MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Under Lock & Key is a news service written by and for prisoners with a focus on what is going on behind bars throughout the United States. Under Lock & Key is available to U.S. prisoners for free through MIM(Prisons)'s Free Political Literature to Prisoners Program, by writing:
MIM(Prisons) PO Box 40799 San Francisco, CA 94140.
Organizations in Occupied Turtle Island organizing under the label of
Palestine solidarity take various tactics and ideological positions. A
great portion of these efforts are negative, representing leftist
organization-building and guilt-soothing for populations who benefit
from imperialism.(1)
Still, there is much to be appreciated in Palestine solidarity
organizing. The fact that as a class, U.$. workers are wedded to
imperialism as a labor aristocracy(2) does not mean that select
individuals and segments of the same class, such as youth, immigrants
and members of oppressed nations, don’t have a righteous impulse to
rebel against genocide.(3) Further, drawing the line between practicing
manufactured discontent to gain social capital (for example, peaceful,
permitted and policed “solidarity” marches, or gathering social media
clout) versus genuine rebellion (involving significant self-sacrifice)
can be a difficult strategic question and a complicated moral matter.
It’s the job of communists to answer these questions, drawing those who
can be allied in a united front under the leadership of the global
proletariat.
In the United $tates, only small percentages of the country ever will
protest for progressive causes, and usually only a few thousand people
are liable to turn up at anti-imperialist protests, if we’re lucky. But
even this small size of protest crowds can be confusing. We see large
events put on in the name of helping Palestine and, ignoring the lack of
ideological unity required for such crowds, perceive that there is a
strong movement against genocide here. To move how? Against which
genocide? You’ll find that the larger the event, the less likely it is
for such questions to be answered.
Let’s examine one specific way this numbers game is lost among the
U.$. left. A very common protest narrative goes something like this: X
city/institution is partnering with Israel. That partnership uses funds
which could otherwise be spent “on our community” (healthcare, jobs,
public resources). Therefore, we must divest from Israel and invest back
into “our community”. The messaging behind agitational work tells the
organizers, audience and onlookers at protests the purpose and goals of
the work: they represent the ideology pushing our practice forwards.
Here, this oft-repeated messaging about divestment explains that
everyone should join the cause to reclaim what is theirs from an immoral
misappropriation.
This narrative about redirecting resources away from genocide and
towards “community” can be found in endless settler-left slogans such as
“build more schools, not bombs!” or “money for jobs and education, not
for war and occupation!” All such ideas revolve around the mythos of the
Amerikan “community”: a fictitious multi-national concept in which,
abstracted from the violence at the base of the Amerikan colony and the
national conflicts therein, we can imagine harmonious and communal ways
of life involving sharing our resources. This imagination goes back to
the root of settler consciousness in Occupied Turtle Island which
imagines a “Thanksgiving” where the colonists shared food with the First
Nations rather than poisoning, raping and murdering them by the
millions.
An almost identical narrative is wielded by referencing the “tax
dollars” spent on Palestine-solidarity campaigns’ targets, begging
Amerikans to rise up against a supposed misuse of money which is
otherwise rightfully owed to them. This relies on the same conceptual
basis as a “community.” If we believe this narrative then absent
specific policy mistakes (such as funding Israel) there would exist the
basis for peaceful redistribution of the spoils of genocide and
imperialism, and this would be a righteous redistribution. At the base
of these common yet mistaken ideas are 1) a genuine impulse towards
fascism by U.$. citizens who wish to become even more wealthy compared
to the Third World, and 2) ignorance regarding the source of global
wealth disparity to begin with.
We cannot resolve #1, the fascist impulse among a majority here,
without overturning imperialism and settler-colonialism entirely. To
address #2 however, we can study how “communities” in Occupied Turtle
Island are literally built and sustained off of genocide, slavery and
imperialism, especially regarding the “average jo.” There are two main
groups in the United $tates: the settlers and the oppressed nations.
Euro-Amerikan settlers have been a consistently reactionary group for
the past five centuries as their life here is founded on slavery and
land theft.(4) They are the numeric majority of the U.$. population and
have consistently subjected the First Nations, New Afrika and the
Chican@ nation with oppressive, genocidal campaigns.(5)
These oppressed nations on the other hand vacillate between
progressive and regressive tendencies depending on proximity to the
spoils of imperialism. Independence movements among oppressed nations
represent a progressive impulse wishing to sever connections with U.$.
imperialism, whereas participation in DEI (Diversity, Equity &
Inclusion) initiatives, reforming political parties and redistributing
wealth to the oppressed nations represent an integrationist trend which
serves to either enlarge the (petty-)bourgeoisie of these nations at the
expense of their oppressed masses or incorporate swaths of the nation
into the capitalist-imperialist world system.(6) Overall there are
substantial parts of oppressed nations here who still face genocide
while other portions steadily receive a bit more of the imperial
pie.
To the extent that anyone here enjoys it, the First World lifestyle
includes housing, food, medicine, transportation and extensive
leisure-time bought from the blood of indigenous peoples and
manipulation of global labor prices which under-pay workers in the Third
World and deprives them of basic necessities.(7) An over-accumulation of
profits in the United $tates has led to excess money supply and higher
domestic wages: the surplus available to create a complacent consumer
base beyond the settlers alone.(8) This is why wages here are
approximately 10x normal wages in Palestine. Thus while some U.$.
workers suffer under national oppression, they are almost all economic
oppressors of the Third World.(9)
So if we convince the majority here that they are actually
impoverished through imperialism, or would be enriched through its end,
we are misrepresenting the facts and tarnishing the cause of Palestinian
liberation. When imperialism inevitably falls, internationalist forces
in the imperial core will probably be encircled by fascism: citizens
here attempting to cling to lifestyles and social roles which can no
longer exist, led by whichever elements of the bourgeoisie can rally
them around new extractive outlets to replace old imperialism. The
faster we can pull away from self-interested economic thinking here, the
faster we will eventually construct socialism. The more here who search
for their own best interest through the fall of imperialism, the longer
such a task will take.
United front work in the imperial core on behalf of the global
proletariat will involve grappling deeply with the labor aristocracy and
the settler nation. We must investigate this majority’s interests as
they unfold in street protests, unions, universities and even prisons.
We shouldn’t reject them wholesale: we should condemn their economic
gluttony while simultaneously uniting those who will commit to fighting
on the behalf of the international proletariat. We must educate each and
every Amerikan who will listen about how their wealth comes from
genocide and how their lives will change when imperialism finally
falls.
Having rejected the fantasy of an abstract, multi-national Amerikan
“community,” we could instead support the many progressive causes
belonging to the oppressed nations here who have suffered under genocide
like Palestine. But such campaigns must be specific in their slogans and
selection of organizing base, as well as how to relate to those with
varying proximity to imperialism. Connecting progressive campaigns such
as those against police brutality, which predominantly affects oppressed
nations, to Palestinian sovereignty is a righteous cause. Trying to
connect Palestine to the reactionary dissatisfaction of everyday
Amerikan workers, especially settlers, is a recipe for fascism and
genocide.
Notes: 1. A
Million Tiny Fleas “The Anti-War Movement that Wasn’t” Substack, Jun 13
2023. 2. Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb
2012, pg. 9. 3. The
Dawnland Group, “A Polemic against Settler Maoism”, MIM (Prisons)
website, June 2024. 4. Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the
White proletariat from mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb. 5.
Maoist
Internationalist Ministry of Prisons, “Proletarian Feminist
Revolutionary Nationalism” June 2017, pgs 96 – 108. 6. Labor
unions from oppressed nations integrating with settler and imperialist
labor unions is an important historic evidence of this trend. See:
Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from
mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb, pgs 152 – 174. 7. Jason
Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, Intan Suwandi,
“Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global
South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015,” Global Environmental Change,
Volume 73, 2022. 8. Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class”
Kersplebedeb 2012, pg 200. 9. Undocumented migrants, prisoners,
homeless people, and the chronically unemployed lumpenproletariat are
generally not economic oppressors.
Let The Memory of Marcellus Khaliifah Williams, A New Afrikan
Poet and Revolutionary, Reaffirm Our Commitment to the
Struggle
Marcellus Williams, also known as Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniel, was
murdered by the amerikkkan state on 24 September 2024. He was a proud
Muslim New Afrikan, a poet, an advocate for Palestinian children, and a
prison imam at Potosi Correctional Center. Despite a vast quantity of
evidence showing that Williams did not commit the crime of which he was
convicted -
“Williams was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery and burglary
in 2001 for the 1998 killing of Felicia “Lisha” Gayle, a 42-year-old
reporter stabbed 43 times in her home. His conviction relied on two
witnesses who later said they were paid for their testimony, according
to the Midwest Innocence Project, and 2016 DNA testing conducted on the
murder weapon “definitively excluded” Williams.”
The state nevertheless passed the decision, with the approval of the
Supreme Court, to murder him in cold blood.
Williams was convicted in 2001, by a jury consisting of 11 white men
and one New Afrikan. According to Al Jazeera, a New Afrikan
juror was improperly dismissed from the jury, with the justification
that they would not be objective.
Prosecutor Keith Larner said that he had excluded a potential Black
juror because of how similar they were, saying “They looked like they
were brothers.”
In a country that supposedly grants everyone the right to a “trial by
their peers”, the fact that a New Afrikan on trial for the murder of a
white woman was not allowed a jury of his peers – of New Afrikans –
makes it clear that amerikkka cannot be “reformed” into “accepting” the
New Afrikan nation, no matter how much surface-level anti-racist
rhetoric is in the media nor how many bourgeois New Afrikans are elected
to positions of power. For skewing Williams’s jury towards white men the
judge would owe blood debts to the oppressed nations and the proletariat
far greater than any average criminal under the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Ey was right about one thing – a jury of New Afrikans, of
Williams’s peers, would have been more likely than a jury of
white men to consider his innocence. That is why more than half of the
people with death sentences in the United $tates are Black or Latin@
according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
Williams’s conviction, for the murder of a white woman, shines
clarity on why it is necessary to have a proper analysis of the gender
hierarchy in the First World. The trope of a New Afrikan man murdering
or “raping” a white woman has been used to stir up the most vile
representations of national oppression ever since New Afrikans were
imported as a permanent underclass and oppressed nation, from Emmett
Till to Marcellus Williams. The rapidity at which the criminal injustice
system will commit atrocities against New Afrikans accused of violence
against white women makes it clear that the question of “gender
oppression” is far more tied up in national and class oppression than
pseudo-feminists would have one believe. Since time immemorial, the
oppressor-nation men and women both have been spurred into action by the
suggestion of a New Afrikan acting violently towards a white woman;
Williams’s case is no different.
“From 1930 to 1985, the white courts not only executed Black murder
and rape convicts at a rate several times that of white murder and rape
convicts, it executed more Black people than white people in
total.”(2)
Hours before ey was executed, the Supreme Court reviewed Williams’s
case, and denied the request to halt or delay his execution. This is
despite millions of signatures on a petition, and a great deal of social
media activism around the case. The righteous anger of millions was not
enough to save Williams’s life. True radicals, not reformists nor
revisionists, need to look past the idea of incremental reforms, of
politely asking the amerikkkan state to consider the humanities of those
it has deemed worthless. If the time and energy that had been put into
the (nevertheless righteous) cause of petitioning for Marcellus Williams
had been put into studying, organizing, and building towards a movement
of New Afrikan liberation, or towards an overturn of the amerikkkan
empire and its justice system, not only would Williams’s life have
likely been saved (as he would have been granted a true trial by his
peers), but the lives of many others convicted (wrongfully or not) of
crimes that pale in comparison to the crimes against humanity committed
by the First World bourgeoisie and its lackeys would have been saved as
well. Any justice for Williams can only be attained when we feed this
righteous outrage into such systematic solutions.
Many of the narratives from supporters surrounding his death would
have the reader believe that the only reason he was undeserving
of death was his lack of culpability. Undoubtedly, the murder of an
innocent man is something that will tug at the heartstrings of many, and
can be used as an agitational opportunity. But as communists, we
recognize that the use of the death penalty by the bourgeois state, and
especially a jury of euro-amerikans deciding the fate of a New Afrikan,
is always murder. So too are the deaths of New Afrikans at the
hands of the police; so too are the deaths of the Third World
proletariat by starvation, natural disaster, or oppression by
paramilitaries serving as U.$. attack-dogs. Whether or not Williams was
guilty of his crime, whether or not the hundreds of others on death row
are innocent, the system will never prosecute those who uphold the world
order that leads the oppressed into a life of crime, will never order
the lethal injection of those with the blood of millions of
oppressed-nation proletarians on their hands.
Williams was a devout Muslim and served as an imam for those in
prison. The topic of religion has
been covered many times before in Under Lock and Key, but this
case serves as an example of how religion serves as a liberatory force
for many in prison – helping them to transform themselves, and to find
allies among all those fighting against amerikkka and the capitalist
system throughout the First and the Third World alike. Williams’s last
words were “All praise be to Allah in every situation!!!”; the author
sees this as an example of why, rather than condemning religion as some
pseudo-“Maoists” and chauvinists will do, we recognize religion to be,
as Marx explained, the sigh of the oppressed people. Islam brought
Williams a sense of comfort and cosmic justice as he headed to his
death, without keeping him from organizing and speaking out against the
moribund and oppressive priSSon sySStem.
Let Marcellus Williams’s death remind all of us that this country’s
injustice system doesn’t care how much people protest, or petition.
Ultimately, polite pleas to higher authority will go ignored. The only
thing that will keep such high-profile injustices like this, as well as
the more covert violence against New Afrikans and other oppressed
nations, from happening again, is freedom from the amerikkkan state, won
through struggle and revolution. And we must remember, unlike so many of
the liberal activists who took up this cause, that we fight for
Marcellus not only because the evidence shows he has a higher chance of
being innocent than most people on death row, but because the oppressive
and racist amerikkkan empire should not have the right to decide whether
a single New Afrikan lives or dies.
Williams’s poetry is a beautiful and striking example of
proletarian-internationalist art, in how it captures the revolutionary
consciousness of New Afrikans in the United $tates, and in how it draws
the link between New Afrika and Palestine.
Communists among demonstrators protesting the murder of Nasrallah by
I$rael in Sidon, in southern Lebanon
28 September 2024 – Protestors gathered across the world to mourn the
killing of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a founding member and leader for 32
years of Hezbollah (the Party of God) in Lebanon.(1) We know some
readers in U.$. prisons will be mourning as well. Nasrallah was the
strongest anti-imperialist voice among world leaders for a generation.
And the recent killings of Lebanese and Palestinian political leaders
have been significant victories for I$rael, at least in the
short-term.
Over 1,000 people have been killed, including Hezbollah’s top
leaders, and 6,000 injured by a series of attacks by I$rael on Lebanon
in the last couple weeks. These included exploding pagers and
walkie-talkies, as well as massive bombing strikes. Amidst these
attacks, the Communist Party of Lebanon has called for national unity to
focus on fighting I$rael, at a time when Lebanon faces its own crisis in
government. They pledged to not let I$rael (and the United $tates, we’d
add) separate the struggle of Lebanon in support of the Palestinian
struggle.(2)
Hezbollah, however, has been the lead party defending Lebanon and
Palestinians from I$rael for decades. They have proven there is still a
progressive role for bourgeois forces to play today, even in our
highly-developed imperialist world.
Nasrallah had a clear analysis of U.$. imperialism:
“America itself is the decision maker. In America, you have the major
corporations; you have a trinity of the oil corporations, the weapons
manufacturers and the so-called ‘Christian Zionism.’ The decision making
is in the hands of this alliance. ‘Israel’ used to be a tool in the
hands of the British, and now it is a tool in the hands of America.”
The Samidoun Palestinian prisoner solidarity network commented on
Hezbollah’s role in the liberation of political prisoners of I$rael:
“Sayyed Nasrallah’s leadership and struggle was also directly
connected to the prisoners’ movement and the liberation of the prisoners
of the Zionist regime. From the liberation of Khiam prison by the
victorious Lebanese resistance in 2000, liberating the torture dens of
the occupiers and their collaborators and turning it into a museum of
honour for those who struggled and sacrificed there, to the repeated
prisoner exchanges achieved by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Resistance,
including the 2004 prisoner exchange, which liberated 400 Palestinian
prisoners as well as 23 Lebanese, five Syrians, three Moroccans, three
Sudanese, one Libyan and one German-British prisoner jailed by the
Zionist regime. These exchanges, in which Sayyed Nasrallah himself
played a major role, illustrated once again that the only viable
mechanism available to liberate the prisoners in occupation jails is to
liberate the land and to achieve an exchange.”(3)
Hezbollah arose from the 1982 I$raeli occupation of Beirut. MIM
founders organized to oppose that 1982 occupation at a time when MIM was
just emerging.(4) The war in 1982 also forged the Joint
Leadership, in which the Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine joined
forces and attempted to further unite the Palestinian liberation
movement away from conciliation.(5) During the 2006 war between Lebanon
and I$rael, MIM condemned RCP=U$A, various alt media, and the U.$. state
department for attacking Iran and Hezbollah using gender.(6) In 2024,
the imperialists are circulating clips of Nasrallah making comments
calling for punishment for adultery and homosexuality. We salute the
“Queers for Palestine” in the United $tates who recognize the children
being bombed in Gaza and now Lebanon are a lot more gender oppressed
than any of us are here in the belly of the beast.
The history of the anti-imperialist united front in the region is
beyond the scope of this article. But the region has certainly
demonstrated the expediency of uniting classes on the basis of national
liberation to fight imperialist occupiers. Hezbollah has remarked in the
past that their alliances are closer to some Marxist groups than certain
Islamist groups. This shows the emptiness of those in the imperialist
countries who want to pit Marxism against Islam on principle. Nasrallah
also wrote that Muslims have the duty to provide charity support to any
Palestinian taking up armed struggle – Marxist, nationalist or any other
shade.(7)
A Hamas spokespersyn responded to the death of Nasrallah saying that
it will not make I$rael any safer:
“Is Israel’s problem with armed groups with limited agendas that can
be eliminated by killing their leaders, or with peoples who have rights
that they have been striving to achieve for decades and have not stopped
or surrendered despite the killing of many leaders? Has any resistance
group disappeared after the assassination of the leaders?”(8)
Despite these recent losses by the oppressed nations in the Middle
East, Hezbollah won the war with I$rael in 2006, killing as many
soldiers as I$rael did without all the civilian deaths caused by I$rael
in Lebanon. Just as the war on Gaza, one year out, has not been an easy
victory for I$rael, further escalations into Lebanon will certainly not
be either. Hezbollah and Ansar Allah (Supporters of God) in Yemen
continue to be the front line of the struggle against genocide in
Palestine and against U.$. imperialism in general.
You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the
revolution!
The New Communist Party of Canada [(N)CPC] was formed by the Kanadian
communist group Revolutionary Initiative (RI) in early 2024. The RI
announced the (N)CPC through the journal Kites which it
co-publishes alongside the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries
(OCR), a communist group in the United States.
In February 2024 the OCR Issued a “red salute” to the (N)CPC
containing mostly praise. In May 2024, the journal Kites
disbanded, explained with reference to the unique circumstances in
Kanada vs. Amerika as well as unspecified ideological disagreements
between the two organizations.
While unity between the (N)CPC and the OCR may have appeared
unprincipled based upon the latter’s criticism of the former, this
polemic argues that they shared a rejection of two crucial political
lines: the labor aristocracy thesis and the significance of national
liberation struggles. To support these claims, first the Dawnland Group
examines the (N)CPC’s political program followed by the OCR’s response,
each published in Kites.
(N)CPC says natives
should ally with settlers
It is difficult to separate the influence of Trotskyism from its
settler-colonial baggage and the (N)CPC demonstrates this truth well.
The Political Program of the New Communist Party of Canada
opens with the (N)CPC’s two “innately linked” objectives: “a) establish
working class rule in the economic and political spheres of Canada; and
b) Usher in a new, non-colonial, equal and fraternal type of relations
between all nations which today remain forcefully and unequally united
within the Canadian state.”(1)
Alone, the second objective is agreeable. But the (N)CPC clarifies
how these two goals are interlinked, writing that neither “is likely to
be achieved in a lasting, meaningful way without the other.
Working-class power without national liberation and national equality
would have to be built on an illegitimate, coercive basis. National
liberation without working-class power would mean a mere reform of
Canadian law, or else create powerless statelets that would fall prey to
any of the multiple imperialist powers contending for domination and
survival in the world today.”
Despite claiming that equality and national liberation are necessary
for indigenous peoples, the (N)CPC supports this only conditionally,
demanding “working class” power come first. Charitably interpreted, the
(N)CPC can be read as considering the “proletariat” of indigenous
nations to be an important aspect of the Kanadian “working class”. In
any case, considering settlers proletariat as (N)CPC does, this would
make the Kanadian “working class” overwhelmingly settler.
Support of indigenous sovereignty contingent upon prior proletarian
revolution renders this support meaningless. Thus, when the (N)CPC
claims that “the only conceivable way to resolve the separate legal
status of Indigenous people without liquidating Indigenous nations as
legal entities is collective rights under the banner of the full right
to self-determination, up to and including secession” and the necessity
of “upholding of the right to secede by popular referendum for all
component republics of the Multinational Socialist Confederacy;” their
conditions render these rights null until proletarian revolution.
National Liberation is a value as much as a strategy. All peoples
have the right to autonomy and self-determination and these rights must
be supported without regards to the opinions of settlers.
Beyond values there are strategic concerns. This “alliance” is
directly risking the sustained colonization of indigenous groups by
“socialist” settlers. The Israeli Kibbutz movement historically
purchased lands form Arabic landlords, where they would evict
Palestinian tenants in order to create “communes.” Despite Kibbutzniks
being considered “left wing” and “socialist,” their settlements encircle
the Gaza strip and they have been used to condemn the October 7
resistance operation (2), the newest stage of the Palestinian national
liberation war. Here the Israeli “working class” has achieved power and
constitutes the main foot-soldiers of genocide. Demanding working class
power in exchange for indigenous sovereignty also neglects the inverse
possibility that national liberation of colonies will be prerequisite
for overthrowing the bourgeoisie.
As addressed in A
Polemic Against Settler “Maoism”, settlers have an inherently
reactionary class role.(3) While isolated settlers reject this role, the
vast majority occupy indigenous lands, stealing their resources and
cheap labor. The basis of settler-colonialism has never been a deceitful
bourgeoisie but their transparent alliance with settlers:
former-proletariat, offered petty-bourgeois class positions through the
redistribution of land acquired through theft and genocide. The (N)CPC
is wrong that the bourgeoisie is the only force standing in-between the
settler-workers and decolonization, and that through “excluding the
monopoly bourgeoisie from this process entirely,” Kanada can negotiate
more just treaties with the First Nations. Settlers are not deceived
by the capitalists against their better interest – a supposed alliance
with the indigenous masses. Settlers assume such a class role because,
with respect to the capitalist mode of production, it is their best
interest.
Settlers are knowing, willful participants in genocide as part of a
bargain with those capitalists in exchange for a petty-bourgeois class
position.(4) This is their best material interest as a class permitted
to escape proletarian existence through conquest. The bargain between
settlers and their bourgeoisie is not conceived via ignorance or
deception, it is the rational consequence of pursuing one’s material
interest within class society: ascension up class and/or national
hierarchy to positions of greater wealth and culpability in
oppression. Settlers fill niches where the bourgeoisie wishes to
expand private property and commodity production, dispose of surplus
populations and compete with other imperial powers. In exchange for
exterminating the original inhabitants, settlers are allowed free reign
of the land and resources of the dead.
There may be a more subconscious belief involved in apologizing for
settlers and manufacturing their innocence, namely that, although
settlers are indeed rationally pursuing their material interests, this
betrays their human interest to live in a world without
exploitation, and that communists can win over the masses of settlers to
this superior moral position.
As discussed in the Polemic Against Settler “Maoism”, there are
important differences between classes and individuals. It is possible to
successfully appeal to the morals and internationalist sentiments of
certain individuals from each class and nation. This will vary wildly
depending on the individual in question and their background. But at the
macro-level, only oppressed nations and classes have the material
interest in a world without oppression which has historically been
wielded to make revolution. Settlers are oppressors. As Black Liberation
Army soldier Assata Shakur famously says, “Nobody in the world, nobody
in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral
sense of the people who were oppressing them.” The (N)CPC suggests just
that failed strategy.
While morals are required to undertake communist revolution, morals
can never be abstracted from their class context. Settler morals,
including the belief that settlers’ working conditions are more
important than indigenous rights, were created with the rise of
capitalism in Europe whose surplus proletarian population was offered
overseas class roles similar to that of Auschwitz guards. The Nazis’
thirst for lebensraum, which slaughtered millions of Jews and Slavs
during the holocaust, was directly copied from manifest destiny and the
treatment of indigenous peoples on Occupied Turtle Island where between
10 and 15 million were murdered (5).
In their first few paragraphs of published writing the (N)CPC have
downplayed the Kanadian “worker” role in ongoing genocide of First
Nations, manufacturing a myth of innocent, deceived settlers. Further,
they dictate the terms of national liberation to the indigenous
communities of Canada in service of the more important “proletarian
revolution.” This is settler “Marxism” and Trotskyism.
Trotskyists believe that third-world revolutions are doomed to
failure without the aid of the more “advanced” proletariat of the
western nations, that socialism is not possible within one country. The
ideas are best summarized by the man himself, discussing how:
“A backward colonial or semi-colonial country, the proletariat of
which is insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantry and take power,
is thereby incapable of bringing the democratic revolution to its
conclusion. Contrariwise, in a country where the proletariat has power
in its hands as the result of the democratic revolution, the subsequent
fate of the dictatorship and socialism depends in the last analysis not
only and not so much upon the national productive forces as upon the
development of the international socialist revolution.”(6)
Thus, even if a colonial or semi-colonial country managed to seize
state power, it would fail if international “proletarian” revolution did
not quickly follow. This was as true for Trotsky in the USSR as it later
became for him in China, where he argued with extremely poor foresight
that alliance with the Koumintang had defeated the revolution and that
instead “permanent revolution” was necessary to liberate China.(7) To
the Trotskyist, the proletariat of these nations is insufficiently
numerically developed to lead a revolution. They forget the fact that no
(western) European nation – those initially with the greatest industrial
proletariat – has ever waged a successful struggle for state socialism,
and the fact that third-world national liberation struggles have
accomplished the most significant strategic advances towards communism
in history. Finally, as covered below, most of the populations in core
imperialist countries are labor aristocrats who hold petty-bourgeois
class positions despite receiving wages: they won’t be leading
revolution anytime soon.
Trotskyism is pervasive in Amerika and Kanada. Even without reference
to Trotsky, without explicit statements of the inferiority of national
liberation struggles, it is still perfectly possible for
“Marxist-Lenninist” and “Maoist” groups to uphold Trotsky’s ideas
through organizing settlers of an oppressor nation instead of organizing
the oppressed.
As discussed in the Polemic against Settler-Maoism, settler “maoism”
and Trotskyism share certain chronology with regards to national
liberation, another characteristic of belief that proletarian revolution
takes priority. The (N)CPC believes socialist revolution will
precede national autonomy for indigenous peoples:
“The only way to cut the proverbial Gordian knot is for the
Indigenous national struggle to link up with the proletarian struggle
for socialism in overthrowing the extant Canadian State. Once it
is overthrown, new agreements can be reached over the use of land,
resources and their sharing between nations. True sovereignty
can be enshrined in a new, multinational constitution. This sovereignty
can ensure full, distinct national rights without the need for
any”Indian status,” which would be replaced by full citizenship in a
sovereign nation. Full independence can be achieved by those
nations who want it and have the resources needed to sustain
it.” (Bold ours)
There are no legitimate “agreements” between settlers and indigenous
peoples, because the settlers have used genocide and theft to acquire
their negotiating assets. This is why DLG advocates for the Joint
Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Oppressed Nations, which will
enforce the will of the oppressed nations at the expense of the
imperialist and settler nations, such as the Amerikan and Kanadian
nation, a process involving extensive redistribution of land and
resources as well as peoples’ tribunals for criminals against humanity.
Finally, the notion that settlers can decide if indigenous nations
“want” or are “ready” for independence, has been used by colonial powers
for centuries to continue oppressing their subjects.
There is a related issue throughout the (N)CPC political program of
advocating for a homogeneous Kanadian culture without the consent of the
indigenous peoples. Deciding autonomously on such a path long after
achieving independence and having received back all stolen land and
resources, plus some for interest from the settlers, would be a
consensual decision. Settlers should not be advocating for any such
cultural assimilation today. The (N)CPC writes that:
“The monopoly bourgeoisie and its State willfully confuse the
potential of Canada for its actual reality. Canada really could be a
brand-new type of country, one where national sovereignty is not the
preserve of a small parasitic class but is instead granted to the myriad
national groups that give it its rich cultural mosaic. We really
could all work together to preserve our respective cultures, develop our
economy in sustainable ways which benefit all working people, embrace
cultures and traditions originating from pre-colonial North America,
from Europe and now from the entire world. We could collectively take
everything that is old and make it into something new.” (Bold
ours).
Settlers have no right to advocate for the creation of international
cultures together with their colonial subjects. This reduces to an
argument for cultural integration which, in Kanada and the United
$tates, represents genocide through sterilization, kidnappings,
residential schools, and murder by colonial militias and police. Whether
or not they understand this, their language is overtly colonial,
advocating for assimilation and continued unequal relationships between
oppressed and oppressor nations. They need an explicit, unconditional
recognition of indigenous sovereignty or they are no different than
other settlers seeking to maintain unfair treaties with First Nations
without reparations or sovereignty.
The Dawnland Group (DLG) writes this polemic because the (N)CPC’s
understanding of indigenous sovereignty directly contradicts with DLG’s
support for New Democracy in Occupied Turtle Island. In 1940 Mao argued
that imperialism and feudalism prevented China from directly pursuing
socialism. Rather, New Democracy was required first, a dictatorship of
revolutionary classes over the country in order to liberate it from
outside domination, so that socialism may be constructed thereafter:
“The first step or stage in our revolution is definitely not, and
cannot be, the establishment of a capitalist society under the
dictatorship of the Chinese bourgeoisie, but will result in the
establishment of a new-democratic society under the joint dictatorship
of all the revolutionary classes of China headed by the Chinese
proletariat The revolution will then be carried forward to the second
stage, in which a socialist society will be established in China.”
To liberate China, the Communist Party led a united front with the
peasants, proletariat, petty-bourgeoisie and some national bourgeoisie
who sided with the communists against Japan in the war for national
liberation. Whereas in Europe, feudalism could be overthrown by the
bourgeois-democratic revolution due to the bourgeoisie’s antagonism with
the feudal mode of production, in colonies and oppressed nations,
imperialism is inclined to promote feudalism from without and thus a
broader united front is required. Despite the defeat of the Cultural
Revolution and the capitalist road taken in 1976, the strategy of New
Democracy liberated China from foreign domination.
Here Mao gives context as to how New Democracy applies to Chinese
conditions:
“Being a bourgeoisie in a colonial and semi-colonial country and
oppressed by imperialism, the Chinese national bourgeoisie retains a
certain revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain
degree… Since tsarist Russia was a military-feudal imperialism which
carried on aggression against other countries, the Russian bourgeoisie
was entirely lacking in revolutionary quality. There, the task of the
proletariat was to oppose the bourgeoisie, not to unite with it. But
China’s national bourgeoisie has a revolutionary quality at certain
periods and to a certain degree, because China is a colonial and
semi-colonial country which is a victim of aggression. Here, the task of
the proletariat is to form a united front with the national bourgeoisie
against imperialism and the bureaucrat and warlord governments without
overlooking its revolutionary quality.”
DLG views the application of New Democracy in Occupied Turtle Island
to mean that, in the oppressed nations, similarly to China, the
bourgeoisie may be an importantly ally in the national liberation
struggle. In the oppressor nations (Amerika, Kanada), not only is the
bourgeoisie entirely counter-revolutionary but this is true of the
petty-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy as well due to benefiting from
and carrying out imperialism and settler-colonialism.
Most bourgeoisie and rich peasantry in China were less wealthy than
the petty-bourgeoisie and much of the labor aristocracy today on
Occupied Turtle Island. The petty-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy of
oppressor nations in OTI have no great interest in being won over to a
communist cause, because most face no national oppression and are
bought-off from imperialist superprofits. Thus, DLG argues that the role
of the Amerikan/Kanadian communist vanguard is to treat these classes as
hostile and instead support the national liberation wars of the internal
semi-colonies and oppressed nations.
By contrast, the (N)CPC writes of the Kanadian situation that “an
Indigenous petty-bourgeoisie and intelligentsia have also been fostered
by the State as part of its counter-revolutionary strategy. The
revolutionary camp will have to cautiously navigate in building a class
alliance that unites the broadest interests of the Indigenous peoples
while isolating and struggling against these new reactionary classes.”
While imperialism promotes neo-colonial sections of each oppressed
nation’s ruling class who collaborate with the oppressor nation, the
(N)CPC is confusing this small segment of the indigenous (petty)
bourgeoisie with its entirety.
The (N)CPC argues the petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie of the First
Nations must be struggled against but the labor aristocracy and
petty-bourgeoisie of the settler nation are important allies to the
revolution. This is a paradoxical reversal of New Democracy, in which it
is inapplicable in the oppressed nations where it was designed
and synthesized successfully, and yet it is applicable in the
core imperialist countries where it has never been employed. Concluding
on their views about national liberation, the (N)CPC recognizes:
“oppressed nations’ right to self-determination up to and including
secession. But we do not content ourselves with this: we recognize that
given the way Canada has been built, total separation between
its various nations is likely to be counterproductive.
Therefore, we intend to build a new form of political and economic
unity, a multinational socialist confederacy whose component parts
are not arbitrarily-drawn provinces, but really-existing peoples and
nations…” (Bold ours)
They provide no explanation for why “separation between various
nations is likely to be counterproductive,” although this is a
convenient platitude for settlers who wish to have an input about when
indigenous people are “ready” for independence, as the (N)CPC indicated
above. It is historically illiterate of the complicity of settlers in
genocide and naive in assuming somehow this time things will be
different and the settler-majority will solve the very contradiction
that their class exists because of.
The (N)CPC pitch must be confusing for First Nations, who have been
systematically slaughtered, expelled and forced onto reservations for
centuries not by capitalists but by settlers pursuing their material
interests. By contrast, a vanguard among the settler nation would be
formed through a revolutionary defeatist position, unequivocally bent
towards the destruction of the settler class role through the
repatriation of land, resources and sovereignty to First Nations via
revolutionary national liberation war.
The small chance of a vanguard position emerging in Kanada and
Amerika will be squandered so long as Trotskyism continues selling
indigenous peoples the promise of new negotiations with the same settler
class that has been occupying their lands and seeing their genocide
through for centuries.
Making proletarians
from labor aristocrats
The (N)CPC writes that,
“comprised of all those deprived of the means to produce and forced
to sell their labour power to survive, the proletariat is the largest
class in society, forming somewhere between 60 and 65% of the
population.”
There are two crucial Trotskyist components involved in viewing
Kanada as 60% proletarian. First is the view discussed above that
settlers can occupy revolutionary class positions; that they can still
be “workers”. Second is the view that labor aristocrats who are paid
above the value of their wages through super-exploitation of the global
south can be proletarian rather than petty-bourgeois. These ideas
closely overlap because the labor aristocracy on Occupied Turtle Island
is mostly settler and the settler nation (Amerika/Kanada) is
overwhelmingly labor aristocratic, save for a tiny minority who fall
into the lumpenproletariat including homeless and prisoners.
Throughout their political program, the (N)CPC rejects the labor
aristocracy thesis. The (N)CPC views the three main contradictions in
the world as
“(a) between the imperialists themselves, which means the struggle
for the re-division of the world is always in motion, albeit to varying
degrees; (b) between imperialist countries and oppressed countries,
which means imperialist exploitation and oppression, and the struggle
for self-determination and independent national development; and (c)
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in each country, which means
class struggle and the potential for socialist revolution.”
Contradiction (b), an important mention, is suspect based on their
treatment of oppressed-nation struggles within Kanada as shown above.
Because of their use of the term “countries”, it is unclear if they
believe this imperialist/oppressed dynamic plays out among the nations
internal to settler-colonies. Contradiction (c) however is wholly
incorrect as in Kanada and Amerika, the proletariat is numerically
insignificant. The vast majority are allied to the bourgeoisie as
settlers and/or Labor Aristocrats, making class struggle minimal on
Occupied Turtle Island at the present time.
The (N)CPC disagrees. They write that
“Through the housing market an ever-growing portion of workers’
paycheques are transferred back to the bourgeoisie in the form of rent
or interest. Either enslaved to mortgages or rents, workers are often
one step away from the streets.”
The term slavery is best reserved for slaves, not home owners. The
view that swaths of workers are “enslaved” to their rent via landlords
is subjective, equally so to being “one step away from the streets.”
In Occupied Turtle Island, these terms are overused as much as living
“paycheck to paycheck.” In the imperial core where minimum wages are ten
times that of the global proletariat, where public services provide the
vast majority with water, electricity and transportation, it is
chauvinistic to discuss “slavery” to anything. The global proletariat
often choose between extremely limited and poor quality food and
housing, or earns too little for this choice, subsisting parasitically
or dying prematurely. It should be clear that the (N)CPC is attempting
to minimize the wages of imperialism paid to the labor aristocracy
through super-exploitation of the global south. The Polemic Against
Settler-Maoism and MIM(Prisons)’s
study on the housing market (8) are invaluable demonstrations of the
growth of the labor aristocracy in Occupied Turtle Island
throughout the previous half century.
The (N)CPC’s specific examples of the proletariat exemplify another
Trotskyist approach:
“At its core are those who work in natural resources, manufacturing,
construction, transport, and logistics — labourers at the centre of
capitalist exploitation. They are key to the revolutionary movement
not only by their large number – around 4 million – but
because they are the producers of commodities and wealth… those working
in industries which allow labour-power to reproduce itself over time –
chiefly health care and education – totalling approximately 4 million
workers… those working to facilitate the circulation of capital –
primarily workers in retail and services with about 3 million workers.
Without these workers the bourgeoisie cannot maintain itself in the long
run or realize its profit. Together with the labourers, these sections
of the proletariat, totalling about 11 million people, hold the
potential to establish a new, socialist economy.” (Bold ours)
Here is a typical Trotskyist confusion of the “importance” of a given
trade to the economy for the revolutionary potential of the workers
therein, which the (N)CPC states as the
“principle of workers’ centrality. That is, the principle that the
workers at the centre of production – and found in great concentration,
specifically, the labourers in large-scale industry and the health and
education workers in the major service centres – form the heart of the
proletariat and the main force for socialist revolution in Canada. The
Party must therefore, first and foremost, establish and build itself
within these workplaces.”
As discussed in the Polemic Against Settler-Maoism, this is a
Trotskyist obsession with numbers and a mechanical application of the
conditions of other historical revolutions onto the imperial core,
assuming revolutionary insurrection will play out along similar lines
despite the bargain of the majority with imperialism. This follows
Trotsky’s belief in a quantity of “advanced” “workers” in capitalism as
prerequisite for socialism, a condition missing from “backwards”
(oppressed) nations.
This opportunistic error leads to mass work among a numerically
enormous yet counter-revolutionary base who benefit from imperialism.
This mass-work is ultimately not communist because improving the lot of
labor aristocrats is important to the bourgeoisie. Social democratic
policies greatly expanding the labor aristocracy were implemented during
the 1930s and 1940s across western Europe and Occupied Turtle Island in
order to compete with socialism in the USSR and materially dissuade
workers from communist politics. This strategy succeeded and that’s why
only oppressed nations have led communist vanguards in OTI since; there
is next-to-no more economic exploitation.
OCR “Revolutionary
Salute” to Trotskyism
All should salute the OCR for criticizing a major (former) partner
organization. A complete assessment of OCR line and practice is far
beyond the scope of our discussion – perhaps impossible during a human
lifespan given their volume of writing.
Unfortunately though, they must be criticized for their unity with
the (N)CPC as well as what this demonstrates: deeper held agreements
with a Trotskyist political formation. This should serve as cause for
reflection and struggle for OCR membership and readers.
Lets begin discussing some strengths of the OCR’s Red Salute.(9)
Readers will have noticed the (N)CPC does not even claim to uphold
Maoism as the most advanced science of the proletariat and the OCR is
correct to criticize them for this, although it is strange the latter do
not require Maoism for joint publications with other communist groups.
All the same, their section on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
in the Red Salute develops many interesting criticisms of the
(N)CPC not addressed in this polemic.
OCR criticisms of the (N)CPC’s betrayal of the labor aristocracy
thesis and their failure to recognize the class nature of imperialism,
as well as pointing out the ludicrous idea of a 60% proletarian Kanada,
are all strong. We praise their criticisms that college-degree
occupations including teachers and medical workers are petty-bourgeois,
and their criticisms of economism and “worker centrality” are good.
Yet, despite acknowledging that they are not Maoist nor sufficiently
anti-imperialist in their class analysis, the OCR still issues a
revolutionary salute to the (N)CPC. At first this seems odd, given the
significance of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and mention of
labor aristocracy in the OCR Manifesto and within Kites 8.
Ultimately, DLG concludes that the unity of these two groups derived
from a shared lack of ideological commitment to national liberation and
the labor aristocracy thesis.
OCR’s soft Labor Aristocracy
thesis
Regarding the (N)CPC’s view that the labor aristocracy forms a mass
base for revolution, the OCR’s manifesto says those gaining from
imperialism in the United States include:
“the petty-bourgeoisie – people who own and operate small
enterprises or who possess skills and education that enable them to sell
their labor at a higher rate – as well as the labor aristocracy
and bourgeoisified workers, whose work is more proletarian in
character but who make substantial wages above what they need to survive
and have significant job security and health and retirement benefits…
However, among these middle classes and the ideological state
apparatuses and political institutions of the US, there is always
conflict and struggle with the bourgeoisie which at times becomes quite
acute.” (Bold Ours)
This concept is evident within Kites 8, the OCR’s most
significant work, an attempt to summarize all those communist parties
across U.S. history which they consider important. (10) They praise the
Revolutionary Communist Party(USA), saying that the latter “developed a
united-front-level program that addressed the key social faultlines of
the time and could unite, in a broad resistance movement, all those in
political motion who were objectively on the proletariat’s side of those
social faultlines.” Much like the (N)CPC, the OCR is claiming there are
segments of each class that can potentially be united to fight for the
proletariat.
Written by an OCR author named Kenny Lake in Kites #2, the
second article in the “Specter” series’s conception of proletarian
revolution is put similarly. Lake writes that:
“revolutionary civil war can only be initiated after the proletariat,
led by communists, has built up the organized forces for revolution
through a lengthy process of class struggle and creates and takes
advantage of favorable conditions for the launch of an insurrection.
The proletariat cannot do this alone, but must forge an alliance
of classes under its leadership by taking advantage of the conflicts and
struggles between the various middle classes and the bourgeoisie and
within the bourgeoisie’s ideological state apparatuses” (Kites
2, pg 36. Bold ours).
It is crucial to say that the proletariat “cannot do this alone.”
This is quite similar to the (N)CPC’s view of the petty-bourgeoisie, who
they claim is
“neither exploiter nor exploited…For a large part of this class, the
lower petty-bourgeoisie, living conditions are similar to that of much
of the proletariat…stuck between a rock and a hard place, we must win
this class to allying with the proletariat for a better life in
socialism. The proletariat must struggle to win them over under its
leadership in a united front against the bourgeoisie, as they can be
powerful allies, holding much influence in universities, trade unions,
media outlets, religious organizations and other such institutions.”
Thus, one explanation of the OCR’s unity with the (N)CPC despite the
latter rejecting the labor aristocracy thesis outright is because the
former hold a weak version of it. For the OCR, even though the
proletariat is the primary revolutionary class, the petty-bourgeoisie
and “various middle classes” still hold revolutionary contradictions
with the U$ bourgeoisie. As such, it may not matter if a struggle
revolves around the concerns of the proletariat or the petty bourgeoisie
or the labor aristocracy because there are advantageous contradictions
among each group.
It is true that actual oppressed classes and nations at times must
make alliances with others. The potential for progressive alliances
depends heavily on the class or nation in question. The OCR and (N)CPC
are misguided because the “middle classes” in Amerika and Kanada are
direct perpetrators of imperialism and settler-colonialism, and as
classes have conflicts with the bourgeoisie only over dividing
spoils.
National
Liberation and New Democracy on Occupied Turtle Island
As previously indicated, the OCR and (N)CPC “class alliance” theories
are an inverted application of the Maoist idea of New Democracy to the
United $tates / Kanada context, these countries being inundated with
settler-colonialism and labor aristocracy. Settlers have a
counter-revolutionary class position with regards to indigenous peoples,
and labor aristocrats have a counter-revolutionary class position with
regards to their nation’s imperialism.
The application of New Democracy to Occupied Turtle Island means that
revolutionaries in various nations have highly distinct
responsibilities. The Amerikan vanguard is distinct from that of
oppressed nation vanguards. The main role of the Amerikan vanguard is to
promote the formation of a Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the
Oppressed Nations through the national liberation struggles of colonies
and internal semi-colonies on Occupied Turtle Island. Amerikan
revolutionaries will not liberate themselves because they suffer no
oppression or exploitation.
By contrast, labor aristocrats within oppressed nations hold certain
revolutionary contradictions by virtue of experiencing national
oppression. Their class can be organized towards the goal of liberation
for their respective nation. This is true for the petty-bourgeoisie and
some of the bourgeoisie of oppressed nations in Occupied Turtle Island
as well.
The same is untrue in the oppressor/settler nation. The few
revolutionaries who form the oppressor/settler vanguard take a
class-suicidal position, sacrificing and attempting to destroy their
petty-bourgeois class through supporting external national liberation
struggles. While the OCR agrees with us on paper with the attitude labor
aristocrat and settler revolutionaries should have regarding
self-sacrifice, they are incorrect to search for revolutionary
contradictions between these groups and their ally-bourgeoisie. If the
alliance is in each party’s mutual interest, there can be no
contradiction.
As identified in the Polemic Against Settler Maoism, the labor
aristocracy has grown wealthier from the 1960’s until the 2020’s. This
signifies to all settlers as well as those from oppressed nations the
opportunity for petty-bourgeois life through rejecting revolutionary
struggle. As such, only a small portion of people from these groups will
constitute a revolutionary vanguard rejecting their class status, as is
demonstrated by the historical record in the U$ and Kanada which shows a
very small amount of communist revolutionaries. Compare this to China in
which hundreds of millions joined the communist party. The bases for
this difference were national oppression and exploitation in China.
The OCR praise the (N)CPC for having developed a “creative” solution
to national liberation struggles through a “clear analysis.” There are
important examples of the OCR qualifying their belief in the
significance of national liberation struggles such that this praise
accords. In Kites 8, they write that:
“Labeling oppressed nations and nationalities in the US as internal
colonies, while morally justified, does not provide the analytical
foundation for such a strategy and program, instead suggesting separate
struggles to liberate each ‘internal colony’ perhaps linked by
solidarity and a common enemy. The “internal colony” analysis fails to
grasp that there is a multinational proletariat in the US,
disproportionately made up of people of oppressed nation(s) and
nationalities but also including white proletarians, which brings
together people of different nationalities who have a common class
interest and similar but variegated experiences of exploitation and
conditions of life, that is in the strategic position, as a
class, to lead the revolutionary overthrow of US
imperialism.”(11)
Submerging the national struggles of all oppressed nations into the
primary “multinational proletarian” struggle is a recipe for Trotskyism,
especially when combined with the implication that some whites hold
revolutionary class positions. It makes struggling with Trotskyist
groups such as the (N)CPC impossible. Having demoted national liberation
struggles compared to “multinational proletarian revolution”, how could
the OCR disagree that class struggle is more significant?
Despite their affirmation of the right of separate nations to their
own revolutionary organizations, OCR says that this trend
ideologically
“strengthened revolutionary nationalism and weakened the potential
hegemony of the communist world outlook over the growing revolutionary
movement. Practically, it meant that the best of the Sixties generation
were in separate organizational structures rather than combining their
strengths and debating out the crucial questions before the
revolutionary movement within one united democratic centralist
structure.”
This echoes the (N)CPC’s claim that it would likely be
“counterproductive” to have separate vanguards for First Nations,
despite the strong risk that white chauvinism will corrupt the formation
of a vanguard party as the OCR documents having happened to the
Communist Party(USA) and the Revolutionary Communist Party(USA) within
Kites 8.(12)
Towards the end of Kites 8 the OCR writes how US revolution
could hinge on developments in nations like Puerto Rico, the Dominican
Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, other Caribbean nations as well as countries
in Central and South America. They write that
“To maximize potential for revolutionary spillover, a communist
vanguard must carry out political work among the immigrant populations
in the US from the countries in question and link the struggles in their
homelands with the struggle in the diaspora.”
While we agree with the attention necessary towards these oppressed
nations, their value is not about “spillover” but about the necessity of
destroying imperialism before proletarian revolution can happen
on Occupied Turtle Island. Until this time, there will be almost no
proletariat whatsoever, but rather a mass of bought-off labor
aristocrats, even among the oppressed nations. The toppling of
imperialism and settler-colonialism will break the class basis for the
labor aristocracy and shift the tide in the favor of a Joint
Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Oppressed Nations (JDPON). This
would allow the return of all First Nation lands and resources alongside
reparations for all internal semi-colonies. At such point, Amerika would
no longer be living parasitically from the Third World or oppressed
peoples and the class base of bought-off settlers and labor aristocrats
would disappear.
Conclusion
That the two organizations co-published Kites for over three
years and the disagreements we discuss above go unmentioned by the
(N)CPC raises the question if some aspects of their theoretical line
were discarded during party formation. As much is particularly suggested
by the Spectre series – originally published by Revolutionary
Initiative (RI), precursor to the (N)CPC – where a version of the Labor
Aristocracy thesis is employed to study the United States class
structure and locate the US proletariat.
It is the responsibility of the communist movement, particularly in
the imperial core where socialists far and wide are attempting to win
over the labor aristocracy, to establish firm boundaries of cooperation.
Although there is not a single correct method to determine such
boundaries, those claiming to be vanguard formations owe it to the
global proletariat to establish them transparently. Unity between groups
who supposedly disagree about fundamental principles is irresponsible
and deeply confusing to the masses. Here it raised the questions: how
did the RI and OCR cooperate for years to publish Kites without
struggling out some of these differences? Did the (N)CPC’s formation
include a (faction-based) ideological drift the OCR was not aware of? If
not the labor aristocracy thesis, Maoism or the importance of national
liberation, what is the basis for unity with the OCR?
Ultimately, we can only conclude that neither group considers these
lines dividing. Despite everything worth praise from the OCR and the
journal Kites, they need to develop higher ideological
standards and more explicit ideological lines. Although their recent
disassociation from the (N)CPC may be a positive change, the OCR must
allow no further opportunistic alliances to fester, internal or
external. Finally, they should struggle with DLG ideologically and
engage with the critiques we’ve laid out here.
Our movement sees the contradiction between internal semi-colonies
(New Afrikan/Black Nation, First Nations, Chican@s, Puerto Ricans,
Hawaiins) and the Amerikan oppressor nation as the principal
contradiction in the United $tates. In practice that means if we want
change, we need to push this contradiction to its conclusion. However,
in the years that MIM(Prisons) has existed, we’ve seen that
contradiction to be at a relatively low level, historically speaking.(1)
Since we don’t have things like armed struggle today to assure us of
this contradiction, a recent Pew Research study provides us with some
reassurance that the national consciousness of New Afrika is alive and
well.(2)
The survey showed that 74 out of 100 Black people in the United
$tates believed the prison system was designed to hold Black people
back. It asked this question for numerous state institutions, with
slightly lower levels of agreement. Another question in the survey
showed 69% of respondents feel that being Black is important to how they
feel about themselves. The latter question demonstrates a level of
national consciousness, even if most respondents would call it “race”.
The distrust in the U.$. government places this national consciousness
in conflict with Amerika and its institutions.
It’s worth noting that the results were pretty consistent along
demographics of age, income, education, sex. The biggest predictor for
not agreeing that the government is holding Black people back is being a
Republican – but even then the majority agreed.
This survey got more attention in the press because it was originally
framed as demonstrating that most “Black Americans” believe “racial
conspiracy theories.” Pew Research responded by amending the language in
the report, and they provide historical examples of the U.$. state using
these institutions against Black people. To view such beliefs as
conspiracy theories is obviously telling.
MIM(Prisons) of course upholds the belief that the U.$. prison system
exists to hold back and repress the internal semi-colonies and control
the population in general. It is part of the system of maintaining
national, class and gender oppression. Interestingly the survey also
showed 74% of Black people believing, “Black people are
disproportionately incarcerated so prisons can make money.” This, as
we’ve discussed extensively, is mostly
a myth. It might be harsh to call it a conspiracy theory, since
everything under capitalism is about money on some level. But we believe
the question of whether people are imprisoned for profit, or for social
control, is an important question for understanding the system and how
to combat it.
The importance of surveys like this from Pew Research is
scientifically investigating our conditions. Despite the fact that Pew
went into this survey with some clear bias around the relationship of
Black people to the United $tates, their resources allowed them to
survey thousands of people across demographics to give them 95%
confidence that their numbers are within plus or minus 2%. While
MIM(Prisons) has done a number of surveys over the years, even our best
did not have such tight confidence intervals. And to date our surveys
have been limited to prisoners, who are also mostly male. Therefore
bourgeois-funded surveys and government statistics are an important part
of our scientific investigation of our conditions. Transforming this
latent national consciousness in New Afrika into action is where
revolutionary practice must come in and deepen our knowledge of our
conditions.
Months after rebellions began in Kanaky (aka New Caledonia), fighting
continues against the French militias and colonial forces. In New
Caledonia, voting is restricted to families who have been living there
since 1998.(1) This is in order to establish the dominance of the
natives over the settlers in the voting system. On 2 April 2024, the
French Senate voted for an amendment to the rule which would allow
voting for anyone who has lived in New Caledonia for a continuous ten
years, on a rolling basis.(2) This triggered the resistance of the
people, as one Kanaky source recently reported:
“The toll of the riots since May 13 is very heavy: Nine people were
killed and hundreds of others injured, 200 houses burned or looted and
nearly 900 businesses closed. A first estimation raises the “damage” to
1.5 billion euros. More than 3,000 soldiers, gendarmes and police were
deployed there by the colonial State. Great victory for the Kanak
people: hundreds of French families made the decision to pack their bags
and leave the colony for good.”(3)
However, the struggle over voting rights itself has cooled as
parliamentary crisis struck France, and French President Macron
announced on 12 June 2024 the suspension of the proposed changes in
voting rights in New Caledonia. France is now focused on an emergency
election at home to try to prevent a sharp rightward turn in the
parliament and presidency.
[UPDATE: 7 July 2024 - Voters succeeded in
preventing a victory of the anti-immigrant Le Pen, but results leave
uncertainty in France as there was no clear majority.]
Background on Kanaky
For our readers to understand New Caledonia (home of the Kanak), we
might use a shortcut of thinking about Puerto Rico (home of the
Boricua). New Caledonia is an island near Australia and Aotearoa (aka
New Zealand) claimed by France with a history of brutal colonization and
imperialist domination. Europeans arrived in Kanaky in the late 18th
century, beginning the colonial period in which the natives (Kanak
people) were enslaved, sold, exposed to European disease, displaced from
their land and placed on reservations. After France gained control of
the area, nickel was discovered in the territory and the French
government began sending prisoners to extract the resource and settle on
the land. Ever since that time settlement has continued, though the
Kanak people remain the largest group.(4) The Kanak people have been
struggling for independence and liberation for generations, with recent
events reflecting the latest upsurge of resistance. In recent years, the
liberation movement has engaged in violent resistance to the sale of
their nickel mines.
As mentioned above, New Caledonia hit news headlines after France
proposed allowing all immigrants, including newer settlers, to vote in
elections on the island. On 15 April, tens of thousands protested the
bill, and on that same day the French National Assembly voted in favor
of it, moving it one step further towards being passed. In May, violent
protests of Kanak people were responded to with the arrest of hundreds
and the French deploying their armed forces to suppress the movement.
This deployment of forces starkly reveals the absurdity of a “free
choice” to be independent. As MIM said about Puerto Rico in 1998:
“The Puerto Ricans have tried for decades”to persuade” the United
States to leave, but only dictatorship (organized force) will settle the
question. Without the freedom to keep the Yankees out, the elections
only show what the Puerto Rican people will say with their arms twisted
behind their backs.”(5)
One of the major arenas of struggle has been the independence
referendum. There have been three of these in the past 4 years; in the
first two the option to remain a territory of France narrowly won (56.6%
and 53.2%), and nationality played a major role in the decision. Kanaks
generally voted for independence while the other minorities generally
voted for dependence. In the third, the independence movement boycotted
the referendum, resulting in a 97% victory for dependence, but the
turnout was only 43.9%, throwing its validity into question.(6) The
protests and riots in May led to the declaration of a state of emergency
(lifted after May 31) and the deployment of reinforcements from France.
Barricades were set up by independence protesters and, in earlier
reports, the clashes led to the death of two French Armed Forces
personnel and injury of over 54 police officers.(7)
The struggle for an independent New Caledonia is a revolutionary
struggle against imperialism. New Caledonians fight France, Palestinians
fight I$rael, and the oppressed here in Occupied Turtle Island fight the
United $tates, all in a united struggle against a common enemy. The
struggle in Puerto Rico against the corrupt government of Ricardo
Rosselló is no different. Puerto Rico was acquired by the United $tates
in the bloody wars of its ascendancy into an imperialist power.
Imperialism is the number one enemy of the self-determination of
nations, reaching its hands across the globe to squeeze every last drop
of profit it can find. The struggle of the oppressed nations, wherever
they are, is the number one weapon against this imperialist system, and
that weapon is ever more powerful the more the oppressed nations ally
with each other and fight imperialism as one. Puerto Rico has a history
of independence movements being co-opted by leaders trying to get a
slice of the imperialist pie. The movement for statehood represents this
tendency, while the independence movement is the movement for national
self-determination against imperialism. In both New Caledonia and Puerto
Rico, the referendums have shown the majority of the population voting
to remain a part of their imperialist occupiers in order to access
certain benefits, whereas the independence movement represents the
revolutionary opposition to national oppression and the upholding of
self-determination.
Kanaky Will Be Free!Palestine Will Be
Free!Puerto Rico Will Be Free!
This polemic focuses on writings and ideas from Revolutionary Marxist
Students (RMS) and Maoist Communist Union (MCU). RMS is a student group
focused primarily on education and organizing around college campuses
and MCU is a pre-party organization with more varied activities. Each
derive from a shared settler “Maoist” ideological tradition in the
United States concentrated on trade unionism and influenced by
Trotskyism. This paper focuses on their misunderstandings of
settler-colonialism, the national question in the United States and the
labor aristocracy. Let it be noted that ideological strengths in their
literature are largely omitted from discussion of these central
issues.
Theses
RMS/MCU ignores the national question in the US and misunderstands
settler-colonialism. This contributes to a pardoning of white settler
workers and acting as though their economic demands will not directly
reinforce imperialism and colonization.
RMS/MCU presents no explicit class analysis identifying and
demarcating the revolutionary from counterrevolutionary forces in
society.
RMS/MCU distort Marx, Engels and Lenin’s understanding of the labor
aristocracy to mean a small privileged upper strata of workers in any
country, rather than the majority of labor having been bourgeoisified
within the imperial core.
Palestine and Settler
Colonialism
The RMS Statement on the Genocide in Palestine is a useful
starting point for investigating the errors of this political
tendency.(1) There is much worthy of praise including rebuttal of some
imperialist propaganda and recognition of, considering Palestine, a
“need to keep up with future development and critically assess the
forces at play. Our primary role in the United States is to understand
and oppose our own state’s involvement in this genocide.”
However, given the importance of opposition to settler colonialism
within the Maoist theoretical lineage, RMS’s adherence to Trotskyist
interpretations of settler labor is unorthodox. In contrast to Mao and
Stalin, Trotsky believed that a socialist government in only one country
would be doomed to failure unless it found rapid new socialist allies
across the world: unless it was accompanied by a global “permanent
revolution.” As Trotsky says himself, “Without direct state support
from the European proletariat, the working class of Russia will not be
able to maintain itself in power and to transform its temporary rule
into a lasting socialist dictatorship. This we cannot doubt for an
instant.”(2)
This was not a view restricted to the specific context of Russia,
however. In the basic postulates beginning Trotsky’s The Permanent
Revolution, written in 1931, he writes that:
“Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the
class struggle, on a national and international scale. This struggle,
under the conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist
relationships on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions,
that is, internally to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars.
Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as
such, regardless of whether it is a backward country that is involved,
which only yesterday accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old
capitalist country which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy
and parliamentarism.”
The above-outlined sketch of the development of the world revolution
eliminates the question of countries that are ‘mature’ or ‘immature’ for
socialism in the spirit of that pedantic, lifeless classification given
by the present programme of the Comintern. Insofar as capitalism has
created a world market, a world division of labour and world productive
forces, it has also prepared world economy as a whole for socialist
transformation.
Different countries will go through this process at different tempos.
Backward countries may, under certain conditions, arrive at the
dictatorship of the proletariat sooner than advanced countries, but they
will come later than the latter to socialism. A backward
colonial or semi-colonial country, the proletariat of which is
insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantry and take power, is
thereby incapable of bringing the democratic revolution to its
conclusion. Contrariwise, in a country where the proletariat
has power in its hands as the result of the democratic revolution, the
subsequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism depends in the last
analysis not only and not so much upon the national productive forces as
upon the development of the international socialist revolution.”(3)
[Bold ours]
This Trotskyist conception that workers from the most advanced
capitalist nations must revolt to assist revolutionary struggles in
backwards, feudal and colonized nations is manifested in RMS’s theory on
Palestine. Like their theoretical forerunner, RMS incorrectly identifies
the friends and enemies of the international proletariat, but without
the excuse that the labor aristocracy was embryonic in Trotsky’s
time.
RMS claims to evaluate the “Hamas October 7th attack” – more
accurately, a counter-attack orchestrated by the resistance Joint
Operations Room groups(4) – in relationship to the supposedly more
“diverse strategy” within the Vietnamese, Chinese and Algerian
revolutionary wars. They claim Hamas is wrong to support a two-state
solution, without acknowledging that Hamas only supports the policy as a
temporary strategic measure.(5) RMS prioritizes “Israeli” citizens
through their critique of a two-state solution, claiming that “Only
through the implementation of one secular and democratic state for both
Israelis and Palestinians in place of the religious-fascist state
currently ruling over the region can this brutal apartheid come to an
end.” RMS misunderstands the inherently settler, counterrevolutionary
designation of “Israeli” which must be abolished alongside the zionist
entity in order for Palestine to be free.
Instead of abolishing the settler class role, RMS claims that “in
order to wage any sort of successful national liberation struggle in
Palestine, a significant section of the working Israeli masses would
have to turn against the apartheid state and link up with the
Palestinians” and that “Historical precedent proves the need for such an
alliance of both the colonized and colonizer working classes in ending
Apartheid, as seen in the South African example.” Here the term “working
class” obfuscates settler-colonialism by equating the class interests of
settler and colonized populations, ostensibly because they each receive
wages, ignoring their wages’ dramatically different quantities and the
fact that one group faces national oppression and the other constitutes
an oppressor nation. RMS also cites the numeric majority of “Israelis”
within Palestine to justify the need for an alliance between the two
groups.
Their singular case study with regards to settler workers cooperating
with colonized workers within a successful revolutionary movement is a
multi-national trade union struggle against apartheid in South
Africa.(6) As RMS writes, “historical precedent proves need for an
alliance of the colonized and the colonizer working classes in ending
apartheid. In South Africa, while less than 10% of the population was
white, an alliance with the working class of said population was not
only possible but necessary for the ending of the apartheid regime.”
While the above source which RMS references argues the significance
of the South African Congress of Trade Unions, it omits the
representation of various nations in the formation or the involvement of
white settler labor. Moreover, despite apartheid being “defeated”
national oppression amd segregation endures in South Africa alongside
the revisionism of the African National Congress.
RMS criticizes the Palestinian resistance militarily through
reference to Algeria, China and Vietnam, while the class compositions of
these nations’ struggles against colonialism and imperialism are not
considered. While no two cases are perfectly analogous, successful
liberation movements against colonialism and imperialism have been won
not through drawing from the sympathy of the oppressor nation “workers”
but through organizing the indigenous masses. Although no socialist
states remain today from 20th century revolutionary movements, victories
against imperialism in a multitude of socialist African, Latin American
and Asian governments during the late 20th century were achieved by the
(mostly) guerrilla warfare of the colonized populations, often fighting
in direct contradiction to enemy settler-labor formations. The Chinese
revolution, which Maoists uphold as the most significant advance towards
socialism, didn’t concern itself with the characteristic mineutia of the
enemy class; they opposed the Japanese occupiers – labor and all. What
is particularly alarming about RMS’s analysis of international settler
situations is the transativity of the analysis on occupied Turtle Island
where settler labor has directly led in colonization and genocide,
especially in the United States.(7)
In every revolutionary struggle, there are those who commit class
suicide and join the side of the oppressed despite their origins as
exploiters. Hence, a rejection of an “alliance” between the settler
workers and the oppressed nation workers must not serve as a mechanical
rejection of individual revolutionaries’ ability to transcend their
class origin. As a class however, settlers have never rejected their
class except when forced to migrate out of a colony by the revolting
oppressed.(8) With respect to colonized nations, settlers everywhere
form a reactionary, exploiting class.
Fundamentally, RMS misunderstands the class role of settler labor as
parasitic and antagonistic to the liberation of their country’s
colonized peoples. Settler labor is understood as the labor and
political organizations representing the class interests of the settlers
as workers – more wages, better work conditions, expansion of settler
lands, and access to resources. Class interests and the demands they
beget represent the improvement of the well being or wealth of the
respective strata. This is especially true within capitalism where the
potential of class mobility is present. No strata is without class
demands, and no labor formation is capable of completely shedding the
class demands of its composite strata as the purpose of forming labor
and political advocacy organizations within capitalism is improving the
lot of a given group, usually through struggle with employers or the
state. It is possible for segments of a strata to reject their class
demands but that is not what RMS is advocating for in the case of
settler labor.
What makes settler labor organizations reactionary is that the
settler class material interest is the dispossession of an indigenous
population, by which the settler class is afforded free land, cheap
resources, access to improved citizenship benefits as dividend from the
immense plunder of the settler bourgeoisie and the cheap labor of the
colonized who are relegated to reservations, often little more than
concentration camps. Settler labor organizations will seek to advocate
for greater dividends of the whole stolen wealth of the nation for the
respective spheres of workers for which they advocate. Conflicts between
the settler bourgeoisie and settler petty-bourgeoisie, including all
settlers who receive wages, do not arise because the state can increase
the levers of indigenous dispossession and genocide, creating settler
class positions for sections of the former-proletariat whenever the
possibility of class struggle presents itself.
This plays out in “Israel” as there are no trade unions, much less
nonprofits or “leftist” activist organizations struggling against the
zionist entity as a colonial project. Israel mandates that every
settler, except the ultra-orthodox, serve in the Israeli Occupation
Forces, learning to kill and hate Palestinians. Remaining are isolated
instances of military defectors and other peaceful protesters being
brutalized over even milquetoast objections to the scale or extent of
the occupation or specific massacres, such as those occurring in Gaza
currently. Settler labor as a class, and indeed the entire settler
population of “Israel” has yet to demonstrate revolutionary potential
and it is unfortunate that RMS excludes any criticism of this settler
“left” from their piece despite calling for the Palestinians to unify
with them.
Imperialism and the
National Question
The trade union movement in the US has historically concentrated
significantly on the labor aristocracy, which to quote Zak Cope:
“is that section of the working class which benefits materially from
imperialism and the attendant superexploitation of oppressed-nation
workers. The super-wages received by the labour aristocracy allow for
its accrual of savings and investment in property and business and
thereby “middle-class” status, even if its earnings are, in fact, spent
on luxury personal consumption. Persons who may be compelled to work for
a living but consume profits in excess of the value of labour either
through some form of property ownership or through having established a
political stake in (neo) colonialist society, may be bourgeois without
hiring and exploiting labour-power” (9)
Cope applies the concept globally to argue that within the OECD
working class – 38 European nations, Mexico (a more complicated case in
The Dawnland Group’s opinion), Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Japan
– there is no legal exploitation. Rather, Cope argues the first world
working class is recipient of super-wages comprised of wages for their
labor in addition to wages from the super-exploitation of the third
world which provides them with cheap commodities and shares of
imperialist profits. In particular, Cope notes the exploitative role of
the first world working class, writing that “where workers seek to
retain whatever bourgeois status their occupational income and
conditions of work afford them through alliance with imperialist
political forces, they can be said to actively exploit the proletariat.”
(10)
Cope calculates the value of super-exploitation through two methods,
namely international productivity equivalence, and
international wage differentials, assuming an international
equalized wage rate. Using these two methods Cope finds a combined value
transfer from the non-OECD to OECD countries of $4.9 trillion in the
year 2008 alone.(11) While a renewed study of imperialist value transfer
is necessary for US communists today, that is beyond the scope of this
polemic. It should suffice to observe that wages in gross disproportion
to the productivity of first and third world workers indicate an
exploitative dynamic benefiting one group at the expense of the other.
There may be challenges cultivating revolutionary empathy and culture in
the imperial core if working conditions and wages here cannot be viewed
in a global context and value transfer is not appreciated.
As recognized by Lenin, Marx and Engels, the global proletariat has
nothing to lose but their chains. This is a category of workers afforded
zero or next-to-zero wealth through imperialism. Formations such as MCU
and RMS refuse this definition because it would broaden the
petty-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy to include most of the
industrial workers who they consider the “revolutionary proletariat” and
dramatically reduce their organizing base within the imperial core.
The most acute struggles in the United States today are national
rather than based on class. The internal nations in the US show the
greatest sites of exploitation, oppression and direct, violent conflict
with the capitalist class. These are the indigenous protesting at
Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline, movement against the
murderous national oppression carried out through police and prisons,
resistance and labor organizing from migrants forced from their home
countries by imperialism, and rebellion among the literal colonies
retained by the US empire today in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. These
instances of struggle go beyond wishing for middle-class living
standards. Not only have they demonstrated increased levels of militancy
against the state, but the roots of these conflicts are irreparable
antagonisms against the structure of capitalism and imperialism which
necessarily go beyond economic demands and have not been placated
through the dividend of super-profits.
Maoist Communist Union (MCU) writing about politics in the United
States focuses on trade unionism and overlooks national questions.
Despite the manifold contradictions between nations on Turtle Island,
within their theory journals, Notes from a Conversation Among
Comrades on the George Floyd Protests: Lessons for Ourselves and
Beyond discusses the oppression of Black people but does not lay
out a conception of their struggle for national liberation or their
nationhood.(12) No other articles discuss national or even “racial” (a
popular but unscientific concept) oppression on Turtle Island, and their
extensive writing about Maoist formations from the Global South and
trade unionism in the US reveals that they view the US as simply another
country that can carry out revolution domestically by replicating Maoist
strategies from the third world. They are mistaken: different conditions
warrant different strategies.
MCU’s Some General Theses on Communist Work in the Trade
Unions exemplifies this view.(13) Ignoring national oppression, the
article instead finds that “in order to have a socialist revolution in
this country we must first develop a strong Communist (Maoist) Party
capable of leading a powerful trade union movement and of freeing that
movement from the domination of reactionary leadership.”
The chronology is important. If communists must first develop this
“Maoist” trade unionist movement, it means any organizing around the
national – or racial, according to language used by MCU – questions and
colonization are peripheral or secondary to this central cause. It
suggests communists might first unite the trade union movement and
later, if at all, use this militant union formation to liberate
oppressed groups within the country rather than working with these
groups as mutually constitutive of a revolutionary struggle, much less
prioritizing struggles of oppressed nations. In reality, organizing a
bulwark of settler labor will negatively impact national liberation
movements.
Instead of oppressed nations, MCU sees trade union aristocrats as the
US’s revolutionary masses. The core reference to the “labor aristocracy”
in Some General Theses is when the authors claim that “the most
secure and consistent base of the reactionary union leaders is the labor
aristocracy which is only a small subsection of the working class, and
in our day is not equivalent to the trade union membership as a whole.”
Having sidestepped an investigation of the various relationships to the
means of production, they claim that the “vast majority” of US trade
union membership is not a “reactionary base.” MCU overlooks an
investigation of total worker compensation including public and private
benefits, the means by which the labor aristocracy is maintained within
imperial core countries. Luxurious positions at the apex of global
commodity exchange and artificially high wages give labor aristocrats
wealth above the means of subsistence on which the proletariat must
endure, and doled out above the value created through their labor.
Without an investigation of international class relations, wages, wealth
and labor productivity it is impossible to determine where the
proletariat ends and where the labor aristocracy begins and ends, much
less between the proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie. It is thus
impossible to determine who the revolutionary masses are.
MCU claims that “A Communist Party must necessarily equip itself with
the most advanced revolutionary science, based upon a summation of the
whole of the proletariat’s revolutionary experience up to the moment in
question.” Despite this, MCU presents no historical summation of
“communist” work in US trade unions for the past 80 years that could
support their conclusion of the necessity or even possibility of
building a “Maoist” trade union movement in the US today. In tandem with
a thorough class analysis, a historical account of why an ideology finds
certain groups revolutionary or counterrevolutionary must be
established. If the US trade unions have not taken up any
anti-imperialist politics since before the New Deal era despite
consistent unsuccessful communist infiltration, what has been the source
of these failures?
In their more recent MCU and the Working Class Movement
summarizing the tendency’s recent organizing initiatives, the
aforementioned mistakes are repeated, particularly a failure to analyze
US classes, their only attempt at defining the proletariat being “the
only class that has an interest in communism as a class.” This is not a
definition. MCU does not scientifically demarcate the proletariat from
the non-proletariat. Their interesting commentary about the significance
of creating a “specifically proletarian line” around which all other
classes must be drawn is inapplicable to any context without an
accompanying class analysis.
Because of the labor aristocracy thesis, workers who benefit from
super-exploitation of the third world are not exploited, they are
exploiters. This entails that the economic interests of the vast
majority of imperial core workers are counterrevolutionary. Trade
unions, tenant organizing and other locally “progressive” economic
campaigns threaten to bolster standards of living and strengthen
citizens’ relationship with imperialism. More specifically, the labor
aristocracy thesis suggests there is no antagonism between first world
capitalists and their citizen labor aristocrats to begin with, the two
instead being allied in consuming value from the Global South.
(Mis)Identifying
the Labor Aristocracy and the Proletariat
To examine historical Marxist origins of the term “labor aristocracy”
as distinct from the proletariat, Marx, Engels and Lenin should be
studied. As written in the Maoist Internationalist Movement’s
Imperialism and its Class Structure in 1997:
According to Marx, the portion of society that is parasitic increases
over time: “At the dawn of civilization the productiveness acquired by
labour is small, but so too are the wants which develop with and by the
means of satisfying them. Further, at that early period, the portion of
society that lives on the labour of others is infinitely small compared
with the mass of direct producers. Along with the progress in the
productiveness of labour, that small portion of society increases both
absolutely and relatively.”
Despite the focus given to the labor aristocracy by Lenin, Marx and
Engels were the first to speak of the labor aristocracy of the colonial
countries. Even in Capital, Vol. 1, Marx speaks of “how industrial
revulsions affect even the best-paid, the aristocracy, of the
working-class.”
Engels in particular is famous for some quotes on England. Here we
only point to the quotes from Engels that Lenin also cited favorably in
his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. As we shall see,
Lenin’s approval and careful attention to the quotes from Engels on the
labor aristocracy are very important in his own thinking.
One of the clearest quotes from Engels as early as 1858 cited by
Lenin is: “The English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois,
so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming
ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy, and a bourgeois
proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the
whole world, this is, of course, to a certain extent justifiable.” We
should also point out that from Lenin’s point of view it was a matter of
concern that this had been going on for over 50 years already. Just
before expressing this concern, Lenin says, “Imperialism has the
tendency to create privileged sections also among the workers, and to
detach them from the broad masses of the proletariat.” Writing to the
same Kautsky who later betrayed everything, Engels said, “You ask me
what the English workers think about colonial policy? Well exactly the
same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party
here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal Radicals, and the workers
merrily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the colonies and the
world market.” Spineless Mensheviks internationally regret this blanket
statement by Engels. The more dangerous revisionists of Marxism are only
too gutless to say Engels was wrong while contradicting him at every
chance. The spineless flatterers of the oppressor nation working class
fear the reaction of the oppressor nation workers to being told they are
parasites. Likewise, these spineless social-chauvinists evade the task
before the international proletariat – a historical stage of cleansing
the oppressor nation workers of parasitism. This task cannot be wished
away with clever tactics of niceness.” (15)
Referring back to Some Theses on our Work in the Trade
Unions, MCU writes that “with the development of capitalist
imperialism, Lenin considered it was no longer possible to bribe such a
large section of the working class: ‘It was possible in those days to
bribe and corrupt the working class of one country for decades. This is
now improbable, if not impossible. But on the other hand, every
imperialist ‘Great’ Power can and does bribe smaller strata (than in
England in 1848–68) of the ‘labour aristocracy.’” Lenin’s claim flowed
from the reality that in 1916, imperialist world war had broken out and
large segments of British and German workers were re-proletarianized.
However, the era of inter-imperialist world war has since been
profoundly interrupted by over seventy years of peace in the core
imperialist countries throughout which the labor aristocracy to which
Lenin referred has grown. Lenin’s writing in Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917 the year after
Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, should be given
authority.
While MCU are correct to recognize the socialist NGO’s, revisionist
parties and capitalist rulers of most trade unions as class enemies,
these do not comprise the labor aristocracy, which instead is the wide
majority of bourgeoisified workers compensated with super-wages through
imperialism.
MCU writing of their conception of the labor aristocracy says that
“In the US, the ruling class has been able to bribe a minority
subsection of the working class for a long period of time. The height of
this bribery was likely reached during the New Deal era, but especially
since the mid 1970s more and more of the labor aristocracy has seen its
privileges severely eroded. We need to do much more investigation
however to determine more exactly how the labor aristocracy in this
country has changed over time, how large it ever truly got and how large
it is today.”
MCU seems to assume that decreasing wages relative to GDP since the
1970s has meant the decrease of the US labor aristocracy, but GPD does
not reflect global class relations nor wage differentials between
nations: “Through this negative account balance (though not only it),
the US working class is able to consume products which its labour has
not paid for. Global neoliberal restructuring has thus maintained the
privileged position of the core-nation working class relative to the
Third World proletariat, albeit on terms less favourable to the former’s
independent political expression than during the long boom of the 1950s
and 1960s.” (16) The persistence of the labor aristocracy despite
neoliberal reform can be measured through the significant increase of
homeownership,(17) vehicle ownership,(18) higher education(19) and real
weekly wages(20) throughout the country since 1960. Based upon these
statistics, MCU is incorrect to claim that the height of bribery was
during the New Deal era.
Clearly, MCU is using a different definition of the labor aristocracy
than Marx, Engels and Lenin because theirs is not based on bribery,
unequal exchange or surplus exploitation within the domestic “working
class” but entirely restricted to political roles among the
petty-bourgeoisie which exist regardless of the compensation of imperial
core workers in general.
Conclusion:
Impact of Faulty Class Analysis on Mass Work
A closer look at MCU and the Working Class Movement which
summarizes the formation’s recent work demonstrates the effects of their
ideological commitment to the settler labor aristocracy through their
focus on the US “industrial proletariat.”
Discussing some problems they had faced while organizing tenants, MCU
claims they were unable to “find and unite with the resolute fighters
among the working-class, raise consciousness amongst them specifically
and wider masses more broadly, and thereby…build up revolutionary
organization” due to “major ideological difficulties in developing
significant numbers of tenants into communists or even clarifying the
larger nature of the struggle beyond the immediate fight against
gentrification.”
They conceived of their task as creating a “united front of all the
class forces – workers, lumpen, petty-bourgeois – affected by
gentrification.” The following section bears quoting at length:
“In a confused attempt to make the central focus of this united front
still be the working-class, we specifically concentrated first on the
homeless, and then when we realized that was going nowhere we shifted to
tenants in public/subsidized housing – respectively perhaps the most and
second-most pauperized and lumpenized sections of the working-class –
despite the fact that we had studied and criticized the Black Panther
Party’s lumpen-line. We justified this by downplaying the degree of
lumpenization among these segments of the population and arguing,
correctly, that many of these tenants were still working-class. What we
did not consider was which segments and sections of the working-class
are most favorable to organize amongst.”
They discuss this line of work saying that
“Naturally, our efforts among the homeless and tenants bore little
fruit. We basically failed to make strong and lasting links with the
working-class, develop Communists from amongst the masses we were in
contact with, build sustained mass-organization, or sustain any
struggles involving substantial numbers of people.”
All of this led MCU to conclude a need to “proletarianize” their
ranks – through taking up industrial jobs, partly in an attempt to
challenge internal petty-bourgeois class tendencies and partly to make
more connections with “advanced workers.” (Recall Trotsky) Finally, they
list an outpouring of petty-bourgeois students into industrial jobs as
“incredibly promising” because they could numerically bolster a
communist party.
MCU quotes Lenin’s 1897 Task of the Russian Social Democrats
to show how it is necessary for US communists today to focus primarily
on the US “industrial proletariat.” MCU claims Lenin
“clearly puts forward that it was specifically the industrial
proletariat working in the urban factories that was the most advanced,
the ‘most receptive to [Communist] ideas, most intellectually and
politically developed.’ Lenin arrived at this conclusion because,
following in the footsteps of the rest of the European industrial
workers throughout the last several decades, the Russian factory workers
had proven themselves in practice to be the leading section of the class
during the waves of strikes in the 1880s and 1890s in Russia.”
MCU fails to discuss the difference in working conditions, wages, and
wealth between US factory workers and those of semi-feudal Russia.
Despite significantly basing their theory on Lenin they have failed to
consider the key ways workers in 21st century imperial core countries
differ from 20th century peripheral feudal workers; they fail to
adequately study imperialism. MCU’s first theory journal includes an
article titled Lenin’s Five Point Definition of the Economic Aspects
of Capitalist Imperialism and its Relevance Today, during which the
term labor aristocracy is never mentioned.(21)
Although it is later downplayed, MCU’s obsession with industrial
workers is perhaps best explained by this quote:
“Without a firm foundation among the industrial proletariat, and
without winning over the majority of the organized workers to a
revolutionary line, it will be impossible for the Party to direct a
general political strike across key workplaces and industries during a
revolutionary crisis. The general political strike is a key tool by
which can we paralyze the ability of the capitalist class to move goods,
troops, and military equipment. Alongside splitting the repressive
forces, paralyzing the bourgeoisie’s ability to run the economy is
essential for a successful revolution during such a crisis. Doing this
in key military industries – especially if, as is likely, the crisis
arises amid a significant war – undermines the bourgeoisie’s ability to
deploy repressive force to crush the revolution.”
According to this picture of revolution, industrial workers formed
the “leading section of the working class” during recent strike waves
because they have struck in the greatest numbers, to the greatest impact
on the national economy. Whereas US industrial workers overwhelmingly
only struck for a greater share of imperialist plunder in the last
century – such as when the recent “historic” UAW strike in winning mere
wage increases for the union and none else(22) – industrial strikes in
feudal Russia were far more frequently communist. Still, MCU’s strategy
is an essentially mechanical application of insurrectionist revolution,
derived from feudal Russia, to the US context.
The US is not an underdeveloped feudal country with only nascent
capitalism. It is the leading core imperialist country and has been for
over seventy years. It is the wealthiest nation in human history, and
has risen wide swaths of the population into allegiance with imperialism
and, at times, fascism based upon the material benefits of empire.
Revolution will be carried out by a minority-of-a-minority in the
country, not by a strike sweeping all sectors of the working class. Our
situation cannot be compared to that of the Bolsheviks.
Most charitably, MCU’s summation of tenant work can be read as the
belief that their chronology was incorrect: first organizing a communist
trade union movement will make work among tenants, lumpen and oppressed
nations far easier. Yet, this is still a narrow application of Bolshevik
tactics to 21st century US contexts. There are many reasons MCU’s tenant
and homeless mass work may have failed: ideological incoherence, focus
on labor aristocratic tenants, ignorance of the primary contradiction of
national oppression facing the masses, lack of a prior conception of
eventual revolutionary civil war around which to mobilize,
petty-bourgeois sensibilities among cadre, or even simple human error.
It is unreasonable to expect MCU to discuss these factors when they are
preoccupied with a nonexistent industrial proletariat, imposing models
from incomparable historical contexts.
MCU’s errors in mass-work and their shift towards “key industry”
organizing may seem like a simple error of studying one revolutionary
circumstance too much at the expense of others, as failing to apply
Marxism to the US context. While partly true, the better explanation is
a combination of opportunism – increasing numbers at the expense of
revolutionary vision – and a failure to prioritize class analysis.
Focusing on certain industries is important, but it fundamentally cannot
tell you about class within various industries, and it cannot replace
determining who the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces in
society are; “who are our friends, and who are our enemies?” to quote
Mao himself.
Focus on workers in specific industries is a strategic
decision likely to be prefigured by an ideological line. MCU has
established a line prioritizing Labor Aristocratic workers that
necessarily rejects the importance of national contradictions to the
revolutionary objectives on Turtle Island, and in doing so promotes
imperialism. RMS falls close behind in promoting an impossible
allegiance of the colonized nations with the settler working class. Each
organization takes part in a prominent tendency of US “Maoist”
organizations to follow Trotskyism despite its contradictions with
Maoism.
These are deeply troublesome trends. To organize the labor
aristocracy, to promote imperialism and Trotskyism is to do the enemy’s
work. The global proletariat is the only force which can make
revolution, and they are held back by settlers and labor aristocrats
alike. The longer communists on occupied Turtle Island fail to embrace
these positions, the further away a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Notes: (1)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227044053/https://marxiststudents.wordpress.com/statements/
(2) Zinoviev,
Gregory Bolshevism or Trotskyism. 1925 (3)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227044746/https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr10.htm
(4)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227044944/https://unity-struggle-unity.org/resistance-news-network-media-guide/
(5)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227045151/https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/hamas-2017.pdf
(6)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227045539/https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/congress-south-african-trade-unions-cosatu
(7) Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from
mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb. (8) See Haiti,
Vietnam, China, Korea, and even South Africa, where millions of
emigrating whites has driven many to re-settle in Israel (9)
Cope, Zac “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb 2012, pg. 9
(10) Ibid. pg. 175 (11) Ibid. pg. 200 (12)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227050314/https://maoistcommunistunion.com/red-pages/issue-3/notes-from-a-conversation-among-comrades-on-the-george-floyd-protests-lessons-for-ourselves-and-beyond/
(13)
https://mcuusa.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/mcu-theses-on-trade-union-work-2.pdf
(14)
https://mcuusa.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/mcu_and_the_working_class_movement-2.pdf
(15)
https://archive.org/details/ImperialismAndItsClassStructureIn1997_254/mode/2up
(16) Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb 2012, pg.
9 (17)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228014852/https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
(18)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228015215/https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/household-vehicles-united-states/
(19)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228015942/https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/
(20)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228015618/https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
(21)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228020932/https://maoistcommunistunion.com/red-pages/issue-3/lenins-five-point-definition-of-the-economic-aspects-of-capitalist-imperialism-and-its-relevance-today/
(22)
https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-contract-raises-pay-details-ford-gm-stellantis-2023-10?op=1&r=US&IR=T
i want to begin this writing by expressing sincere solidarity to the
surge of student activism in support of the Palestinian people and
against amerikan and israeli militarism and imperialism. If i could tell
the students who’re facing or will face charges in the empire’s courts,
i would tell them to keep in constant memory that no matter what they,
the empire, says or does you are not a criminal. i would tell them that
be careful to remember the righteousness of our cause and to remember
that they are not alone.
In every mass movement and organization there are varying levels of
socio-political consciousness and radicalism. Those who are neophytes to
the struggle should pay careful attention to the machinations of the
institutions of the empire. One’s experiences with the empire’s
institutions usually increase one’s level of radicalism and
consciousness. While we enter struggle usually because of various
sympathies we hold, We continue and elevate our activism usually because
we realize that our theories and sympathies only barely touched the
surface of the ugliness of the empire.
Allow the experience you will have going through the motions of the
empire’s institutional shuffles to harden you, to motivate you.
Understand that your sacrifices are worth it, and that while we face
certain levels of sacrifices, the people who’ve inspired us so much, the
people whose stiff resistance is the reason i am even writing this
missive, those people are making sacrifices and facing down levels of
repression that most humans will never know. Be proud of the trials the
oppressors put you through, and also be vigilant in order to learn
lessons to apply to your future work in the struggle.
Advice for those inside facing charges for fighting for Palestine, my
best advice would be to not let the repression to stop you from
organizing in furthering the cause. Continue your work on the inside. My
experience on the inside in recent months is that there are a lot of
patriotic, amerikanized prisoners. More than we often realize. And they
are louder than those of us who support the self-determination of
Palestine, and the divestment of amerikan institutions from israel. Your
voice, your commitment is needed just as much inside as it is outside.
Captivity is not the time for self-defeat. The struggle must
continue.
Palestine’s struggle has and is being analyzed in various ways. But
for the record the Palestinian struggle is a nationalist, anti-colonial
struggle. There are many connections to other nationalist,
anti-neocoloinal struggles within the united $tates. In north amerika
the empire has succeeded in stamping out the struggle, the culture, and
much of the existence of the Indigenous people, New Afrikan people,
Chican@ People, and Puerto Rican people. They have already done to us
what israel is attempting to do to Palestine now. amerika looks
different and is softer with its policies of social control only because
they’re further along in their experiment of empire building and
settler-colonialism. As a captive New Afrikan revolutionary nationalist
i am extremely proud of, and inspired by, the Palestinian struggle for
national independence. Their struggle provides a measuring stick to
other nationalist movements. i hope we take note and begin to organize
more in earnest.
Because there are many students who’ve been drawn into this movement
by the extremes of the Palestinian situation, some may not be aware that
there are revolutionary nationalist movements here in their backyards
itching to mobilize enough people to raise the level of contradiction to
the point that the Palestinian struggle is already at. Because there are
connections between these nationalist movements we hope that you will be
able to identify them and connect yourselves to these revolutionary
nationalist struggles. In Our effort to smash the tentacles of amerikan
militarism and imperialism in Palestine and elsewhere, We have to raise
our level of struggle here. We have to raise our capacity here within
the nationalist movements, and i believe the student movement is a key
part of doing that. As such the best we in the prison movement and those
of you in the student movement can do is to build connections with each
other, help each other, and help the world’s oppressed and exploited
people.
i hope this letter is received well, and that you, the reader
continue to struggle ceaselessly until victory is won.
A spear, utilized as a weapon to engage in battle, can only be
effective insofar as its tip is both sturdy and sharp. And the sharpness
of its tip is maintained as part of a process of sharpening in the
continuum of a protracted struggle campaign. Otherwise, what you’ll have
is not an implement for war, but a stick that merely rhetorically
projects a technology for combat that in actuality, is incapable of
immobilizing or pushing back against a harmful, even deadly force. So
considering the condition of the spear, I have no intention to deal with
or re-visit the “Long Attica Revolt” with historicism, relegating the
event to a time in history; nor to romanticize its existence for the
purposes of psycho-emotional or intellectual masturbation. Instead, I
relocate the Long Attica Revolt to the present moment in hopes of
creating dialogue and theory around the fundamental question of whether
the “Long Attica Revolt” (i.e the prison movement) still exists?
I start my analysis of the question at the end and (epilogue) of
Orisanmi Burton’s (hereinafter Ori) text with the statement:
“For many, 1993 was a watershed in the slow disintegration of the
prison movement.”(1)
If 1993 marked the crucial turning point in which the prison movement
started dissipating, or decomposing, what does the reality look like in
2024, 31 years after its evocation? If we are serious about
“interpreting the world to change it, there is no escape from historical
materialism,”(2) requiring my analysis to stay anchored to tackle the
question from my direct experience as a prisoner of 21 and a half
consecutive years of carceral bondage within Michigan prisons. In so
doing, I stay true to Mao’s injunction to adhere to what [Vladimir]
Lenin called the “most essential thing in Marxism, the living soul of
Marxism, [the] concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”(3)
The “prison movement,” according to the New Afrikan analysis that I
subscribe to, marked a specific moment in time that spearheaded a
qualitative change, transforming issue-based prison struggles centered
primarily around conditions of confinement (reform), into a movement
that was influenced by and married itself to the anti-colonial national
liberation struggles being waged beyond the concrete walls
(revolutionary). These circumstances, having affected colonial people on
a world scale, radicalized and politicized sections of the colonial
subjects in the united states to such an extent where the consciousness
developed inside of penal dungeons was being disseminated to the streets
where it would be internalized and weaponized by agents against the
state. The impetus for this qualitative leap in the substance and
character of the prison movement was Johnathan Jackson’s 7 August 1970
revolutionary act of pursuing the armed liberation of the Soledad
Brothers, culminating in the 9 September 1971 Attica Rebellion. This is
why Ori argued the “Long Attica Revolt was a revolutionary struggle for
decolonization and abolition at the site of US prisons.”(4)
While Ori’s assessment may have been correct, his very own analysis,
and a concomitant analysis of present-day Michigan, exposes a
revolutionary contradiction prone to reversion and therefore
revolutionary (Marxist) revision by elements that were, in fact, never
revolutionary or abolitionist but only radical reformist. Revisionism
spells doom (death) to the prison movement, so part of our objective has
got to be how do we oppose the carceral state from an ideological and
practical perspective to ensure the survival of a dying prison movement,
and reap benefits and successes from our struggle. After all, Ori tells
us the aim of his book is “to show that US prisons are a site of war,
[a] site of active combat.”(5)
Clausewitz (Carl von) observed that war was politics by other means,
just as Michel Foucault reasoned politics was war by other means. War
and politics being opposite sites of a single coin, this “COIN” in
military jargon is none other than “counterinsurgency.” As explained in
the U.S. Army Field Manual at 3-24. It defines insurgency as:
“an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to
weaken the control and legitimacy of established government, occupying
power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent
control.”
“The definition of counterinsurgency logically
follows:”Counterinsurgency is the military, paramilitary, political
economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to
defeat insurgency.””
“Counterinsurgency, then, refers to both a type of war and a style of
warfare”(6), whose aim is, in the context of prisons, to neutralize the
prison movement and the ability of its agency to build the movement into
the future.
As we can see, by isolating and extracting this point from Ori’s
text, u.s. prisons as combat zones where war is waged is significant if
we are to gleam from this fact what the proponents, the protagonists of
the prison movement must do next; how we struggle accordingly in hopes
of gaining victories.
The Master Plan
The logical response of a revolutionary tactician to state repression
is resistance. But not just resistance for the sake of being
recalcitrant – as Comrade George (Jackson) informed us, our fight, our
resistance has to use imagination by developing a fighting style from a
dialectical materialist standpoint. Because
“…we can fight, but if we are isolated, if the state is successful in
accomplishing that, the results are usually not constructive in terms of
proving the point. The point is, however, in the face of what we
confront, to fight and win. That’s the real objective: not just
make statements, no matter how noble, but to destroy the system that
oppresses us.”(7)
In constructing long-term insurgency repression (counterinsurgency),
the scientific technology deployed by the state was “soft power” as its
effective mechanism to accomplish their task. Ori tells us the federal
government drafted a “Master Plan” which hinged on “correctional
professionals coming to realize that the battle is won or lost not
inside the prison, but out on the sidewalks.”(8) This assessment could
only be true considering the question surrounding prisons and the
corollary prison movement is one of legitimacy, for only through
legitimacy could the state preserve carceral normalcy. So
counterinsurgency, or war, to be overtly specific, and the game is the
acquisition of legitimacy from the masses (national public at-large) as
a main objective. This fact should be telling that the struggle for
state oppression, aggression and repression within the context of the
prison movement is ultimately always a struggle for the people. Thus,
“in an insurgency, both sides rely on the cooperation of the populace;
therefore they compete for it, in part through coercive means.”(9) These
political facts, as tactics of war, envision the real terrain in which
the battle for prison lives is waged: the mental realm. It is within
this domain that resistance and the legitimacy on both sides of the barb
wired cage will be won.
The prisoner population must take cues from these facts. The very
first recognition has got to be that prisons, deployed as war machines,
cannot possibly be legitimate if we (the prisoners) have been cast as
the enemies the state seeks to annihilate as human beings by
re-converting us from second-class citizens back to slaves. This was the
very point Ori lets us in on regarding Queen Mother Moore’s August 1973
visit and speech in Green Haven Prison in New York, that New Afrikans
were in fact enduring “re-captivity.”(10) Blacks have long hoisted this
argument, lamenting an amendment to the 13th Amendment to the u.s.
constitution, and a host of case law, like the case of Ruffin v
Commonwealth cited by Ori, have declared “incarcerated people
slaves of the state.”(11) And as slaves, to borrow the words of George,
“the sole phenomenon that energizes my whole consciousness is, of
course, revolution.” In this vein the prison movement is partially about
the survival of the humanity of prisons, their dignity, which requires
the survival of the spirit of the prison movement. This is what Chairman
Fred Hampton meant when he said “You can kill a freedom fighter, but you
can’t kill freedom fighting. You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t
kill revolution.” It is this very same deprivation of human dignity that
Huey talked about resulting in what I’m experiencing among Michigan
prisoners, who are largely “immobilized by fear and despair, he sinks
into self-murder”.(12) But even more dangerous to Huey than self-murder,
is spiritual death, what Huey witnessed become a “common attitude…
driven to death of the spirit rather of the flesh.”
So the very idea (spirit) of the prison movement must survive, must
be kept alive, or, “your method of death can itself be a politicizing
thing.”(13). And this is precisely the reality Michigan’s male prisoners
have succumbed to, death of spirit, death by de-politicization.
All this begs the question posed by George: What is our fighting
style in face of political death? This question can only be answered
against the background of the statement: “For many, 1993 was a watershed
in the slow disintegration of the prison movement,” because the reality
shouts out to us that the prison movement has diminished to such a
degree, it’s in desperate need of being incubated back to life (if it
still exists at all).
Thus far it has been made clear that at issue is the survival of the
prison movement which means by extension a revival of the political life
of prisoners. The catalyst breeding political consciousness can only be
education. As Ori illuminates, part of the prisoner war project requires
guerrilla warfare, the life of which itself is grounded in political
education.(14) Ori himself writes in the acknowledgment section of
Tip
of the Spear that he sharpened his spear (political analysis)
by tying himself to a network of intellectuals and study groups, like
Philly-based podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism.
The Role of Outside
Supporters
The “Master Plan” developed by the state concluded “that the battle
is won or lost not inside the prison, but out on the sidewalks,” and
this leads directly to the utility of individuals and organizations
outside the confines of prison life to be leveraging against the
subjects inside the walls. Yet, it must not be lost upon us that by
virtue of the state’s “Master Plan”, they seek to weaponize outside
organizations as tools to drive a nail in the coffin of the prison
movement once and for all. Proponents of the prison movement,
accordingly, must also utilize and weaponize outside agency to advance
the prison movement. When asked, although George said, “A good deal of
this has to do with our ability to communicate to people on the street,”
we must nevertheless be sure not to allow this communication or the
introduction of outside volunteers to stifle the spirit of the
movement.
Ori hits the nail on the head when exposing the “Master Plan” to
absorb outside volunteers as part of the “cynical logic of
programmification, with well-meaning volunteers becoming instruments of
pacification.”(15) I spoke to this very phenomena in 2021 essay entitled
“Photograph Negatives: The Battle For Prison Intelligentsia”, in
response to a question posed to me by Ian Alexander, an editor of True
Leap Press’s “In The Belly” publication, on whether outside university
intellectuals could follow the lead of imprisoned-intellectuals? There I
mentioned how Michigan’s outside volunteers near absolute adherence to
prison policy, designed to constrain and be repressive, retarded our
ability to be subversive and insurgent, called into question the purpose
of the university-intellectuals infiltration of the system in the first
instance. And while “many of these volunteers undoubtedly had altruistic
and humanitarian motives, they unwittingly perpetuated counterinsurgency
in multiple ways.”(16)
The battle for prison intellgentsia itself creates an unspoken
tension between the inside (imprisoned) and outside (prison)
intellectuals to the detriment of the prison movement, benefiting the
state’s “Master Plan.” As I cited in “Photograph Negatives,” Joy James
correctly analyzes that it is the imprisoned intellectuals that are
“most free of state condition.” Scholar Michel-Rolph Troillot’s insight
also champions that imprisoned intellectuals, “non-academics are
critical producers of historiography,”(17) yet, as Eddie Ellis told Ori
during a 2009 political education workshop, “We have never been able to
use the tools of academia to demonstrate that our analysis is a better
analysis.”(18) This fact further substantiates my position in response
to editor Ian Alexander that outside university-based intellectuals must
take their lead from imprisoned intellectuals because (1) we are the
experts, validated through our long-lived experiences; and (2) most
university-intellectuals are clueless they’re being used as tools within
the state’s “Master Plan” against the very prisoners that altruism is
directed.
Carceral Compradors Inside
But sadly, it’s not just the outside volunteers being positioned as
pawns in the state’s war against prisoners. To be sure, prisoners
themselves have become state agents, be it consciously or unconsciously,
pushing pacification through various behavioral modification programming
that intentionally depoliticizes the prisoner population, turning them
into do-gooder state actors. It is in this way that the prison state
“strategically co-opted the demands of the prison movement and
redeployed them in ways that strengthened their ability to dominate
people on both sides of the wall.”(19)
In Michigan prisons, these compromised inmates function as “carceral
compradors,” and part of the plan of this de-politicizing regime is to
convince the prisoner population to surrender their agency to resist. It
has been the state’s ability to appease these, what Ricardo DeLeon, a
member of Attica’s revolutionary committee, said was the elements of
“all the waverers, fence sitters, and opponents,”(20) exacerbating
already-existing fissures, exposing the deep contradictions between a
majority reformist element, and the minority revolutionary element. This
success effectively split and casted backward the “prison movement” to
its previously issue-based conditions of confinement struggle model by
“exposing a key contradiction within the prison movement, ultimately
cleaving support from the movement’s radical edge while nurturing its
accomodationist tendencies.”(21)
All of this was (is) made possible because “a sizable fraction of the
population that saw themselves, not as revolutionaries, but as
gangsters: outlaw capitalists, committed to individual financial
gain”(22), and radical reformist, despite their rhetoric to the
contrary, focused rather exclusively on conditions of confinement,
instead of materializing a revolutionary goal. If the prison movement is
a revolutionary movement, then the revolutionary element must manage to
consolidate power and be the final arbitrators of the otherwise
democratic decision-making processes. Ori cites Frantz Fanon to make
clear that political parties serve as “incorruptible defenders of the
masses,” or, the movement will find itself vulnerable to neocolonial
retrenchment.(23) The schism that emerges between these two factions,
ideologically, paralyzes the prison movement. These implications
obviously extend beyond the domain of prisons to the collective New
Afrikan struggle on the streets, as the prison movement was fostered by
national liberation struggle on the outside, lending the credence to the
victory from the sidewalk notion. But in order to secure a revolutionary
party-line, the revolutionary party must be the majority seated element
in the cadre committee.
Perhaps this is precisely why Sam Melville, a key figure in the
Attica rebellion, said it was needed to “avoid [the] obvious
classification of prison reformers.”(24) This is significant because
otherwise, reformists would dominate the politics, strategies and
decision-making, killing any serious anti-colonial (revolutionary)
ideology. Again, this is true for both the inside and outside walkways.
As a corollary, this reality should cause the revolutionary-minded to
seriously rethink ways in which our struggle is not subverted from
within the ranks of fighters against the state who, contradictorily, are
okay with the preservation and legitimization of the prison machine and
its “parent” global white supremacist structure, so long as remedial
measures are taken to ameliorate certain conditions.
Our Road
In advance of summarizing, let me just say I do not at all intend to
imply a reformist concession can’t be viewed as a revolutionary
advancement within the overall scheme of carceral war. I pivot to Rachel
Herzing, co-founder of Critical Resistance, that
“an abolitionist goal would be to try to figure out how to take
incremental steps – a screw here, a cog there – and make it so the
system cannot continue – so it ceases to exist – rather than improving
its efficiency.”
But that’s just it. The Attica reforms did not, as Rachel Herzing
would accept, “steal some of the PIC’s power, make it more difficult to
function in the future, or decrease it’s legitimacy in the eyes of the
people.” On the contrary, the Attica reforms entrenched the system of
penal legitimacy, seeded the proliferation of scientific repression, and
improved upon the apparatus’s ability to forestall and dissolve
abolitionist resistance. In addition, the reforms were not made with the
consent of the Attica revolutionaries, but by a splintering majority of
radical reformers who, in the end, the present as our proof, greased by
the levers of power assenting to the machine’s pick up of speed and
tenacity.
As inheritors of the prison movement, and as we consider the
de-evolution of the Long Attica Revolt and all it entails, specifically
its survival, we are called upon to meditate on Comrade George’s
essential ask – What is our fighting style? At minimum, I suggest our
task is implementing a twofold platform: (1) political education; and
(2) internal revolutionary development.
First, those equipped with the organization skills and requisite
consciousness, as a methodology of guerilla war, should construct
political education classes. These classes should operate within study
group formats. We must return to the injunction of prisons functioning
as universities, that “The jails (and prisons) are the Universities of
the Revolutionaries and the finishing schools of the Black Liberation
Army.”(25) We align ourselves with the Prison Lives Matter (PLM)
formation model and utilize these study groups to engage in:
“a concrete study and analysis of the past 50+ years, and in doing
so, We learn from those who led the struggle at the highest level during
the high tide (1960s and 70s), where and how the revolutionary movement
failed due to a lack of cadre development, as well as knowing and
maintaining a line.”(26)
Our political education study groups must also instill a pride,
courage, and will to dare to struggle along the lines of New Afrikan
revolutionary ideology. For desperately, “Our revolution needs a
convinced people, not a conquered people.”(27) The quality of courage in
the face of impending brutality by what Ori calls the state’s “carceral
death machine”(28) will be necessary to put in gear the wheels of
guerrilla resistance. The invocation of this spirit sets apart the human
prepared to demand and indeed take his dignity by conquest, from the
weak, pacified slave who rationalizes his fear, which is in fact
“symptomatic of pathological plantation mentality that had been
inculcated in Black people through generations of terror.”(29) This
terror in the mind of Black males inside of Michigan cages is displayed
at even the mention of radical (revolutionary) politics, inciting a fear
drawn from the epigenetic memory of chattel slavery victimization, and
the propensity of master’s retaliatory infliction of a violent
consequence. This thought has frozen and totally immobilized the
overwhelming majority of Black Michigan prison-slaves, not just into
inaction, but turning them into advocates of pacified slave-like
mentalities. But these niggas are quick to ravage the bodies of other
niggas.
To this point, Ori writes
“Balagoon suggests that the primary barrier to the liberation of the
colonized was within their minds – a combination of fear of death,
respect for state authority, and deference to white power that had been
hammered into the population from birth. Liberation would remain an
impossibility as long as colonized subjects respected the taboos put in
place by their oppressors.”(30)
To be sure, liberation struggles can only be “successful to the
extent that we have diminished the element of fear in the minds of black
people.”(31) Biko, speaking to this fear as something that erodes the
soul of Black people, recognized “the most potent weapon in the hands of
the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.”(32)
Secondly, hand-in-hand with our political education must be the
material engagement in the first revolution, the inner revolution. This
is “The hard painstaking work of changing ourselves into new beings, of
loving ourselves and our people, and working with them daily to create a
new reality.”(33) This first, inner-revolution consists of “a process of
rearranging one’s values – to put it simply, the death of the nigger is
the birth of the Black man after coming to grips with being proud to be
one’s self.”(34)
The ability to transform oneself from a nigga to an Afrikan man of
character is perhaps the most important aspect of developing concordance
with a New Afrikan revolutionary collective consciousness. Commenting
“On Revolutionary Morality” in 1958, Ho Chi Minh said that “Behavioral
habits and traditions are also big enemies: they insidiously hinder the
progress of the revolution.” And because niggas, unbeknownst to
themselves are white supremacists and pro-capitalist opportunists, the
vanguard security apparatus must forever remain on guard for the
possibility of niggas in the rank-and-file corrupting the minds of other
niggas who have yet to internalize New Afrikan identity.
May these be our lessons. Ori’s Tip of the Spear text is
important in the overall lexicon on the history of the prison movement,
and must be kept handy next to the collection of Notes From New
Afrikan P.O.W and Theoretical Journals. Tip of the
Spear should serve not just as reference book, but a corrective
guide for the protagonist wrestling the prison movement out the arms of
strangulation, blowing spirit into the nostrils of its decaying body
until it’s revived, and ready to fight the next round. And We are that
body. Let’s dare to do the work.
Forward Towards Liberation!
We Are Our Liberators!
^*Notes: 1. Orisanmi Burton, October 2023, Tip of the Spear: Black
Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, University of
California Press, p. 223 2. Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros, and Walter
Chambati, January 2020, Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo,
Tulika Books, p.22 3. Mao Zedong, 1937, “On Contradiction”, Selected
Works of Mao Tse-Tung 4. Burton, p.52 5. Burton, p.224-226 6. Life
During Wartime, p.6 7. Remembering the Real Dragon - An Interview with
George Jackson May 16 and June 29, 1971, Interview by Karen Wald and
published in Cages of Steel: The Politics Of Imprisonment In The United
States (Edited by Ward Churchill and J.J. Vander Wall). 8. Burton,
p.175. 9. Life During Wartime, p.17. 10. Burton, p.1 11. Burton, p.10
12. Huey P. Newton, 1973, Revolutionary Suicide, p.4 13. Steve Biko, I
write What I Like, p.150 14. Burton, p.4 15. Burton, p.179 16. Burton,
p.175 17. Burton, p.8 18. Burton, p.7 19. Burton, p.150 20. Burton, p.41
21. Burton, p.150 22. Burton, p.99 23. Burton, p.92 24. Burton, p.82 25.
Sundiata Acoli, “From The Bowels of the Beast: A Message,” Breaking da
Chains. 26. Kwame “Beans” Shakur 27. Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina
Faso Revolution 1983-1987, p.417 28. Burton, p.105 29. Burton, p.42 30.
Burton, p.42 31. Biko, p.145 32. Biko, p.92 33. Safiya Bukhari 34.
Burton, p.62
In the past, the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM), and its mass
org at the time, the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League, campaigned
to get the University of California to Divest from I$rael.(1) This was a
correct strategy, because U.$. imperialism is the number one backer of
the I$raeli war machine. Behind the flag of I$rael is the stars and
stripes.
More recently, United Struggle from Within (USW) carried out a
petition campaign, which read in part:
“Therefore with this declaration we angrily express our indignation
with the state of Israel for committing genocide, and for the Israeli
people for allowing it to happen in the 21st century after vowing”never
again.”
The petition recognized that Palestinian political prisoners had
supported the California hunger strikes in recent years and it was time
to return solidarity. By 2016, comrades in 16 prisons had gathered 189
signatures. Recognizing the limitations of conditions, the petition also
read:
“Within these walls we are as yet powerless to tap into the potential
of the imprisoned lumpen; the oppressed internal nation lumpen in
particular as agents of social change, but we are not yet powerless to
sign a piece of paper to denounce the state of Israel and their support
in the U.$.”
Still today, comrades are asking what can we do to support
Palestine?
Settlers Supporting Settlers
The war against Palestine is what Amerika has always done from its
very founding – land grab, occupation, genocide. Therefore, there is
much support in the United $tates for I$rael’s current bombing campaign
and invasion of Gaza. And the tactics being used against Palestine could
easily be tried against indigenous people here on Turtle Island
next.
MIM and others have documented the history of Amerikan labor union
support for I$rael.(2) Yet, in recent months not only has the U.$. seen
millions demonstrate to oppose U.$. militarism in Palestine, but labor
unions representing millions of Amerikan so-called workers have signed a
call for a cease fire.(3) While Amerikans have always been settlers, the
United $tates is more and more a population of people who do not come
from settler backgrounds. And more and more, people from non-settler
backgrounds are joining the ranks of labor unions, big tech companies
and other professional roles. This is one factor behind the wavering
support for I$rael. Of course, it is the Palestinian resistance that is
forcing Amerikans to take a position.
The cease fire call is a shift for many Amerikan labor unions away
from outright Zionism to the left wing of white nationalism. Despite the
cease fire statement, these unions will still be campaigning for
Genocide Joe this year. And while some members of the International
Longshoreman Workers Union (ILWU) participated in a one day protest/shut
down of the port of Oakland in support of Gaza, there has been no
sustained strike by Amerikan unions that are actively involved in
shipping arms to I$rael.
The United Auto Workers (UAW), having been in the news for strikes
last year, is one of the unions to issue a statement for a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, the UAW has been hosting talks with employees of arms
manufacturer Raytheon for a “just transition” to guarantee labor
aristocracy union jobs in thefuture technologies of war and genocide.
Brandon Mancilla, director or UAW’s Region 9A, announced in a tweet on
Dec 1st the formation of a Divestment and Just Transition working group
to explore how “we can have just transition for US workers from war to
peace.” Behind the UAW’s ceasefire resolution, was UAW Labor for
Palestine. Self-described on their website as a “nationwide group of
rank-and-file UAW members” that seeks to “organize UAW worksites that
send arms and other material to Israel.” They have faced great
resistance from the UAW in general to taking any action to stop
producing arms for I$rael. Like the Amerikan leaders who mumble words
about humanitarian efforts in Palestine while continuing to authorize
more and more shipments of war machines to I$rael, Amerikan labor makes
statements about ceasefire, while continuing to produce these machines.
Actions speak louder than words.
As we reported in ULK 84, arms shipments must get to the
Red Sea before they face real resistance; resistance by Yemen’s
armed forces. And following I$rael’s attacks on Iranian diplomatic soil
in Syria in April, Iran has seized an I$raeli-linked cargo ship passing
through the Strait of Hormuz. While the Strait, which accesses the
Persian Gulf, does not lead to I$rael, it does lead to I$rael’s new Arab
allies in the UAE.
Doing Better
The #1 thing people in the United $tates can be doing in the
short-term to stop genocide in Palestine is to stop shipments of arms
and aid to I$rael. Just as the imperialists have used blockades to
weaken the Palestinian resistance. The question is how to make such a
blockade meaningful and sustainable.
In the longer-term it is our responsibility in the United $tates to
weaken imperialism from the inside. As we see the principal
contradiction in the United $tates to be between nations, it is by
supporting national liberation struggles at home that we believe we can
best make this happen faster. And without building the revolutionary
forces here in the United $tates, we do not foresee a successful,
sustained blockade of aid to I$rael.
Another realm of struggle we should be tuned into is the struggle
against political repression of those supporting Palestine, and
especially the state imposing limitations on the exchange of information
between Palestine and the world. The labeling of organizations linked to
the Palestinian struggle as “terrorist organizations” is parallel to
organizations in the oppressed nations in the United $tates being
labelled “security threat groups (STGs).” As our readers know well the
right to free speech and association is not guaranteed but must be
struggled for within this bourgeois democracy.
Finally, correct political line must lead for us to succeed on all
fronts. Democratic Party-supporting labor unions calling for “cease
fire” is not the correct political line. Stopping all aid to I$rael is
correct. Supporting national liberation struggles of the oppressed is
correct. Recognizing the populations of the exploiter countries to be
part of the bourgeoisie is correct. And recognizing the need for
independent communist organizations in all parts of the world is correct
for avoiding past mistakes that restricted the revolutionary potential
of oppressed nations (see next section).
There is a reinforcing effect between revolutionary nationalist and
communist movements around the world. Communism was more popular in
Palestine when communists were demonstrating models of success in
practice in other parts of the world. The revolutionary nationalism of
Palestine today will impact the consciousness of revolutionary
nationalism around the world, including within U.$. borders. Amplifying
this effect in the short-term will help us build the type of movement
that can provide real solidarity with Palestine in the short-term. The
history and class interests of Amerikan labor prove that their current
level of sympathies with Palestine are tenuous and lacking in
militancy.
It is the struggle of the occupied indigenous populations, the
largest of which is Aztlán, that are most parallel to Palestine in our
context. Meanwhile New Afrika has probably been the most ardent
supporter of Palestine in the United $tates historically. Though it’s
also worth noting the prominence of Jewish voices in opposing the war
from the United $tates, due to the connection the existence of I$rael
has forced onto all Jewish people. As a resistance movement based in a
compact area of land that is mostly urban, there is much to be learned
tactically from the successes of the ongoing struggle in Palestine today
that relates to the conditions of oppressed nations in the heart of
empire.
The ICM, Pan-Islamism and
Palestine
Support from communists around the world, especially those waging
People’s War in the Third World, has been unwavering on the side of
Palestine liberation since October 7th. But the history of the
International Communist Movement (ICM) has led to setbacks in
Palestinian and pan-Arab liberation.
MIM(Prisons) has been working on reiterating MIM line on the
Communist International in recent years as part of an effort to compile
MIM’s
work opposing crypto-Trotskyism. One of the key issues we have with
Trotskyism is its view that the most advanced capitalist countries
will/should lead the communist movement. MIM line says that the most
exploited and oppressed nations will lead the way, and recognizes the
need for independent initiative and direction from within each nation.
We also see the need for a Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the
Oppressed Nations (JDPON) as a tool for overthrowing imperialism. Under
the JDPON, it will be the communist minorities in former imperialist
countries that are benefiting from the assistance of more advanced,
socialist, former colonies.
From 1919-1943, the third Communist International (Comintern) was the
first experiment in an international communist movement that involved
parties in state power. At that time the idea that the advanced
capitalist countries would lead the socialist revolution was more
popular. Bolshevik leader Mirza Sultan-Galiev was one of the biggest
critics of this position. In 1923, at the 9th Conference of the Tatar
Obkom, Sutlan-Galiev stated:
“If a revolution succeeds in England, the proletariat will continue
oppressing the colonies and pursuing the policy of the existing
bourgeois government; for it is interested in the exploitation of these
colonies. In order to prevent the oppression of the toiler of the East
we must unite the Muslim masses in a communist movement that will be our
own and autonomous.”(4)
MIM positively reviewed eir ideas:
“Sultan-Galiev was for the formation of a”Colonial International” to
replace the Comintern as organization of central importance. He also
called for the “dictatorship of the colonial nations over the
metropolis.”“(5)
Sultan-Galiev applied this concept to Russians, who were far more
oppressed and exploited than Amerikans today, as well as to the United
$tates, which ey saw as built on the genocide and labor of First Nations
and New Afrikans.
Cuban revolutionary Che Guevarra and Georgian leader of the Soviet Union
Joseph Stalin. Despite eir mistakes in building the first socialist
state, Stalin is part of the lineage of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. While
friendly to Maoism in many ways, Guevarra is known for focoism, a
military strategy that is the opposite of Mao’s Protracted People’s War.
For a brief period, about 5 years after the Russian revolution, the
Bolsheviks had created a Muslim communist party separate from the
Russian one. But this project was quickly abandoned. Decades later, USSR
leader Joseph Stalin, who also played a leading role in the Comintern,
abolished the Comintern in 1943. Stalin and Mao both said the communist
international was no longer appropriate for the complicated conditions
of international struggle. One of the problems with the communist
international was the mixing of people from exploiter countries and
exploited countries in one organization. Another was the mixing of
people engaged in armed struggle against imperialism with those who are
not. Sultan-Galiev’s proposal for a “Colonial International” addresses
the first problem. However, eir ideas were not ultimately adopted by the
Comintern, and ey was purged from the Bolshevik Party in 1923.
Current
Events in Russia and Palestinian Communism
Last week a horrible mass shooting took place in Moscow, killing 143
people. The gunmen are reportedly from Tajikistan and working with the
Islamic State-Khorasan, based in Central Asia. An Amerikan analyst
explained that this group “sees Russia as being complicit in activities
that regularly oppress Muslims” and that a number of other Central Asian
militants have allied with the Islamic State group due to their own
grievances against Moscow.(6) Tajikistan is a former Soviet republic.
One must wonder if a Muslim Communist International, separate from the
Russian one, could have avoided the emergence of militant groups in
Central Asia today that have violent beefs with Moscow. This goes both
ways, with chauvinist attitudes by many Russians today towards the other
former Soviet republics. As the capitalist/imperialist USSR collapsed in
1991, both sides of this national divide perceived the other to be
exploiting them.(7)
On the Western side of the USSR Sultan-Galiev helped establish a
separate Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921. This
became a bastion for German Nazis in the 1940s, leading to the native
Tatar population being relocated by Stalin, and the area populated by
Russians and Ukrainians – leading to disputes over the territory today.
This suggests that Stalin was correct to oppose Sultan-Galiev for narrow
nationalism in the late 1920s and ultimately have em killed in 1940 as
the Nazis were preparing to invade.
The problems with trying to unify too quickly with a communist
international seems to have played a role in Palestine and the Arab
world as well. The Soviet Union supported the partitioning of Palestine
by the Zionists, leading to the Nakba (“The Catastrophe” or ethnic
cleansing of Palestine) in 1948. Despite the Comintern having been
dissolved in 1943, apparently it was still policy for the Communist
Parties in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon to support the USSR line on the
partitioning of Palestine against their own beliefs. This led to massive
loss of support for the communists in Syria and Lebanon for years to
come (there was not much support in Palestine until years later).(8)
While U.$. and I$raeli imperialism played a role in suppressing
communist organizing, these internal contradictions and short-comings
are what allowed such efforts to succeed. We can see how the strategies
we choose today can have grave and lasting impacts decades later. That
is why we, as communists, must do a better job of implementing an
effective internationalism by recognizing the national
self-determination of each oppressed nation. Independence in action must
coincide with a struggle for unity in ideology.
“The early stages of socialism according to both Lenin and Stalin
would see a vast multiplication of nations seizing their destinies. It
was only under advanced communism that we could contemplate the
disappearance of nations.”(7)
The above is in line with USW’s slogan of “unity from the inside
out.” It is only with true self-determination of the oppressed nations
that they can fully unite with other nations. Of course, the more unity
we have the stronger we are. So we must struggle for unity, without
forcing it before conditions are ripe.
We call on comrades to continue to make connections between Palestine
and national struggles in occupied Turtle Island, and to build national
liberation struggles here in the heart of empire.
