford the “excesses” of the liberal welfare state and reform liberalism that as far as it was concerned had produced a failed war strategy, cultural decadence, rampant inflation, urban riots and demands for rights from groups representing every sector of U.S. society.
This was the beginning of the right-wing neoliberal turn. A societal-wide counterrevolutionary policy that also required a domestic counterinsurgency strategy that would have a military, but more importantly, an ideological/cultural component. Domestically the main target of the counterinsurgency would be the revolutionary nationalist and socialist forces of the Black liberation movement and “new communist” formations.
Internationally, the turn to neoliberalism translated into a brutal intensification of colonial/capitalist (imperialist) value extraction from nations in the global South buttressed by weak, corrupt, repressive neocolonial states politically and militarily propped-up by the U.S.
The neoliberal counterrevolution produced irreconcilable contradictions that we are living through today. The gap between rich and poor nations and between workers and capitalists had never been more pronounced and immiseration so cruel.
For the Black working class, the neoliberal turn was a catastrophe. The off-shoring of the U.S. industrial base with its relatively high paying jobs along with the reorganization of the economy to a service economy and the privatization wave that devastated social services and public employment where Black workers were disproportionately located created structural precarity that only needed one incident to push tens of thousands into desperation. In the 2000s there were two. Hurricane Katrina and the economic collapse of 2008 that saw the greatest loss of Black wealth and income since the end of the reconstruction period between 1877 and 1896.
Compounding this devastation, the crimes against humanity represented by the 2020 covid pandemic in which literally tens of thousands of Black people, mainly poor, unnecessarily died because the state failed to protect their fundamental human rights to health and social security.
While Katrina exposed the fragility of Black life in the Gulf Coast, the economic crisis of 2008 just a few years later plugged millions of African workers into a desperate, depression era scramble for survival in conditions where Black labor was superfluous, and the very existence of Black life was seen as a social problem. The mass slaughter of the covid pandemic closed out the first two decades of a century that was supposed exemplify “American” greatness with a demoralized and confused electorate turning to a washed-up hack politician named Joe Biden.
Midterm Elections: If Stopping Fascism is on the Ballot, what was it the Africans Experienced all These Years?
Neoliberalism was a rightist capitalist reform project. Today it informs the context for the midterms elections for African/Black workers. The objective material needs of Black workers and our desire for self-determination, independent development and peace were not on the ballot.
And while the duopoly represents the primary political contradiction obscuring the reality of the dictatorship of capital, the most aggressive neoliberal actors now operate in and through the democratic party. Consequently, the unspoken character of the competition between the two parties is that elections have now shaped up since 2016 as a contest between the far-right elements represented today by Trump forces and the neoliberal right represented by corporate democrats tied to finance capital and transnational corporations.
This is the undemocratic choice. The republicans represent the disaffected white nationalist petit-bourgeoisie settlers who think they are indigenous to this land. The ruling corporate capitalist elements of that party are for the most part nationalist oriented, dependent for their profits on the domestic economy. Some elements produce for the global markets, but they are in constant struggle with big capital as the capitalist economy “naturally” concentrates into its monopoly stage.
Democrats who historically had been associated with labor and the common man even during the period when it was the party of racist segregation under the apartheid system in the South, is today the party controlled by U.S. based monopoly capital. For workers, this form of bourgeois democracy has no space or structure representing the interests of workers, the poor and structurally oppressed. The working class and poor are slowly beginning to understand that.
That is why early evidence suggests that African/Black workers did not participate in numbers that were necessary for the democrats to have prevailed in some of those key races. The democrats have nothing to offer, no policies, no hope, and no vision.
Some of the cowardice phony “progressives” in that party suggest that the national democrats did not push an economic message even though it was clear that the economic crisis was their most pressing concern.
But what economic message? The democrats long ago abandoned their base and they continue to desperately find ways to dilute the influence of their most loyal base – African Americans – by seeking out that elusive white, primarily female, suburban vote.
What the midterms reaffirmed is that the class war that Powell advocated for in the 70s as a primary strategic objective of the ruling class continues and is intensifying, even as the ruling class is in crisis and cannot rule in the same way. This means that the people must disabuse themselves of all illusions and sentimental ideas around common national interests with this reckless and increasingly irrational bourgeoisie.
We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to the slick propaganda that diverts attention away from the failures of the capitalist system. January 6th and Trump, evil Putin, the calculating Chinese, the exaggerated crime issue, and immigration issue, are all meant to divert us away from the fact that our lives are empty, that we have no time for friends and family, mindless soul crushing work characterizes our existence, if we have it, and the fear and anxiety that comes from a precarious existence saps our spirits and turns our confusion and anger inward.
Ideological clarity that stems from a liberated consciousness directs us to the conclusion that it is the system that is the enemy. Not our neighbor, or the undocumented gardener or food delivery person, not the peoples of Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba who just want to live in their own way and in peace.
The democrat party is a morally bankrupt shell, hollowed out by years of lies and corruption. Many do not want to accept the bitter reality that we (Africans and colonized peoples) must objectively acknowledge, that nothing will substantially change by this election or any other bourgeois election. We can and must contest in those spaces but we are clear - as long as power is retained by the Pan European colonial/capitalist dictatorship Black people will continue to suffer and collective humanity will face an existential threat.
The agenda was set with the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971. Written at the request of the United States Chamber of Commerce, probably the most influential structure of capitalist rule at the time, the concern for the Chamber was the need to find a more coherent counter-offensive to the attacks against the system over the previous years. At the center of the anti-system attacks during the 1960s was, of course, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War movement.
Powell made the argument that the capitalist class had to recognize that their very survival was at stake and that meant capitalists had to understand that as a class their interests transcended their individual enterprises.
And while the tone of Powell’s memo was “professional” and lacked rhetorical excesses, the need for a more intentional and strategic class war was the call that leaped out from the Powell memo.
The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.
The policy implications were obvious. The U.S. ruling class concluded that it could no longer afford the “excesses” of the liberal welfare state and reform liberalism that as far as it was concerned had produced a failed war strategy, cultural decadence, rampant inflation, urban riots and demands for rights from groups representing every sector of U.S. society.
This was the beginning of the right-wing neoliberal turn. A societal-wide counterrevolutionary policy that also required a domestic counterinsurgency strategy that would have a military, but more importantly, an ideological/cultural component. Domestically the main target of the counterinsurgency would be the revolutionary nationalist and socialist forces of the Black liberation movement and “new communist” formations.
Internationally, the turn to neoliberalism translated into a brutal intensification of colonial/capitalist (imperialist) value extraction from nations in the global South buttressed by weak, corrupt, repressive neocolonial states politically and militarily propped-up by the U.S.
The neoliberal counterrevolution produced irreconcilable contradictions that we are living through today. The gap between rich and poor nations and between workers and capitalists had never been more pronounced and immiseration so cruel.
For the Black working class, the neoliberal turn was a catastrophe. The off-shoring of the U.S. industrial base with its relatively high paying jobs along with the reorganization of the economy to a service economy and the privatization wave that devastated social services and public employment where black workers were disproportionately located created structural precarity that only needed one incident to push tens of thousands into desperation. In the 2000s there were two. Hurricane Katrina and the economic collapse of 2008 that saw the greatest loss of Black wealth and income since the end of the reconstruction period between 1877 and 1896.
Compounding this devastation, the crimes against humanity represented by the 2020 covid pandemic in which literally tens of thousands of Black people, mainly poor, unnecessarily died because the state failed to protect their fundamental human rights to health and social security.
While Katrina exposed the fragility of Black life in the Gulf Coast, the economic crisis of 2008 just a few years later plugged millions of African workers into a desperate, depression era scramble for survival in conditions where Black labor was superfluous, and the very existence of Black life was seen as a social problem. The mass slaughter of the covid pandemic closed out the first two decades of a century that was supposed to exemplify “American” greatness with a demoralized and confused electorate turning to a washed-up hack politician named Joe Biden.
Midterm Elections: If Stopping Fascism is on the Ballot, what was it the Africans Experienced all These Years?
Neoliberalism was a rightist capitalist reform project. Today it informs the context for the midterms elections for African/Black workers. The objective material needs of Black workers and our desire for self-determination, independent development and peace were not on the ballot.
And while the duopoly represents the primary political contradiction obscuring the reality of the dictatorship of capital, the most aggressive neoliberal actors now operate in and through the democratic party. Consequently, the unspoken character of the competition between the two parties is that elections have now shaped up since 2016 as a contest between the far-right elements represented today by Trump forces and the neoliberal right represented by corporate democrats tied to finance capital and transnational corporations.
This is the undemocratic choice. The republicans represent the disaffected white nationalist petit-bourgeoisie settlers who think they are indigenous to this land. The ruling corporate capitalist elements of that party are for the most part nationalist oriented, dependent for their profits on the domestic economy. Some elements produce for the global markets, but they are in constant struggle with big capital as the capitalist economy “naturally” concentrates into its monopoly stage.
Democrats who historically had been associated with labor and the common man even during the period when it was the party of racist segregation under the apartheid system in the South, is today the party controlled by U.S. based monopoly capital. For workers, this form of bourgeois democracy has no space or structure representing the interests of workers, the poor and structurally oppressed. The working class and poor are slowly beginning to understand that.
That is why early evidence suggests that African/Black workers did not participate in numbers that were necessary for the democrats to have prevailed in some of those key races. The democrats have nothing to offer, no policies, no hope, and no vision.
Some of the cowardice phony “progressives” in that party suggest that the national democrats did not push an economic message even though it was clear that the economic crisis was their most pressing concern.
But what economic message? The democrats long ago abandoned their base and they continue to desperately find ways to dilute the influence of their most loyal base – African Americans – by seeking out that elusive white, primarily women, suburban vote.
What the midterms reaffirmed is that the class war that Powell advocated for in the 70s as a primary strategic objective of the ruling class continues and is intensifying, even as the ruling class is in crisis and cannot rule in the same way. This means that the people must disabuse themselves of all illusions and sentimental ideas around common national interests with this reckless and increasingly irrational bourgeoisie.
We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to the slick propaganda that diverts attention away from the failures of the capitalist system. January 6th and Trump, evil Putin, the calculating Chinese, the exaggerated crime issue, and immigration issue, are all meant to divert us away from the fact that our lives are empty, that we have no time for friends and family, mindless soul crushing work characterizes our existence, if we have it, and the fear and anxiety that comes from a precarious existence saps our spirits and turns our confusion and anger inward.
Ideological clarity that stems from a liberated consciousness directs us to the conclusion that it is the system that is the enemy. Not our neighbor, or the undocumented gardener or food delivery person, not the peoples of Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba who just want to live in their own way and in peace.
The democrat party is a morally bankrupt shell, hollowed out by years of lies and corruption. Many do not want to accept the bitter reality that we (Africans and colonized peoples) must objectively acknowledge that nothing will substantially change by this election or any other bourgeois election. We can and must contest in those spaces but we are clear – as long as power is retained by the Pan European colonial/capitalist dictatorship Black people will continue to suffer and collective humanity will face an existential threat.
Image: YouTube
Donald Trump is no peace maker, but his stance on negotiations to end the war in Ukraine is in stark contrast to that of the democrats, who fully support continuing the dangerous proxy war against Russia. Anti-war forces must step up and struggle for peace.
Since the U.S. sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014, taking a stand against the plan by the U.S. to use Ukraine as a weapon of war against Russia was a perilous stance for pro-peace and anti-imperialist forces. What made opposition especially difficult was that the plan was being executed by the administration of Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama with the full support of the right-wing neoliberal establishment that controlled and still controls the U.S. state.
But, while it was a challenge to oppose the many criminal adventures of the Obama administration, the return of that administration to power under Joe Biden has ushered in the acceleration and normalization of censorship, the blatant politicization of the investigative agencies of the state and a war fever that has gripped the culture. Opposition to the neoliberal war agenda and domestic subversion has become an affront subject to criminal prosecution, or at minimum social ostracism.
Yet, as dangerous as the environment has been, the vocal call by Donald Trump to seek a path to peace in Ukraine will make it even more hazardous for anti-imperialist and anti-war forces to demand an end to the war. Trump said , “We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in World War III and there will be nothing left of our planet.” In the past that position would have found a home in the democrat party, even if it was along the side of more hawkish elements. But in the new democrat party, support for the most aggressive policies of a foreign policy community that seems increasingly out of touch with reality is the norm, with no deviation from the “line” tolerated.
And while only the most naïve would believe that Donald Trump was committed to an anti-war position, there are three points to be made here: First it is a fact that during his administration the U.S. did not initiate any new conflicts and secondly, the opportunism and political myopia of the U.S. liberal/left in aligning itself with the neoliberalism of the democrat party disarmed itself rhetorically from offering principled criticisms of the obvious turn to the right by the democrat party foreign policy establishment, that lastly, represents yet another example of the political and ideological ground conceded by the liberal/left forces to the Trumpian right that it pretends to be opposed.
Trump’s call for negotiations and an end to the war presents a dilemma that is not confined to the contradictory positions of the U.S. liberal/left. Trump is tapping into a sentiment that significant portions of the electorate share and that is that the Ukrainian war has made life even more precarious for them with higher food and fuel prices on top of inflation that is felt as a pay-cut by workers. However, even more importantly, the public is starting to embrace the position that the sacrifices they are being asked to make for Ukraine and the war effort that they did not vote for, does not seem to be shared by the rich. In fact, it appears that the rich, especially the military contractors and energy companies, are benefiting quite well from the conflict and not having to sacrifice much, if at all.
Those sentiments are out there. It is being expressed by democrats, independents and by increasing numbers of republicans that cannot be reduced to Trump supporters. Those positions are just not being covered by the corporate press because the corporate/capitalist press is committed to the class agenda of big capital and that means the war agenda.
The democrats do not get it though, even the so-called progressives. The neoliberals reneged on most of the progressive agenda Biden pretended he would govern by. In response, progressives have supported every piece of legislation presented to them by the leadership, including uncritical support for aid to Ukraine even as the capitalist class shifted the cost of the war to their working-class constituencies. In May of this year, for example, the growing divergence between the republicans and democrats on funding for Ukraine was obvious when Congress voted 368-57 in the House and 86-11 in the Senate to approve an additional $40 billion for the war. Every single no-vote – 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House – came from a Republican. All the “progressives,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The Squad, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee and most members of the Congressional Black Caucus all fell in line without one question and not a peep of a criticism of the war agenda or of its cost.
This should be an opportunity for the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement. For the last five years, the Black Alliance for Peace has advocated that a major strategic objective for the anti-war and anti-imperialist forces during the bourgeois electoral season should be to attempt to place the issue of war and the U.S. imperialist agenda at the center of national discourse. That never happened.
Therefore, it is ironic, or perhaps contradictory, that both Trump and the democrats have taken up the initiative to insert the issue of war into the national electoral discourse. The democrats were moving to make continued support for the war a partisan issue in the upcoming midterm election before Trump made his remarks on Ukraine. The democrats, though, with the full support of the corporate media were constructing a line that suggested republican questions or opposition to the position of all-out support for Ukraine reflected the pro-Putin influences of Donald Trump. That totalitarian position has ensured that democratic party operatives and elements of the liberal/left either gave verbal support for the war agenda or were cowed into silence.
CODEPINK reported that as part of its week of action against the war in September, Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and retired Colonel Ann Wright went door to door to the offices of members of the more than 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). What they found was that not one member of the caucus would commit to voting against the $12 billion expenditure for the Ukraine war that was contained in the Continuing Resolution legislation that passed on September 30th.
It will take bold and fearless actions on the part of anti-war and anti-imperialist forces if we are to win more of the public to take a stance against an agenda that is antagonistic to the interests of most of the public, especially the public that makes up the working class and the oppressed nationalities.
The servants of imperialist power in the duopoly want to make support for the white supremacist U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination a litmus test in the midterm election. They will frame all opposition to the neoliberal war agenda as unpatriotic and even foreign inspired. The FBI has already been unleashed against the anti-imperialist forces in the African/Black communities with the raid on the properties of the African People's Socialist Party (APSP).
We are preparing our forces for an even more intense struggle. For the Black Alliance for Peace, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.” We do not fight for ideas in people’s heads, we fight the structures of oppression.
This is the “Black radical peace tradition.” It is a tradition of struggle informed by the historical necessity that we must win. We will not be intimidated into silence by the state, the democrats or confused collaborative leftists.
We continue to struggle for peace, but we understand that there will be no peace without justice and for justice we have to fight for it. On that commitment we say there will be no compromise and no retreat!
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
Saladin Muhammad was the founder of Black Workers for Justice. He played a key role in developing Black revolutionary labor organizing.
“African Americans need a national political framework with an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and internationalist program – a national liberation front…” (Saladin Muhammad, Marxism, Reparations and the Black Freedom Struggle)
Our dear brother, leader, confidant, mentor and model servant of our people, Saladin Muhammad, joined our revolutionary ancestors on September 19, 2022 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Saladin was 76 and had been battling illness for a while.
When our revolutionary elders leave this material world, we often say another giant has fallen as a testament to their contribution and the love that we have for them. But sometimes, that characterization is just not enough. This is one of those times. Brother Saladin occupied a category that only a few have occupied. As one of only a handful of strategic thinkers and organizers of our movement that had not retired (how does a member of an oppressed nation and class retire from revolution?) Saladin continued to provide the leadership that he had given for well over five decades.
Sister Ashaki Binta, who worked with Saladin captures what he meant to all of us:
“Brother Saladin leaves an outstanding legacy of revolutionary commitment, leadership, consciousness, and direct organizing of our people’s struggle for liberation. He was a commander-in-chief of revolutionary forces throughout the Black Liberation Movement and a staunch fighter for the Black Working Class. He worked tirelessly and with phenomenal energy to organize, guide, and lead our people’s fights and battles against oppression. He was an internationalist, upholding the world-wide struggle against capitalism and imperialism. His intellect, insight and analysis was outstanding in the theory and practice of organizing class and revolutionary struggle and the tactics and strategy of social transformation, national liberation, and socialism for the African American people.”
Asé!
I met Saladin around 1987, just a few years after I “went South” to organize. I was working for the last of the 1964 Mississippi Summer organizations, the Voter Education Project, at that time being run by another one of my mentors Ed Brown, the older brother of Jamil al-Amin (H. Rap brown). I was helping to organize a fightback in a Black community that was attempting to reconstitute itself as the municipality of Keysville in southern Georgia. Saladin was there representing the Black Workers for Justice that had been organized a few years earlier. I was immediately struck by his strategic vision, organizational skills and steady, humble revolutionary leadership. A few years later I was a proud member of BWFJ and even though we parted ways, I maintained a relationship with the comrades and with Saladin over the years. He was always there for me with strategic advice and never hesitated to support me no matter if he agreed with every aspect of what I was attempting or not. That I will never forget.
Brother Abdul Akalimat, another of our revolutionary elders who worked with Saladin for many years, especially the last few years in the various efforts to build a national framework for Black left unity, shared some of the remaining strategic questions Saladin was still grappling with until the very end:
- What are the paths out of the working class into revolutionary movements for social transformation? What is the role of family, childhood friends, cultural practices, and neighborhood political culture?
- How does Black resistance become a conscious part of the Black liberation movement? What is the role of a progressive Black nationalism, and how can it link to working class issues?
- How has the struggle in the African Diaspora for national liberation from colonialism and imperialism impacted the Black liberation movement in the US? After post-independence reversal into neo-colonialism, especially in South Africa, what can be the relationship between the Black Liberation movement in the US and the fight for social transformation and social justice in Africa?
- What are the prospects for the fight of Black workers? What is the role of the Black workers struggle within the general workers movement?
- What is the necessary connection between the fight for Black liberation and the fight for socialism?
Thank you, brother Saladin. We will continue to grapple with and to solve these challenges/questions as you did in theory and practice .
Brother Saladin's Celebration of Life service by his family will be Saturday, October 1 at 2 pm eastern time at the Rocky Mount Event Center located at 285 NE Main St., Rocky Mount NC 27801 and can be viewed on Youtube .
There will be a memorial service organized by the Black Workers for Justice on November 12. Details will be forthcoming.
Rest in peace African. Know that those of us still in this ream of existence pledge to continue the redemption of our people. We will fight and we will win because in our heads and hearts will be the memory of you and all our people who sacrificed so that we could someday be free. We still hear the drums brother Saladin. And as long as we hear those drums of Africa calling African workers and the colonized everywhere to freedom, we will never give up.
That is what we learned from you, and it is a lesson we will keep with us until we see you again!
Saladin Presente – the African Nation will be free!
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
"End Racism: Build Peace" was the theme of the 2022 International Day of Peace. That noble sentiment can't be realized when powerful white supremacist structures are committed to practicing hegemony.
It is not a cruel irony but imperial consistency that on September 21, 2022 the United Nations International Day of Peace, Xiomara Castro Sarmiento, the new president of Honduras addressed the 77th Session of the United Nations in New York while on that same day in a display of shameless imperial hubris and utter contempt for the idea of international peace, Volodymr Zelensky, the Ukrainian actor/president was scheduled to address a gathering of defense contractors in Houston, Texas to make the case for more war.
The contrast of President Xiomara Castro’s appearance in New York, representing a nation that in 2009 was plunged into 13 years of brutal dictatorship by the newly elected Obama administration, and Zelensky’s scheduled appearance in Houston could not be starker. President Xiomara Castro and most of the representatives from the Global South used their presentations at the United Nations to call for peace, for global cooperation and security for their people and the people of the world. The messages from the West were quite different. While decorated with allusions to liberal values that the West never really believed in, and certainly never applied to their colonial subjects, self-serving moralism and calls for more confrontation peppered the remarks from most Western leaders. None of them made a serious commitment to peace.
Zelensky’s U.S. handlers had to know that September 21 was the United Nations International Day of Peace, but providing another opportunity for one of Zelensky’s grand performances, this time before the CEOs of defense corporations with a personal stake in war and death, outweighed any considerations for being caught in a political and moral contradiction on that day.
For the Biden administration, a commitment to peace is a poor substitute for the benefits of securing another $13 billion in aid for Ukraine contained in legislation meant to fund the U.S. government. Moving money from the public coffers to the pockets of the defense companies that pay the bills for both parties is always seen as good bipartisan policy.
Zelensky did not appear before the defense industry CEOs because it appears that at the very last minute someone in the Biden administration understood that the optics of Zelensky begging defense contractors for more weapons to wage war on a day the U.N. had committed to peace would not look good. A lame excuse was given for why he could not do what he was put in place to do: play the role of a president and push Western interests. So, one of his underlings filled in for him.
However, that small bit of perception management did not, and cannot, reverse what is irreversible, namely, the precipitous decline of the moral standing of the U.S. and the West. The heavy-handed attempts to coerce nations in the Global South to align themselves with the U.S. and Europe on the Ukrainian conflict has had a disastrous result for the West. The vast majority of the peoples of the world — a world still experiencing the degradation and humiliation of ongoing parasitic U.S. and Western colonial/capitalist exploitation — decidedly turned against the “collective West.”
The Black Radical Peace Tradition Provides a Path Forward for the Anti-War and Anti-Imperialist Movement in the North
“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.” (BAP Principles of Unity)
The fact that the theme of the International Day of Peace this year was: “End Racism: Build Peace,” and was ignored by the collective West, was no surprise to non-Westerners.
On this year’s theme, Secretary-General António Guterres said:
“Racism continues to poison institutions, social structures, and everyday life in every society. It continues to be a driver of persistent inequality. And it continues to deny people their fundamental human rights. It destabilizes societies, undermines democracies, erodes the legitimacy of governments, and… the linkages between racism and gender inequality are unmistakable.”
But Guterres’s commentary demonstrates the limitations of his understanding of race and racialism, and their connections to war and imperialism. Black peace activists, who were also anti-colonial activists, made the correct connection between white supremacy, war, and the colonial/capitalist global system more than seventy years ago in the immediate post-world-war period. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that trained the first wave of white anti-war activists, and eventually Dr. King, also made those connections. But for liberals like Guterres and even radicals, racism, as a non-material phenomenon that exists in the consciousness of individuals, is the focus. You change minds, and like magic, fundamental human rights like housing, education, healthcare are then realizable.
But this conception is anachronistic and even reactionary. For the Black Alliance for Peace, the concept of white supremacy provides a broader and more theoretically sound framework than the focus on “racism” for understanding the structures and social relations that emerged with the invasion of the “Americas” , the establishment of the global colonial/capitalist system. BAP defines white supremacy as :
“The combined ideological and structural expression of “white power.” In its ideological expression, it posits that the descendants of people of the territory/idea referred to as Europe represent the highest examples of human development.
That their culture, social institutions, religions, and way of life are inherently and naturally superior. This position is combined with what BAP calls the global structures and institutions of white supremacy, the material means to maintain and advance global white power: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization, Global Banking system, NATO, and dollar hegemony.
For BAP, white supremacy, therefore, cannot be reduced to individualized attitudes and values just among people identified as white. Instead, it should be seen as a structure of domination that is also ideologically embedded into every aspect of U.S. and European society to the extent that it has become normalized and invisibilized as general common sense.”
Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky as the coordinators of the “white lives matter more movement” understand the connections between war, white supremacy, and imperialism. They are white supremacists, committed to European (white) global hegemony. They both understand very well that the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is dependent on its capacity to effectively project collective imperialist state violence. They also understand that this agenda requires some degree of public support, or at least public acquiesce. That is precisely why the idea of peace is seen as a threat and the repressive mechanisms of the state are deployed to foster confusion and division among the anti-war movement in the U.S.
For the peoples and nations in the global South, the Ukraine war stripped away all pretenses to any idea of Europe being committed to any idea of collective humanity. The self-interested agenda of “collective West” and the imperialist interests driving that agenda became obvious to all. Yet, among the liberal/left in the Northern nations, concerns for “authoritarianism” trumps the imperial and racialist class and national agenda of the U.S. and European bourgeoisie. Northern anti-war and anti-imperialist organizations often find themselves providing ideological cover for imperialism by projecting moral and personal explanations for war and conflict over the colonial/capitalist material determinants that are really driving imperial policy.
Anti-war and anti-imperialist solidarity requires that those movements embrace the Black radical approach to the peace issue. Connecting anti-capitalist analysis and an anti-colonial stance is essential for an Anti-war politics that will have some value for nations and peoples who find themselves in the crosshairs of Western colonial violence.
The people of Honduras understood in 2009, as people in the U.S. lionize Obama as a supposed departure from the criminality of past presidents, that this kind of confusion exacts a terrible price for the colonized that can, as in the case of Honduras, result in 13 years of right-wing dictatorship. And with the manufactured NATO proxy war with Russia, it can also lead to the possibility of global nuclear annihilation for the world today.
As BAP member and scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly who has been instrumental in explicating the Black Radical Peace tradition has written, “throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the legacy of Radical Black Peace Activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice lived on through organizations like the Black Panther Party, the National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union, and the Third World Women’s Alliance.”
Today that tradition is being upheld by BAP.
There is no solution but peace, but to have peace we have to fight for it. That is the commitment that must be made on the international day of peace and all other days. That means seizing power from the Euro- “American” capitalist oligarchy — the defenders of death, the plunderers, and profiteers — and building a new world where all can prosper and live in dignity and peace.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.