Participants in the African American History Month concluding forum in Detroit on February 28, 2009. Abayomi Azikiwe, PANW editor, delivered an address on the history of African labor. (Photo: Cheryl LaBash)
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
A tribute to Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah
by Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
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Note: The following speech was delivered at a public forum entitled "Police Violence and the Capitalist State." The event was sponsored by Workers World Party in Detroit on December 12, 2009. The forum was chaired by Kevin Carey of the Detroit People's Task Force and also featured speeches by Sandra Hines of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, Andrea Egypt of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) and Roberto Guzman, a Puerto Rican activist living in Detroit.
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Since the beginning of the United States of America, the government and its financial supporters have maintained their authority through the violent suppression of the people. Even prior to the founding of the U.S., when Britain, France and Spain controlled large areas of North America, the interests of the Native Peoples and Africans have either been totally disregarded or considered secondary to the ruling class that is dominated by Europeans.
The U.S. became a world power through the forced removal and genocide against the Native Americans and the kidnapping, enslavement and suppression of the African people. This process of mass murder, forced labor and containment was done to ensure the dominance of slavery, feudalism and eventually capitalism.
By the late 19th century, the U.S. was poised to expand throughout the former Spanish empire which led to the colonization of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The so-called Spanish-American war was in actuality an imperialist war to take control of these territories from their previous rulers. The U.S. sought and gained total hegemony over the western hemisphere.
For example, the former French and Spanish colonies in Hispaniola eventually became dominated by the United States by the conclusion of the 19th century. The Platt Amendment had been crafted by the U.S. ruling class at the beginning of the 20th century to provide a pseudo-legal rationale for the dominance of Cuba. Later the U.S. occupied the nation of Haiti between 1915-34 and imposed a system of neo-slavery quite similar to what developed within its own country in the aftermath of slavery and the failure of reconstruction.
All of these exploitative and repressive systems did not arise spontaneously. They represent the logic of racism, national oppression, capitalism and imperialism. The government or the state is specifically designed to enforce the exploitation and repression of the working class and the oppressed.
V.I. Lenin, the founder of the Bolshevik Party that led the first socialist revolution in history in 1917 in Russia, wrote a series of articles and statements later known as "State and Revolution." Lenin drew on the earlier work of Friedrich Engels in his book "The Origins of the Family, Private, Property and the State in writing these articles. Lenin quotes Engels in one of these articles by recalling that:
"The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from the outside; just as little is it 'the reality of the moral idea, the image and the reality of reasons,' as Hegel asserted. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development, it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.
"But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, may not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power apparently standing above society becomes necessary, whose purpose is to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power arising out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly separating itself from it, is the state." (Engels)
Lenin goes on to further clarify the true character of the state in a capitalist society. He says that the state represents the domination of the capitalists over the workers and the oppressed. The state is not an arbiter or a mediator between conflicting social classes but a mechanism that attempts to ensure the domination of one class over another:
"According to Marx, the state is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another; its aim is the creation of 'order' which legalises and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the collisions between the classes. But in the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, order means reconciliation of the classes and not oppression of one class by another; to moderate collisions does not mean, they say, to deprive the oppressed classes of certain definite means and methods of struggle for overthrowing the oppressors, but to practice reconciliation."
With the progression of capitalism there is the development of a domestic armed force which stands apart and above the masses to utilize force in carrying out the will and desires of the ruling class. In every region of the country, in every state, in every county, city , township and village, there are the law-enforcement agencies to coerce the workers and the oppressed to abide by the laws and mores of the society.
Lenin quotes Engels again in this regard who said many years before that:
"The second is the establishment of a public force, which is no longer absolutely identical with the population organizing itself as an armed power. This special public force is necessary, because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the cleavage of society into classes....This public force exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but of material appendages, prisons and repressive institutions of all kinds, of which gentilic society knew nothing...."
Therefore, domestically and on a foreign policy level, the state under capitalism is a violent entity that upholds the right of the banks, the landowners and the factory bosses to enforce its political and economic will on the people.
The Historical Development of National Oppression and the Right to Self-Determination for the African-American People
African-Americans, Latinos and Native Peoples have always resisted the oppressive mechanism of the state. Whether the resistance took the form of armed actions against the state, its agents and supporters or if it involved flight from slavery and occupation, these popular forms of struggle represented the will of humanity to be free from oppression.
The indigenous people of North America fought for centuries to prevent the European settler encroachment of their lands and cultures. People in Mexico, which encompassed what is known today as the southwest and west of the United States, waged a decades-long armed campaign against the advancement of settler-colonialism.
In regard to the African people in America, there were numerous revolts during slavery. People also ran away from the plantation system, engaged in acts of sabotage that included work slowdowns, vandalism against the slave master's property, arson, poison as well as the use of religion as a means of promoting a consciousness of resistance.
During the Civil War that resulted in the legal collapse of the antebellum slave system, Africans fought in the war to end the dreaded exploitation and oppression. In the aftermath of the Civil War, during the attempt to reconstruct the South on a democratic basis, Africans resisted the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist para-military groups that sought to reimpose the slave system.
Lynching, the black codes, jim crow, disenfranchisement and false imprisonment were the mechanism utilized to keep African-Americans under control where the maximum profit could be gained from their labor. Even after slavery, African-Americans remained tied to the southern plantation agricultural system through sharecropping and tenant farming.
In the post-slavery agricultural system, in most cases, African-Americans remained indebted to the landowners, merchants and the banks. African-Americans who owned land as a result of the large-scale re-structuring of the plantation system after the civil war were under constant attack by the dominant white agricultural class who through laws and force of arms, sought to seize the farms ostensibly owned by African-Americans.
As an oppressed nation under capitalism, African-Americans are entitled to the right of self-determination, national liberation and even independence. This is based on the actual history of their experience during slavery and the period of the late 19th and early 20th century in the rural and small town South.
However, even after African-Americans began to migrate to the urban areas of the South, North, Midwest and West, they were still racially segregated, economically super-exploited and systematically repressed by the state and white racist vigilantes. This is why African-Americans formed their own religious institutions, social clubs, political associations, civil rights, separatist-nationalist and pan-africanist formations.
Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, emigration movements of African-Americans gained considerable support in efforts to re-locate outside the South in Kansas and Oklahoma. Even in the South, there was the formation of all-black towns in Mississippi and Florida. Other movements sought to repatriate to Africa in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Gold Coast (Ghana).
The Pan-African Congress movement led by people such as Henry McNeal Turner, Anna J. Cooper, Addie Hunton, Henry Sylvester Williams and W.E.B. DuBois, brought together peoples of African descent from around the world. The Universal Negro Improvement Association-African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) formed by Marcus Garvey, organized millions into an international movement that placed strong emphasis on self-determination and national independence.
These movements in the African world coincided with the rise of the labor movement in the United States. It also paralleled and intersected with the movement towards women suffrage and equality. However, despite the tremendous contributions of the women and labor movements, they were never able to overcome the entrenched racism and national chauvinism within the European and European-American community.
The international socialist and communist movements through its theoretical formulations that were advanced by Marx, Engels and Lenin addressed the question of national oppression and the right of self-determination.
Lenin pointed out in his theses on "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, that:
"Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of capitalism. In the foremost countries capital has outgrown the bounds of national states, has replaced competition by monopoly and has created all the objective conditions for the achievement of socialism. In Western Europe and in the United States, therefore, the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for the overthrow of capitalist governments and the expropriations of the bourgeoisie is on the order of the day.
"Imperialism forces the masses into this struggle by sharpening class contradictions on a tremendous scale, by worsening the conditions of the masses both economically--trusts, high cost of living--and politically--the growth of militarism, more frequent wars, more powerful reaction, the intensification and expansion of national oppression and colonial plunder. Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realize the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political separation.
"Socialist parties which did not show by all their activity, both now, during the revolution, and after its victory, that they would liberate the enslaved nations and build up relations with them on the basis of a free union--and free union is a false phrase without the right to secede--these parties would be betraying socialism.
"Democracy, of course, is also a form of state which must disappear when the state disappears, but that will only take place in the transition from conclusively victorious and consolidated socialism to full communism." (Lenin, National Liberation, Socialism and Imperialism, pp. 110-111)
Between the 1920s and the early 1950s, thousands of African-Americans joined the labor movement, various left parties and other political formations including the struggle to oppose the Italian fascist and imperialist invasion and occupation of Ethiopia between 1935-1941. During World War II, African-Americans fought for inclusion into the war industries when A. Phillip Randolph organized the first March on Washington Movement in 1941 that resulted in Roosevelt issuing the F.E.P.C.
Inside the military during World War II, African-Americans fought against racism and national discrimination so prevalent in a segregated armed forces that treated black soldiers as second-class citizens and colonial subjects. A similar form of German, Italian and Spanish fascism, in their view, was already in existence and widespread as state policy towards African-Americans in the United States. After the war there was an upsurge in racist violence against African-Americans with a rash of lynchings and other forms of white mob violence even directed against soldiers and veterans of the war.
The anti-communist hysteria of the period, between 1948 and 1955, coincided with the socialist revolutions in China, Korea and Vietnam. The anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa were of great concern to the ruling class of the United States. However, it was the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s that led the way for the lessening of political repression inside the U.S.
The civil rights movement beginning in 1955 organized and mobilized hundreds of thousands to oppose racism and national oppression. With the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-65, the more militant forces within the movement raised the cry for black power. Black power coincided with the urban rebellions and the mass movements to end U.S. imperialist intervention in Southeast Asia.
The Legacy of the Black Panther Party and the Need for Socialist Revolution
The Black Panther Party arose during this period as a vanguard movement aimed at encouraging self-defense and socialist revolution. Fred Hampton, who was martyred 40 years ago this month, articulated the notion that true liberation for African-Americans could only occur in conjunction with an international proletarian revolution. The FBI was behind the assassination of both Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago during the early morning hours of December 4, 1969.
Some argue that after 40 years much progress has been made towards the eradication of racism and sexism in the United States. Today there are thousands of elected African-American political officials and many women have taken leading positions in politics, academia, business and the professions. Yet African-Americans still have disproportionally higher unemployment and poverty rates than whites. The housing, health care, education and environmental crises effect African-Americans to far greater degrees than whites.
The United States is still a repressive country where African-Americans and Latinos are severely affected by police brutality and murder at the hands of law-enforcement. Over a million African-Americans are in prisons in the U.S. constituting approximately 50% of the incarcerated population, even though they only represent 12% of the overall people residing inside the country.
Political repression is escalating inside the United States with attacks against the Islamic community of all races. African-American Muslims are inflicted with a double mark of being both Islamic and black in an historically racist society. It was not an accident that the FBI targeted Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah for assassination.
Despite the fact that the U.S. has an African-American president, the state has not been transformed. The state organs still maintain racism and national oppression. Imperialist war remains a cornerstone of U.S. capitalism and racism. It will take a socialist revolution to overturn racism, national oppression and the imperialist war machine.
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