The war against Africans intensifies, the puppets and stooges do as they are ordered, while others are satisfied with empty gestures. But the revolutionary path is unchanged, as Ajamu Baraka explains in his observations of the current moment.
1) The term “Black Misleadership Class,” was a popularization by the late Bruce Dixon in the pages of Black Agenda Report (BAR) of a very serious concept rooted in an understanding of the class dynamics and structures of late or monopoly capitalism in the Western colonial/capitalist states and the neocolonial state relationships between those Western states and the still colonized world – albeit with flag independence. Within the West and particularly in the U.S., Bruce and the writers at BAR identified the professional/administrative petit bourgeoisie as the “Black Misleadership class.” Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral and others identified that same petit-bourgeois and aspiring bourgeois class as the “misleaders” in Africa.
2) Today the petit-bourgeois class, from Atlanta that is championing Cop City, to Haiti where it is opening the door to another violent assault from the White West, to the puppet states in West Africa threatening intervention against Niger, are the shameless servants to white colonial power. Targeting and overthrowing that class element must be seen as a central strategic target for advancing the global African revolutionary project.
3)Uncle Tomism functions at an international level. Congressmen Hakeem Jeffries and Gregory Meeks, and Vice President Kamala Harris are all buck dancing Negros for white power.
4) Rwanda’s intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect U.S. and Western mining interests, support for the racist deportation of policies of the U.K., from which deportees from African are being sent to Rwanda, to the role that Rwanda troops were solicited to play in Mozambique to protect French natural gas interests, all make president Paul Kagame the biggest Uncle Tom, house Negro on the continent.
5) The one thing the current crisis is exposing and can never be completely reversed, is the class basis of state policies. That is why a working class based political challenge, even a social democratic one, would be deeply threatening to the capitalist dictatorship.
6) South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa sent letters of invitation to 70 countries for the upcoming BRICS summit in South Africa. Guess who didn’t make the cut – U.S., UK and France.
7) Even though President Ramaphosa can appear militant by not inviting key Western nations, his people will not forget that he caved to pressure from the white capitalist class in South Africa that was allowed to keep their blood money from centuries of exploiting Africans by essentially disinviting President Putin from attending in person. South African capital supported the demands from the West that Putin not attend because he is supposed to be a war criminal. Imagine that – Western nations claiming the moral high ground on international criminality.
8) How revolutionary is the call for reparations within the ongoing existence of a settler-colonial state? It seems like the way the demand for reparations is framed by non-radical liberal forces makes the issue deeply conservative.
The logic of reparations seems to depend on two things from Africans: recognition of the existing state which confers and affirms its legitimacy, even while demanding restitution or repair, and secondly and more contradictorily, the demand for reparations from the existing state creates a convergence of interest between the aggrieved group and the state to maintain the viability of the state in order for the state to be in a position to provide repair!
Even if the state conceded to the demand in whatever form agreed to – that is highly unlikely because African revolutionary forces don’t have the institutional power to force that concession from the state and if we had that power, we would be well on the way to overthrowing the state where real and substantial reparatory power would occur.
9) The responsibility of the revolutionary at the center of empire is to help to inoculate the masses against the crude propaganda that is still able to mobilize the multinational working class and colonized masses to embrace policies and a worldview that is counter to their objective interests.
10) Both bourgeois parties are involved in a systematic assault on democracy and human rights. The task of revolutionaries must be to defend democracy and struggle for people(s)-centered human rights as part of the transitional program toward socialist reconstruction.
11) For the U.S. and its Western allies, intervention in Haiti is not a criminal assault but a rescue mission even though the Haitian people said they don’t need to be rescued by the White West. What they want is for the “collective West” to stop interfering in their national affairs and respect their sovereignty.
12) After having set the stage for an armed intervention into Haiti because the Biden administration cares so much about Black life and democracy, the Biden administration searched for a Black face for its white power move on Haiti. For months it cajoled and threatened but it couldn’t find a state in the Americas region beyond the pathetic little mini states of Jamaica and the Bahamas willing to kill Haitians and die for the U.S.
13) Kenya with the help from Rwanda and the blessings of Caribbean Union (CARICOM), as the front organization, was selected to serve as the strike force for the assault on Haiti and the Haitian people. Both states were happy to accommodate and stated that they saw their role as the realization of Pan African solidarity, and, therefore, a duty.
And the response from the white left, the Black misleadership class and even some elements of the Black left to this expression of neoliberal Pan Africanism – crickets.
14) “Biden signs proclamation to honor Emmett Till with a national monument.” I can’t wait for the day when Black people reject any symbolic gestures from this settler state. We don’t want to be on your money, postal stamps and you can also take back Juneteenth but still give the people off on that day.
15) The opportunism and immorality of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is consistent with democrats who can't even call out the obvious racism of Israel.
16) Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, AOC, the squad, they all need to go. Anti-imperialists, the poor and working class have no representation in the fake capitalist democracy monopolized by two corporate parties. This is why I'm a socialist and committed to People(s) Center Human Rights and radical change.
17) We are supposed to go along with the fiction that Netanyahu is more than a white supremacist fascist and international criminal. Oh, and tell the Palestinians living under a brutal fascist occupation that you can't be a fascist and Jewish. Palestinians have human rights.
18) Before Anderson Cooper's discussion (interrogation) of Cornel West's stance on NATO and Biden's war in Ukraine, can anyone remember another anti-war voice being given space in the capitalist media at that level? But hey, in this Orwellian context we shouldn't be surprised.
Ajamu Baraka is Chairman of the Coordinating Committee 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.
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