Under Lock & Key

Book Review
The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Governments War on Dissent
By Ernesto B. Vigil
University of Wisconsin Press 1999
450 pages

This book is about the Chican@ organization the Crusade for Justice, which was founded by Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, and the repression they endured. Corky was born on 18 June 1928 to parents who were farm workers. His father was a migrant from Mexico and fought in Pancho Villa’s army during the Mexican Revolution, while his mother was a Chicana from Colorado. From Boxer, to bourgeois Democrat, to Chican@ militant, Corky developed in the urban setting of Denver.

The Crusade for Justice was formally founded in 1966, in response to murders of Chican@s by pigs. It was an organization which sought self-determination for Chican@s and hoped to serve as a model for the Chican@ nation.

The federal government began surveilling Corky soon after he officially broke with the bourgeois politics of the Democratic party. He broke with them because he saw that they were not really working in the interests of the Raza, rather they served Empire. He really got on the FBI radar in 1966 when the FBI files note an anti-war speech he made in Denver, Colorado. In this speech Corky said:

“Who reaps the profits? If in essence we are sharing in this prosperity by our own personal good life, then we are prospering at the expense of the blood and bones of fellow human beings. If our own economic gain must be earned by such a grisly trade, then we are truly a very sick society … prolongment of the war means isolation of the most powerful military country in the world, frowned on and hated by millions of people on all the continents of this planet.”(p. 28)

Here he clearly understands that the imperialist war on Vietnam was wrong and also saw that those in the First World who benefited via better living standards and privileges were benefitting off of the “blood and bones” of people around the world. So early on we see that Corky was much different than say a Cesar Chavez because he not only sought better treatment for Chican@s but for folks around the world.

I found the portions of the book concerning FBI surveillance very educational. The author obtained FBI reports on Corky via Freedom of Information Act requests, and learned that at one point the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) sent a report to J. Edgar Hoover stating that protesters were released after protesting the death of a New Afrikan who was killed for using a segregated facility, and after walking out of the courtroom the SAC notes of Corky and others: “They all joined hands and sang, ‘we shall overcome’.”

For the SAC to feel the need to report to Hoover something like this highlights just what kind of beast that we are up against. The unity between oppressed nations is an extreme threat to the safety and security of white supremacy. Calls for unity or a united front between the internal semi-colonies will always threaten our oppressor because this unity challenges the Settler state even before a single rifle is raised. Together we make the occupiers tremble!

Perhaps one of the significant actions that “Crusade for Justice” did was, besides mobilizing the Chican@ nation, it held the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation conference, which brought Chican@s together for the first time like no other. It was here that the concept of “Aztlán” and Chican@ independence was brought to the Raza like never before. And although this was guiding the Chican@ movement onto the anti-imperialist road and was a revolutionary event, the leaders - Corky and the Crusaders - were not communists and this was their shortcoming. As good as their efforts were and as much as the Chican@ nation needed them at the time, they did suffer some erroneous political line.

At the conference a preamble and three-point plan was adopted. The preamble, also known as “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” was steeped in patriarchal tone with talk about “brotherhood” of Chicanos and our “Forefathers” in Aztlán. What’s more, as Vigil notes, there is no talk of the First Nations who exist within many parts of the land base we call Aztlán. The preamble was written by the poet Alurista and thus the preamble was a little poetic.

The program was written by Corky and reflected some idealism. He speaks of nationalism, self-determination, independence and total liberation from the oppression and exploitation, but not of socialism or communism. From my studies I know that there were Chican@ communists involved in the Chican@ movement, but they were a minority. For most, the Chican@ struggle was simply about breaking from the “Gringo” i.e., national oppression, but liberation divorced from socialist relations of production leads back to capitalism and thus imperialism. We have learned from our foremothers and forefathers and understand that even within the Chican@ Nation there are class contradictions which will continue to be a problem post-liberation, and will not be resolved without dissecting capitalism completely. Without identifying this truth, one is left with the empty shell of bourgeois nationalism and continued oppression only under new management.

The fact that even organizations like Crusade, which did not even seek socialism, but simply to be free from oppression, faced state repression and intense FBI surveillance is shocking. Here was a group who we find out in this book was surveilled by FBI, military intelligence, police intelligence, CIA and others, and they were not even attempting to install socialism. This teaches us all the extent of the settler in protecting its Empire.

Vigil describes how in the late 1960s and early ’70s many middle class people of all nationalities were protesting for integration of schools, but the Chican@ movement did not care for integrating schools nor did they struggle for this.

“School busing to achieve integration was of little interest to Denver’s Chicano activists, who had other priorities; bilingual education, community empowerment, and curriculum reform. For them, integration was misguided ‘Liberalism,’ a mere cosmetic reform premised on the assumption that minorities could be well educated only when Whites were physically present.”(p. 117)

Here Vigil is on point that Chican@s should not focus on integration, not in schools and not with Amerikkka. Our goals are to liberate our people, not to sleep in the oppressor’s house. The only integration we want is Aztlán’s future economy being integrated with socialist relations of production.

I really enjoyed reading about the Escuela Tlatelolco which was a “Freedom school.” Chican@ youth learned “Spanish, history, music, folkloric dancing, geography, printing, sculpturing, and contemporary world and national affairs.”(p. 161) Vigil explained: “Three professors were recruited from Monterey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, to teach advanced Spanish, Mexican history, economics, political science and mathematics.”(p.162)

Independent institutions such as liberation schools are important for us to decolonize the minds of our youth, but this decolonization must come wrapped in communist ideology – which the Escuela Tlatelolco wasn’t. Our contemporary liberation schools will clearly show our youth that only a socialist Aztlán will begin the process of real nation building and is the only way to truly liberate the Chican@ nation. We want schools today that are operating outside U.S. influence and which display what real people’s power means.

There was an interesting section on a Chican@ prisoners self-help group which formed in 1969 at Colorado State Penitentiary. This political group was called the Latin American Development Society (LADS). The LADS made it possible for Chican@ community organizations to go into prison and helped to create a bridge of cooperation where Chican@s being released from prison would be funneled into the outside Chican@ activist community where they would find post-prison services such as employment, counseling, etc. Corky Gonzalez was able to go into the prison and speak at the first LADS meeting, so the Chican@ movement was injected into this prison political group.(p. 180-181)

Like prison groups today LADS focused on combatting oppression and providing education for the imprisoned Chican@, and LADS also left us with some good examples to learn from. They created several serve the people programs in the pinta, for one they created a committee that worked with new prisoners, what we may call “first termers” here in pintas in Califas. This was important because a new prisoner or “fish” may be easy prey for some predator in prison. In this way youngsters were given revolutionary clecha once they entered the pinta by LADS “O.G.’s”. LADS was comprised of prison vets who were politicized. Within LADS were many sub-committees such as the Committee to Assist Young People (CAYP), as well as a security committee called the Zapatistas.(p. 182) The LADS were anti-dope and combatted drug use or sales in the pinta. They were not trying to poison the imprisoned Raza, rather they were trying to build the Raza.

Criminal acts and lumpen-on-lumpen crime declined once the LADS became active and they were able to establish a Concilio de Unidad (Unity Council) which contained LADS and outside activists who collaborated with one another. This I think is needed in today’s pintas where prison revolutionaries via United Struggle from Within (USW) can link up with MIM(Prisons) and ensure released prisoners can be funneled into the revolutionary movement out in society. But prisoners need to step up and prepare ourselves and other prisoners to continue their political work on the outside.

The shortcomings of LADS was it was an above ground (prison approved) organization, so although the prison officials allowed them to have meetings etc., Vigil states that prison officials abolished the LADS once they gained influenced. My question is since when do we allow our oppressor to abolish our efforts to organize or serve the people? At the same time state repression is real and very deadly, this probably explains why many of today’s imprisoned Chican@ revolutionary groups operate underground.

Something else I found interesting was something Corky Gonzalez came up with and that was the Congreso de Aztlán (Aztlán Congress). As Vigil explains, “The Congress de Aztlán was a conceptual congress of the ‘Chicano nation,’ of ‘Aztlán.’ It would be similar to a government-in-exile in as much as it claimed legitimacy in opposition to the colonizing power that claimed Mexicans as subjects. In this case, however, the congreso was not in exile but operating in occupied territory.”(p. 189)

The Congreso de Aztlán was never able to be activated because of inner contradictions within the Chican@ movement. The main political vehicle was the la Raza Unida Party (RUP). RUP made an attempt at establishing dual power, where Raza sought community control of community politics and community services, but this “dual power” was in reality an attempt to use the oppressors’ politics to liberate the people, which of course could never really be successful. This approach is a result of those Social Democrats who fall for ballot box “revolution.”

Vigil states about the RUP, “The party was a national party in name only and never had a clear central ideology other than the anti-establishment nationalism prevalent in the movement.”(p. 191) I would disagree, the RUP did have an ideology but for the most part it was bourgeois ideology. When the Congreso de Aztlán is finally activated in the future it will have a strong ideology. Chican@s have learned a lot since decades past, we know that like Mao said, without a revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary party. The ideology of our Congreso de Aztlán will be communist in nature.

RUP also failed to have a national platform, newspaper or command structure.(p. 192). Their strategy seemed to be to knock on doors and tell Raza to vote Brown. Had RUP enacted a clear revolutionary program and national officers, etc., I believe they would have been neutralized by the U.$. government’s COINTELPRO tactics a lot faster than they were, because they attempted to organize above ground in opposition to Amerikka.

Some of the leaders in the Chican@ movement were more revolutionary than others. Reis Tijerina who fought the land grant struggle in New Mexico, for example, got out of prison and made a statement which Vigil quotes: “I don’t dig the political philosophy of the Third World. We are here. We have what it takes. I don’t go for outside ideologies.”(p. 192) His First Worldism shines forth, and had the U.S. miraculously given back the land grants in New Mexico we may never had heard from Tijerina again. Tijerina went on to describe our youth of believing in “imported ideologies” that “serve the Anglo,” yet it was his clinging to capitalism which served the imperialists. Here Tijerina displays dogmatism, where facts don’t matter in relation to ones narrow-mindedness. Corky responded to Tijerina stating he wanted no “alignment with political prostitutes” in a letter that was published in the Crusade newspaper El Gallo. Corky saw that Tijerina’s efforts were opportunistic, relying on familial ownership of land. Corky saw the struggle being to liberate the land for all of the Chican@ nation, not simply for land-owning families, and thus Corky was more correct.

The Chican@ movement during these times also produced some underground revolutionary groups. Some of these groups were the Chicano Liberation Front in El Paso, the Frente de Liberación Chicano of Northern California, and the Continental Revolutionary Army in Colorado. These groups were reportedly involved in bombings within U.S. borders and other operations aimed at U.S. imperialism. Vigil notes how the Continental Revolutionary Army bombed the Texas home of James M. Somerville, who newspapers described as the CIA chief of the Denver field office. As Vigil points out, it was the first physical attack on the CIA on U.S. soil and it was done by Chican@s. It’s important to note that in the 1970s Denver was the bombing capital of the U.S.(p. 295)

Prisoners were also forming revolutionary groups at this time, such as Chicanos Organizados Rebeldes de Aztlán (Organized Rebel Chicanos of Aztlán - CORA). CORA put out a newspaper called AZTLAN from prison which was distributed out in society. Another organization was the Movimiento Organizado Socalistas Chicano de Aztlán (MOSCA). Both of these organizations were created in the Federal prison system and some of their miembros left the pinta to remain politically active on the outside. Every generation of prisoners needs their own revolutionary Chican@ organizations. Our oppression continues and so should our resistance. CORA’s example of creating a prisoner newspaper is something contemporary prisoners have not been able to pull off, but the example remains that the independent press can be created from within prisons. The imprisoned Chican@ struggle is nothing new, our people have been rising up in these colonial pintas for decades, and so we have a lot of history to learn from if we can access it.

The content of Crusade that dealt with the developments of Chican@ independent institutions was powerful and subjectively pleasing, but the real meat of this book was in learning how state repression – primarily by the FBI – was aimed at the Crusade for Justice and the Chican@ movement of the ’60s and ’70s. There are many books on COINTELPRO and other political repression, but few focus on it aimed at the Chican@ movement like Crusade does. Not only were field reports generated for local police intelligence units on Crusade activity, but these reports were shared with many others like military intelligence, FBI, CIA, etc. For as little as making a speech critiquing capitalism or Amerikkka, an FBI file was started on a persyn. Attending an event protesting pig brutality was also grounds for investigation. I recommend this book because it helped me understand the extent of political repression by U.S. imperialism. Even journalists were having an FBI file created on them for making a critical statement or article on police or government.

I see the need now more than ever to rebuild the Chican@ nation and mobilize the people on the only path to justice and real equality. Our complete decolonization will manifest in an independent Socialist People’s Republic of Aztlán.

¡Aztlán Libre!

I recently received the level 2 study group. One question it asks is “Does MIM(Prisons) recruit members from prison? Why or why not? Do you agree? Explain.” My answer, in part, was “As prisoners we need MIM(Prisons) to not be subjected to our oppression, which helps to protect the integrity and Third World viewpoint of the MIM.” I realized that what I was referring to was resistance to what I once read a comrade call “bourgeois brainwashing.” I then set about to understand the psycho-social dynamics of this bourgeois brainwashing and how we must form resistance from within. I also examined the role played by MIM(Prisons) and the tie to how we view the Third World.

Bourgeois brainwashing uses the psychological phenomenon of dehumanization to facilitate the deconstruction of our value systems. Used as a defense against painful or overwhelming emotions, dehumanization entails a decrease in a person’s sense of his own individuality and in his perception of the humanness of others. This dehumanization of others allows for their maltreatment to be acquiesced in with relative freedom from the restraints of conscience or feelings of comradeship.

Dehumanization has two interrelated processes: self-directed dehumanization, which relates to self-image and denotes the deterioration of an individual’s sense of his own humanness, and object-directed dehumanization, which refers to one’s perceiving others as lacking in those attributes that are considered to be most human. These two forms of dehumanization are mutually reinforcing: reduction in the fullness of one’s feelings for other human beings diminishes one’s own sense of self; any reduction of the humanness of one’s self-image limits that person’s capacity for relating to others.

You see, the first step is for the pigs to beat down our self-worth and self-respect. Once we lose sight of our own humanness, we cannot see it in others. We then have complacence, even to the point of being helpful, while the U.$. empire oppresses, occupies and exploits the Third World nations. Why should I care? The Third World proletariat are less than human anyway. I didn’t put them in the situation they are in, they put themselves there, therefore, they deserve it!

Thus, oppression necessarily rests upon dehumanization, which diminishes and morphs our value system. We can resist dehumanization by holding on to our self-worth and self-respect, and our communistic value system that brought us to participate in the MIM. This takes resistance from within; from within the prison and from within our own selves.

There is a process of resistance called counter-socialization. To keep our values insulated from the conformist bourgeois values shoved down our throats while incarcerated is no easy task. It requires a stabilizing point of reference and behavior patterns that harmonize, to some degree, with our own values. These are two distinct aspects: a supportive reference system or group, and behavior patterns that offer protection against dehumanization of self and others. Our values or attitudes may not be consistent with the behavior expected or even forced upon us, which makes us vulnerable to a deep psychological discord with accompanying stress and pull toward equilibrium to reduce this mental discord and stress. Unless we are careful, our values may subtly change to match our behavior, and the brainwashing has begun.

For us to keep our communistic values from dying or fading away, it helps (it may even be essential) to have value sharers to whom we can refer for guidance and support. This reference group or individual can be other persons within the prison – a formal or informal counter-group. Such a reference system has the advantage of being accessible, relevant (everyone in the same location), and standing out in its interpretive scheme. Our counter-values can also be sustained through contact with or reference to people outside of the prison system. This support has the advantage of not being caught up in the same dehumanizing process as us and, therefore, may be more objective. Furthermore, their existence does not depend on the prison system – a very important point if the going gets rough and the pigs set about to silence our dissension.

To stay on guard, we should occasionally test the limits of the pigs’ tolerance for deviant behavior. If we have too much fear of disciplinary action or retaliation we may too narrowly define the boundaries of freedom and may mentally discard alternatives of action that could be advantageously pursued. We can be guided by the experience of others, but more can be gained from personal testing. Personal testing reaffirms a commitment to resistance and nudges us out of complacency. It also gives us a sense of freedom of action, thereby revitalizing our self-determination. To keep from absorbing a new dehumanized value system, we may find it useful from time to time to gut-react with automatic responses. If we always think about consequences before we express our true feelings, the feelings themselves may imperceptibly change. Just as the pigs limit what they will tolerate by way of opposition, we must also limit what we will tolerate by way of co-optation.

One of the most intriguing questions from both a theoretical and practical standpoint is: how long and under what conditions can a person maintain dehumanizing conditions and discordant values without support of any kind from others? Can internal fortitude based on some seemingly distant reference system keep one’s brain from being washed, and if so, how? One important aspect of value preservation under conditions of deprivation and debasement is a sense of self-worth. We must hold on to self-respect by preserving some fragment of the truth about ourselves that we respect. Maintaining our integrity under repressive conditions may also require some mental separation of the self from the conditions the pigs force upon us. When we invoke the scientific stance of the observer, in effect, we refuse to be co-opted into the machinery of self-debasement. The preservation of the psyche is also facilitated by exercising freedom of action, however restrictive the limits. This may be as simple as the exercise of anticipating what is going to happen and having predictions validated by future events. Pro-action, as opposed to reaction, also gives us back some sense of control.

MIM(Prisons) offers the supportive reference system outside of the prison system and strongly encourages us to start our own localized study groups to support each other. They also offer support through the formal group United Struggle from Within. This support is imperative in combating the bourgeois brainwashing by allowing us to keep our communistic values front and center by giving us a criticism/self-criticism forum and correcting us when our values begin to morph. MIM(Prisons) also supports us in action. They give us support in testing the limits, in the grievance process, in organizing, and in letting our voices be heard.

Comrades, we must not fall prey to the pigs’ dehumanization efforts, communistic value diminishment, and subsequent bourgeois brainwashing. It takes more than passively reading an article or book and agreeing with the content – it takes action! When we start to think that our oppression is our own fault, then we start to justify the oppression of the Third World nations, by the U.$. empire, with some backward bourgeois thought process. We must resist, and this must be resistance from within!

Thank you for the September/October issue of Under Lock & Key(ULK). As you know, ULK readers are literally a “captive audience.” You also know that their confinement seriously limits their ability to access and study the vast body of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist literature you claim to uphold, and also other writings you’ve given your own interpretations to: which you either claim to embrace or otherwise criticize.

In this latest ULK you critiqued my own recent article “Answering A Revisionist Line on the Labor Aristocracy”. Point is, for your readers to weigh the credibility of your interpretations and arguments against what others have written pro and con, they must be able to read not just what you have had to say, but what the other side has said as well.

In your response to my article you said you promote honesty, and clarity in polemics, however you appear yourself to practice deception by omission by publishing only your side of the discussion for your audience to read. And I daresay, your arguments do not accurately represent, and puts your own spin on and omits, a great deal of what I wrote in my article.

Whenever our Party engages in and publishes our polemics with others, we publish both sides’ arguments, or if resources don’t allow, we try to make the other side’s arguments available to our readers. That’s called being all-sided and practicing democracy. It’s also called being dialectical, which Mao promoted. MIM(Prisons) doesn’t do this. And it’s not that you don’t recognize the need to do so.

Back in 2006 when your parent organization (the Maoist Internationalist Movement) first began its efforts to influence us to embrace its line, especially on the labor aristocracy question, we invited you to publish our debates. MIM’s reply was they lacked space in its media – then MIM Notes – and it no longer published its theoretical journal, MIM Theory.

Apparently you’ve now found space to publish your side of the discussion. Certainly you also have space to publish my own article that you were critiquing and my forthcoming reply to that. I critically invite you to do so, and ask that you print this letter in your next ULK.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
Rashid, MOD

MIM(Prisons) responds: The general point that printing both sides of a polemic is a helpful way to educate the masses is a good one. Yet we regularly read Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao talking about some revisionist we don’t know anything about, and we learn from these essays. And in the case of the article being criticized, we linked to Rashid’s article for our online readers and have sent a copy to everyone in prison who has requested one. We also included some direct quotes in our response. That’s more than we can say of Rashid who did not print any of our writings alongside his critique, or even cite our materials where readers could find out more about our position. To our knowledge the NABPP-PC has never published anything we’ve written.

Like the recent debate with Turning the Tide, we wouldn’t have published this critique of Rashid if h had not written h article criticizing us first. And we don’t have space to spare in Under Lock & Key for articles that are so off the mark. Every issue we have good content that does not make the cut. We are currently pushing USW comrades to raise the bar for donations to expand the amount of content we can fit into ULK for this very reason. For theoretical study we distribute numerous books and have numerous study packs on this question including our newly released introductory pack on the labor aristocracy. We also distribute a couple study packs by Rashid hself, on topics where we have unity. Finally, we distribute the classics by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. So if our readers fail to grasp the essence of this issue it is not for our lack of making materials available.

As the original review stated, we were underwhelmed by Rashid’s piece, which was mostly empty rhetoric. We only responded because we know our readers are influenced by the writings of the NABPP-PC. Rashid promises a reply, which will hopefully enlighten us as to how we misrepresented their line. Certainly we will print any corrections if we published something incorrect. But it seems the NABPP-PC line on the labor aristocracy is just as wrong today as it was in 2006, as they make the same tired arguments the revisionists have made for decades.

Much has been said recently about the overtly racist remarks made by one of the contestants on the “Big Brother” reality show. Viewers were shocked at the nerve of some of the show’s participants, not only in the fact that they would say such things, but in the contestants’ blatantly unapologetic attitude afterwards. After all, this is the 21st century, and according to some, we have moved beyond those inconsistencies in Amerika’s past which had previously kept her from fulfilling the promise of its ethos. Most Amerikans (white people in particular) like to believe that although things like slavery and segregation are all a part of our nasty past we should all just forget and move on from this shameful hystory. Surely the United $tates has made great strides when it comes to “race relations,” and Amerikans of all colors have never experienced a more collective prosperity than they do today, never mind the previously unthinkable: a Black man in the White House.

So why then does racism continue to exist? More importantly, how do we eradicate it? To properly answer these questions we must take it back to where it all began, and for this we’ll have to revisit some ugly truths.

Origins of Racism: Connections to Capitalism

People forget that Amerika is a nation of settlers founded on genocide, slavery and annexation. This oppressive nation-building formula includes the more subtle forms of national oppression and the many different ways they are institutionalized and manifested in our society. One particularly malevolent form of national oppression, which most of us are all too familiar with, is of course racism and the more pernicious racial ideology from which it stems. But racism isn’t simply some oppressive philosophical dogma utterly disconnected from the real world. Rather, racism and racial ideologies are direct products of national oppression, which is engendered by society based on property relations and the division of labor produced therein, which in turn has influenced how humyn beings have come to interact with each other in the struggle between the global “haves” and “have nots.” In short, racism has not been around forever. As a matter of fact, the very concept of “race” didn’t even exist prior to the 16th century. Racism and racial ideologies have only been around so long as capitalism itself has been around. The concept of “race” developed alongside the rise of modern society and not as usually believed as a remnant of the irrational and dark Middle Ages. What’s more, the concept of “race” has been directly linked back to the primitive accumulation phase of capitalism, which is itself grounded in the first rape and plunder of Africa and the Americas. This primitive accumulation phase is clearly explained by radical eco-feminist and author Maria Mies when she stated that:

“Before the capitalist mode of production could establish and maintain itself as a process of extended reproduction of capital - driven by the motor of surplus value production - enough capital had to be accumulated to start this process. The capital was largely accumulated in the colonies between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of the capital was not accumulated by merchant capitalists but largely by way of brigandage, piracy, forced and slave labor.”(1) And furthermore, “One could say that the first phase of the primitive accumulation was that of merchant and commercial capital ruthlessly plundering and exploiting the colonies’ human and natural wealth…”(1)

Examples of Racism in National Oppression, Yesterday and Today

Racism as a building block for the rise of the modern western world was as indispensable for that society as it is to the continuing subjugation of nations and the integrity of the First World today. Testimony to this is the way that the people of Islam have been demonized as “dark” and “backward” by the “civilized” west who sees itself as “exceptional.” Thus the role that racism has played in gaining public support for the current wars of conquest is undeniable. One need only examine how Muslims, who were Amerikan citizens, were vilified and attacked by settler violence following the retaliatory attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon under the guise of “Amerikan Patriotism.” The conscious connection of these actions to the collective white history of colonialism in Africa is manifested in the term “sand nigger.” What this “Amerikan Patriotism” really translates into is a special brand of oppressor nation chauvinism, and a vehicle for white power in the 21st century. It is particularly popular and appealing to Latin@s and New Afrikans who think they can fully integrate into Amerika by becoming agents of imperialism and uniting with the oppressor against the people of the Third World.

Therefore the revolutionary character of militant Islam, seen when it is waging war for the independence of Muslims from U.$. imperialism, should be supported by the oppressed nation lumpen as it is objectively an anti-imperialist struggle despite the reactionary views of those leading the struggles, whether it’s Al Qaeda or Bashar al-Assad and their associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism. The struggle of the West and their “democratic” running dogs in the region strengthen the victory of imperialism. Real communists know that there are only two sides to a battle, therefore it is our duty to unite all who can be united in the camp of the oppressed and build a United Front against the imperialists and their racist backers! In his day, Stalin had to combat those promoting a “third way” between the socialist camp and the imperialists, pointing out that those who broke away from the Soviet Union inherently joined the imperialist system, becoming victims of it. The lack of a socialist camp today does not change the bankruptcy of the third-way idealists. Revisionists today point to the forces waging war in the Middle East and call them the “Two Outmodeds” and are peddling a third way out for the oppressed. However, this third way out is itself reactionary and anti-revolutionary, and if upheld will in fact reinforce the very same imperialist structure it pretends to be against, by weakening national unity of the oppressed. This is one lesson we take from the theory and practice of United Front in the Chinese war of liberation against Japan.

Racism as Pseudo-Science and Glossing Over of the National Question

Purveyors of racial ideology fancy themselves as being backed by science, and indeed there is a “science” to racism, it’s called eugenics and it stresses the genetic makeup of people as determinant of their “natural” abilities and inclinations. Eugenics was developed as justification for the oppression and enslavement of non-white people and outlaws alike. It was, however, thoroughly criticized and debunked by the wider scientific community for, among other things, not being an objective and quantifiable method of analysis of the humyn species. While most people today have hardly heard of eugenics it was certainly popular back when England had stretched the tentacles of the British empire (forerunner to U.$. imperialism) all over the Third World, while here in Amerika the slave owning south was likewise using it for the continuing oppression and enslavement of the New Afrikan nation.

1. The lack of scientific relationship to biology since there is only the human race.
   
2. The creation of categories of inferior and superior based on arbitrary characteristics and definitions.
   
3. The creation and perpetuation of a system of oppression of the “inferior” group in all aspects.
   
4. The re-enforcement of a relative differential in treatment - and it’s ideological justification between those considered inferior and those considered superior.
   
5. The use of race as a principal means for social control.
   
6. Rendering irrelevant the experience and viewpoint of the subordinated population except and insofar as interpreted by dominant populations. This specifically has been applied to African descendants, Indigenous peoples, Asians, and Latinos, those usually referred to as “people of color.”(2)
   

We’d also add that the false concept of “race” is a social construct originally based on power struggles between humyns in the pre-capitalist era of slavery, and it has done much to gloss over the fact that the oppressed internal nations of Chican@s and New Afrikans are separate nations from the Amerikan nation (white settler-state), with separate hystories distinctly their own. Therefore we speak of nations and nationalities where most people speak of “race,” in order to refer to a group of people who share a common language, culture, territory and economy. The concept of nations is thus more accountable to hystory and is firmly grounded in material reality. (See “Marxism and the National Question” by J.V. Stalin.)

Methods for Resolving the Principal Contradiction

Despite the fact that the concept of race has been repeatedly disproven, proponents of racial ideology and the national oppression it engenders (and vice versa) hold steady to their un-scientific beliefs. And to a certain extent this is fine. They have their beliefs and prejudices, but we have science! We know where they stand and we know that the oppressed people of the world will not sit idly by but will take up armed struggle against the imperialists to impose the will of the people on today’s oppressor nations. What isn’t fine however are the so-called allies of the oppressed nations within the Amerikan “Left” who mistakenly call themselves communist yet go about espousing the concept of “race.” Whether they are speaking about the common cause of all the “races” that are equally oppressed by capitalism-imperialism, or whether they are agitating around the “race issue” here in Amerika, they’re of no great help. They are immediately caught in the irrevocable trap of idealism, and that is no attitude for a communist to have. First, these idealists objectively hurt the revolutionary movement within U.$. borders by elevating the problem of “race” to that of principal contradiction when in fact there is no problem of race. There is a problem of imperialism and national oppression. Secondly, they deny that the principal contradiction is imperialism vs. the oppressed nations by emphatically denying that there are any other nations in the United $tates besides Amerika. Some have opportunistically come to acknowledge New Afrika, while denying other nations’ existence, not because they are dialectical materialists, but because they’re focused on pulling numbers to their side. Lastly, by denying the concept of nations and national liberation and instead focusing on multi-racial unity they deny the theories and practice of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, as well as the revolutionary movements they spearheaded and the many national liberation movements that followed in their traditions.

Racism in the United $tates or any other place in the world will not be wiped from the earth solely by educating it out of existence, but by getting rid of the many material conditions and relations from which it springs. Racism is a product of national oppression, hence we must focus on uniting the oppressed nations for their own liberation from this jailhouse of nations that is the United $tates. Only then will we seriously be able to talk about combatting racism as a backward idea from another period of history.

The Black Order Revolutionary Organization (BORO), has been actively involved in the ideological struggle with regard to the national identity (nationality) of descendant people of Afrikan slaves since our founding. We take this opportunity to once again contribute to this critical debate.

Our struggle in this country has always had two major political tendencies - one for independence and the other for integration. The nationality debate has been part and partial of this struggle.

When people refer to their nationality, they are informing you of what nation they belong to. Some of the characteristics that define a nation are: a common historical experience, common language, culture, territory (land) and economic life. Our Afrikan ancestors landed on these shores as Ashanti, Ibo, Fula, Moors, etc. We didn’t have a collective identity, language, culture, tradition, etc. But thru our collective oppression and our collective resistance to that oppression, we developed a collective language, culture, and so on in the southern part of what is now known as the U$A. We had developed into a “new” Afrikan people. A people who are separate and distinct from all other people on planet Earth. Thus, we claim the national identity of New Afrikan and claim as our national territory the states Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Our national territory has been named the Republic of New Afrika.

BORO upholds the usage of New Afrikan as opposed to “Black” and “African-American.” “Black” implies the fictitious categorization of the term “race.” African-American implies that we have fully integrated into this country as full citizens.

We do not identify ourselves as “Amerikan” because “America” is the Euro-Amerikan (so-called white) nation. That is why we spell Amerika with a “K” instead of a “C,” to signify that “America” is an illegitimate nation of European settlers. We use the “K” instead of a “C” in spelling “Afrika,” to distinguish ourselves from the neo-colonial and petty-bourgeois elements within our own nation.

Nationalism is about ideology and politics, not “color” or “race.” BORO upholds the Huey P. Newton line that “there are two kinds of nationalism: revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a people’s revolution with the end result being the people in power. Therefore, to be a revolutionary nationalist you would by necessity have to be a socialist. If you are a reactionary nationalist you are not a socialist and your goal is the oppression of the people.”

BORO recognizes that what you say and what you do is a reflection of who you are. So when we see political elements using the terms “Black” and “African-American,” we see you as part of the reactionary-bourgeois elements within our nation. We see you as a wanna-be American who is misleading those of our people who have less political awareness and consciousness.

New Afrikan is a clear distinction from all other political trends within our nation, and must be upheld by all those who are a part of the struggle for land, independence and socialist development. Terminology is critical to identity. New Afrikan and the political ideology behind this term is revolutionary nationalist. Black and African-American is about integration and assimilation.

“Some people talk about a ‘nation’ but really don’t wanna be one (independent), as evidenced by their efforts to crawl back on the plantation. How can we tell? You can identify those trying to crawl onto the plantation by the way they identify themselves. i.e. Blacks, Afro-Amerikans, Afrikan-Amerikans, ethnic group, minority nationality, national minority, under class - anything and everything except New Afrikans, an oppressed nation. Amerikkka is the plantation, and continuing to identify yourself within the Amerikkkan context is evidence of the colonial (slave) mentality. Ain’t no two ways about it.”(1)

New Afrikan is our national identity. New Afrika is our national territory which is currently held in colonial bondage by the United $nakes of Amerikkka. Ours is a struggle to free our land, independence and socialism.

MIM took up this question of the terms “Black” and “New African” back in 2001 in MIM Theory 14 when it published a letter from a RAIL comrade (RC) proposing use of “New African.” In that letter, the RC proposed that “Use of the term New African is waging ideological struggle to establish a national identity.” S/he goes on to explain that “New African implies the identity of a national territory - the Republic of New Africa” while the term “Black” “cannot and will not be distinguished from integrationist, assimilationist, and other petty bourgeois reactionary agendas.” MIM responded to this pointing out that the term “African-American” has emerged to distinguish the petty bourgeois integrationists. MIM’s main complaint with the term “New African” was cultural nationalism:

“What makes including the word ‘African’ in the term relevant? Culture. That is, it is not the land in Africa that makes Blacks in North America a nation, nor the economy, language, and so on. It is the cultural history that survived the genocidal purges of the Middle Passage and slavery that links Blacks to a historical African culture. This is completely true, and this connection is obviously important. However, for the definition of the nation it plays into cultural nationalism to give this aspect too prominent a role. In fact, as MIM has argued, this term has been used most often by people with cultural nationalist tendencies. All the arguments for stressing the African link are cultural, and therefore the tendency of this term is toward cultural nationalism, which is a serious danger from the petty bourgeoisie and comprador bourgeoisie as well.”(2)

MIM(Prisons) has researched the use of the term “New Afrikan” and concluded that while there may be cultural nationalism associated historically with some who use the term, overall today it is being used by the most progressive elements of the revolutionary nationalist movement within the United $tates. While we have some reservations about the ties to Africa promoted by some, we have concluded that “New Afrikan” is a better term to represent the Black nation than “Black,” which has strong racial connotations and is generally not associated with a nation. “New Afrikan” is a term specific to the historical context of African-descended people in North America and so better represents our line on this oppressed nation within U.$. borders.

Black Order Revolutionary Organization (BORO), New Afrikan Maoist Party (NAMP), New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP), New Afrikan Collective Think Tank (NCTT) and the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) all use the term “New Afrikan.” Except for NAIM, these are all prison-based organizations. NAIM was the progenitor of the term “New Afrikan.”

NAIM has written: “to call oneself New Afrikan, at this early stage, is to be, by and large, about what We in the NAIM are about: Land, Independence and Socialism.” They lay claim to the term: “We are the ones who led the ideological struggle for the usage of New Afrikan as our national identity (nationality) over ‘black’ as a racial identity.”(1)

One argument NAIM uses for the term New Afrikan is: “…colonized Afrikans, who evolved into New Afrikans here, were stolen to be used as a permanent proletariat. The New Afrikan nation was born as a working-class nation of permanent proletarians. The fact that We weren’t paid does not preclude the fact that We were workers. What do they think so-called ‘slavery’ (colonialism) entails if not work?”(1)

On this last point, MIM(Prisons) disagrees that New Afrikans are a permanent proletariat. As MIM laid out and we continue to expand on, the vast majority of U.$. citizens are part of the labor aristocracy, not the proletariat. This does not necessarily negate the use of the term “New Afrikan,” but we want to be clear where we differ with NAIM on the class makeup of the nation today.

The NABPP promotes Pan-Afrikanism, promoting the common interests of the various oppressed nations of Africa and extending it to the so-called African diaspora of New Afrikans in the United $tates and other imperialist countries. This is one of the pitfalls of the term New Afrikan: it can lead people to associate imperialist-country Blacks with the oppressed nations of Africa. While most Blacks were originally brought over as slaves and certainly were strongly connected to their home continent at first, we see a very distinct oppressed nation that has developed within U.$. borders in the hundreds of years since the slaves were first forced to North America.

We do not use the term “New Afrikan” to promote pan-Africanism among U.$.-resident peoples. New Afrikans have historical ties to Africa, but today New Afrikans have far more in common with, and are more strongly connected to, other nations within U.$. borders. New Afrikans are closer to Amerikans in economic interests and national identity than they are to Egyptians or Somalis, and will certainly lead any pan-African movement astray and likely sell out the African oppressed nations.

We have not seen a clear rationale for the distinction between “New African” and “New Afrikan,” but some use the letter “k” in “Afrika” to distinguish themselves from the colonial spelling. According to a writer in MIM Theory 14, the term “New Afrikan” originated in 1968 when the First New Afrikan government conference was held by the PGRNA (Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika).(3) We have adopted this spelling, as it is used by the progressive elements of the nation, but welcome input on the relevance of this spelling distinction.

There are two wars waging in oppressed communities throughout the United $nakes: a war by the imperialist-oppressor nation to keep poor and oppressed communities in semi-colonial bondage, and a war between lumpen street organizations. The battlefields are the reservations, barrios, ghetto cities and prison plantations. Many of you have defined the war between us and the dominant nation incorrectly as “racism,” but what is really going on is national oppression. And, in order to defeat and destroy national oppression a “nation” must engage in a national liberation struggle with the end result being national independence. But this is getting ahead of myself.

Many of you who belong to a street organization, misnomered a gang, know the history of your group and can trace yourselves back to when your organization fought against injustices being perpetrated against some segment of your community. And you know that many have deviated from your origins and laws. At the same time, a lot of you are struggling to re-define and re-direct your organization back to their original purposes – serving the needs of the people.

Conversely, we all recognize or should recognize that the conditions of our communities and nations are a direct result of our colonization by those who settled this country. The poverty, misery and suffering, the drug addiction and violence are all because you are not in control of your own development and destiny. Those who don’t rule, get ruled.

My question to you is 1) who ultimately bears the responsibility to see that peace exists in our communities? 2) who bears responsibility to see that we have adequate housing, medical care, education, etc? 3) who benefits most from our communities being saturated with drugs? 4) who benefits most from all of the violence in our communities? 5) who benefits the most from all of us being incarcerated?

Know that the state and federal government have been discussing changing federal laws that would declare gangs and gang nmembers to be domestic terrorists. Why would they do that? Because those in power know that you have the actual and potential power to change this society, that you have the actual and potential power to liberate your nation. You can put an end to police brutality, homelessness, hunger, war, etc. Yea, you have that power!

“The police, and those that they truly serve and protect, do not want us to respect the actual and potential power of our young people, they do not want us to glimpse, through our youth, the power that lies within each of us. If the crips and bloods can bring peace to our communities, and the police can’t or won’t, then why do we need the police? If the Disciples, Vice Lords, Latin Kings and other street organizations can serve and protect our children and elders, and the state demonstrates that it can’t or won’t, then why should we continue to depend upon it and profess loyalty to it? If the power to end violence exists within our own communities, then we should be looking for ways to increase our power, and we should be looking for ways to exercise it.”(1)

Ain’t nothing wrong with being in a street organization, because after all, a “gang” is a group of people with close social relations that work together. The problem is that most street organizations are moving in the wrong direction. They’re engaging in the wrong social practices which are retarding the growth and development of our people.

Through the media and other outlets, the negative images of gangs are filtered (like that bullshit Gangland), so that our people will see street organizations as the main problem existing in our hoods, and they’ll ask for more police presence and harsher prison sentences for those identified as gang members. But gangs didn’t create the current problems. The state fears that you’ll become conscious and active and solve the problems.

Dig this: “One of the main reasons for the rampant crime that occurs in the colonies is national oppression. The colonized live in areas where there is unemployment or underemployment, crummy housing with high rent and poor education. The colonized kill and fight over the money that secures necessities… this reality afflicts the nationally oppressed in the most harmful ways. The nationally oppressed do not hold state power nor the economic power to compete with the oppressors… so the rampant crime in the colonies is not due to self-hatred but national oppression and capitalist culture and policy.”(2)

So you see, “Our problem is not that there are gangs in our communities – our problem is that our communities are colonized territories that suffer from arrested development caused by the U.S. settler-imperialist state. Thus, we have no need to attack gangs – that is, ideally, we have no need to attack any organized group of our people that work to free the process of our collective development. [my emphasis] What we must do is make sure that all organized groups in our communities have this as their goal – and so long as we deal with members of our communities (i.e. members of our families), the means that we use should be education and persuasion, rather than physical force. However, even if stronger means are called for, they should be means created and employed by forces within our own communities and not those of U.S., local, state and federal governments. The transformation of gangs into progressive groups within our communities is part of the process of acquiring group power that will enable us to control every aspect of our lives. Our problem is that too many people in our communities – old and young – lack the identity, purpose and direction required of us if we are to acquire the kind of power that we need to truly free ourselves and begin to pursue the development of our ideal social order.”(1)

The betterment of our conditions must begin with self, with you making a conscious and disciplined commitment to transforming yourselves and your organizations. Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe, with a sense of legitimacy? This is an aspect of the “criminal” and the “colonial” (slave) mentality: continued recognition and acceptance of the legitimacy of the colonial rule, to continue to feel that the colonial state has a right to rule over the colonized.

If we take control of our communities and the power to control every aspect of our lives, then we can ensure that the lynchings end. You can put an end to there ever being another Oscar Grant, Sean Bell or Trayvon Martin lynching.

Soldiers, Riders, Gangstaz – protect your community, clean it up, build it up, feed it, educate it, and let no one do it any harm. That’s gangsta, but revolutionary!

Ride or Die!
Unite or Perish!
July 2013

I was discussing the issue of declining membership with a well known organizational leader with tens of thousands of followers. He stated that you only want to write if it is behind your philosophy, and that you criticize anyone who does not agree with your strategy. He specifically mentioned the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. So your criticism, well intended or not, is doing more dividing than uniting.

MIM(Prisons) responds: This letter is responding to the article in ULK 33 summarizing our annual congress which reported that our number of subscribers has dropped in the past year. First, we want to be clear that subscribers are not the same thing as members. We reported in the same article that the number of active United Struggle from Within members has increased over the past year. But still, we want to see an increase in ULK readers as well and so this is a bad trend.

It is true that MIM(Prisons) is critical of other organizations. This is because we see political struggle and education as fundamental to building an effective revolutionary movement. The MXGM is a good example of an organization that we have reported favorably about in the past. But we need to be honest about where we see faults in the political lines or strategies of other organizations. We hope others will do the same for us. We cannot build real unity if we just ignore significant disagreements over political line and strategy.

Further, we work towards a United Front with all organizations who can unite with us on basic goals. This is an important Maoist strategy that allows different organizations to come together for common goals without sacrificing their independence or brushing real political differences under the rug.

We see these practices as principled. It may lead some individuals to dismiss MIM(Prisons) as too divisive, but we see the real divisiveness in those groups that refuse to publicly acknowledge political differences while privately gossiping or positioning themselves into power. We are willing to lose a few supporters who can’t take open political discussion and disagreements to maintain clarity of political line.

The Minister of Defense of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (Prison Chapter) recently stepped in(1) to defend Turning the Tide against our USW comrade’s critiques.(2) We can appreciate the greater clarity and honesty in Rashid’s piece compared to Michael Novick’s, but still cannot forgive him for getting the first question of importance to communists wrong: who are our friends and who are our enemies? Like Jose Maria Sison and Bob Avakian, Rashid has long been exposed to MIM line and writing, and many attempts to struggle with him have been made. It does great damage to the International Communist Movement when these people become icons of “Maoism” in many peoples’ eyes, while promoting chauvinistic lines on the role of the oppressor nations under imperialism.

Rashid opens his piece with the most common strawpersyn argument of the revisionists, that the MIM line is wrong because Marx and Lenin never abandoned organizing among Europeans and Amerikans. Rashid needs to be more specific if he’s claiming there are groups that are refusing to work with white people or moving to the Third World to organize. While our work mostly targets prisoners, we target prisoners of all nationalities, and similarly our street work is not very nation-specific. The question we would ask instead of “should we organize Amerikans?”, is, “what is going to achieve communism faster, organizing rich people around demands for more money, or organizing them around ideas of collective responsibility for equal distribution of humyn needs and ecological sustainability?”

Rashid’s third paragraph includes some numbers and math and at first glance i thought it might have some concrete analysis. But alas, the numbers appear just for show as they are a) made up numbers, and b) reflecting the most simple calculation that Marx teaches us to define surplus value. To counter Rashid’s empty numbers, let us repeat our most basic math example here. If Amerikans are exploited, then to end exploitation would mean they need to get paid more money. Dividing the global GDP by the number of full-time laborers gives an equitable distribution of income of around $10,000 per persyn per year.(3) To be fair, in Rashid’s article he addresses this and quotes Marx to say that we cannot have an equitable distribution of income. In that quote from Wages, Price and Profit Marx was writing about capitalism, which is inherently exploitative. Our goal is communism, or “from each according to her ability, to each according to her need.” But we’re not there yet, Rashid might argue. OK fine, let’s take Rashid’s hypothetical McDonald’s worker making $58 per 8 hour workday. If we assume 5 days a week and 50 weeks a year we get $14,500 per year. According to the World Bank, half of the world’s people make less than $1,225 per year.(4) That report also showed that about 10% of Amerikans are in the world’s richest 1% and that almost half of the richest 1% are Amerikans. So Rashid wants to argue that under capitalism it is just that the lowest paid Amerikans earn over 10 times more than half of the world’s population because their labor is worth that much more? How is that? What Marx was talking about in Wages, Price and Profit was scientific: a strong persyn might be twice as productive as a weak one, or a specially trained persyn might add more value than an unskilled persyn. So Rashid wants to use this to justify paying anyone who was birthed as a U.$. citizen 10 to 25 times, or more, the average global rate of pay? We have no idea how Rashid justifies this disparity except through crass Amerikan chauvinism.

This empty rhetoric is not Marxism. It is ironic how today people will use this basic formulation for surplus value from Marx to claim people of such vastly different living conditions are in the same class. No one else in the world looks at the conditions in the United $tates and Haiti and thinks, “these countries should really unite to address their common plight.” It is only pseudo-Marxists and anarchists who read a little Marx who can come up with such crap.

Rashid later establishes commonality across nations with the definition, “The proletariat simply is one who must sell her labor power to survive, which is as true for the Amerikan worker as it is for one in Haiti.” We prefer Marx’s definition that the proletariat are those who have nothing to lose but their chains. According to Rashid, we should determine whether someone is exploited based on different measuring sticks depending on what country they live in. Apparently, in the United $tates you must have a $20,000 car, a $200,000 home and hand-held computers for every family member over 5 in order “to survive.” Whereas in other countries electricity and clean water are optional. More chauvinism.

Rashid continues discussing class definitions,

“For instance, if there’s no [Euro-Amerikan] (‘white’) proletariat in the US, then there’s also no New Afrikan/Black one. If a EA working in McDonalds isn’t a proletarian, then neither is one of color. If there’s no New Afrikan proletariat, then there’s no New Afrikan lumpen proletariat either (”lumpen” literally means “broken”–if they were never of the proletariat, they could not become a ‘broken’ proletariat).”

Lumpen is usually translated as “rag.” Even in the United $tates we have a population of people who live in rags, who have very little to lose. However, we completely agree with Rashid’s logic here. And that is why MIM(Prisons) started using the term “First World lumpen” to distinguish from “lumpenproletariat.” There is little connection between the lumpen in this country and a real proletariat, with the exceptions being within migrant populations and some second generation youth who form a bridge between Third World proletariat, First World semi-proletariat and First World lumpen classes. Rashid continues,

“Yet the VLA [vulgar labor aristocracy] proponents recognize New Afrikan prisoners as ‘lumpen’ who are potentially revolutionary. Which begs the question, why aren’t they doing work within the oppressed New Afrikan communities where they’re less apt to be censored, if indeed they compose a lumpen sector?”

This is directed at us, so we will answer: historical experience and limited resources. As our readers should know, we struggle to do the things we do to support prisoner education programs and organizing work. We do not have the resources right now to do any serious organizing outside of prisons. And we made the conscious decision of how we can best use our resources in no small part due to historical experience of our movement. In other words we go where there is interest in revolutionary politics. The margins, the weakest links in the system, that is where you focus your energy. Within the lumpen class, the imprisoned lumpen have a unique relationship to the system that results in a strong contradiction with that system. The imprisoned population could also be considered 100% lumpen, whereas less than 20% of the New Afrikan nation is lumpen, the rest being among various bourgeois classes, including the labor aristocracy.

“And if the lumpen can be redeemed, why not EA [Euro-Amerikan] workers?”

Again, look at history. Read J. Sakai’s Settlers and read about the Black Panther Party. Today, look at the growing prison system and the regular murder of New Afrikan and other oppressed nation youth by the pigs. Look at where the contradictions and oppression are.

We can quote Marx, Engels and Lenin on the labor aristocracy to boost our position as well. But Rashid takes an ahistorical and dogmatic reading of these authors. Engels was on the cutting edge recognizing this question in the late 1800s. Lenin witnessed the rise of the labor aristocracy in the early 1900s, and it was the Comintern under Stalin’s leadership that settled the two-line struggle over this class during WWII.(5) Meanwhile, MIM has already addressed the fact that anyone who turns to Mao to determine their class analysis of the United $tates, when Mao never did his own class analysis of the United $tates, doesn’t really understand what Mao taught us.(6)

The only really interesting thing about this piece is that Rashid has further drawn a line between the MIM camp and the slew of anarchist and crypto-Trotskyist organizations who are still confused about where wealth comes from. They think people sitting at computers typing keys are exploited, and Rashid accuses our line of requiring “surplus value falling from the sky!” We already told you where the high wages in the imperialist countries came from, Rashid, the Third World proletariat! That is why the average Amerikan makes 25 times the average humyn, and why all Amerikans are in the top 13% in income globally. As the revisionists like to remind us, wealth disparity just keeps getting greater and greater under capitalism. The labor aristocracy today is like nothing that V.I. Lenin ever could have witnessed. We must learn from the methods of Marx and Lenin, not dogmatically repeat their analysis from previous eras to appease Amerikans.

I want to express that Under Lock & Key did well in the response to Turning The Tide’s (TTT) improper misrepresentation of MIM(Prisons). TTT has no true political line and those who think differently should debate on this issue.

The petit-bourgeoisie is not only the white nation people. Anyone who posses the ideological and social behaviors or the political views that are influenced by private property interests are in fact part of the petit-bourgeoisie. In Amerikkka those whose ideological principles are on this level are part of the oppressor nation. Many TTT constituents fail under these principles.

And as for the individual claiming to have been dropped by MIM(Prisons), it sounds like that person never was attempting to build. For those who want to attack an organization that has been staunch in true struggle and who’s line is correct in many ways, needs to, as the komrade who address this issue said, investigate before hs/she has the right to speak. Komrade Soso did well in the response and TTT should engage in “righteous” criticism not some back door attack on MIM(Prisons).

MIM(Prisons) must keep their energy on educating those who want to learn. Let’s not waste energy on fictitious attacks. MIM(Prisons) has been doing revolutionary work for many many years and has proven results. As said, history will tell.

MIM(Prisons) responds: We agree with this comrade that TTT demonstrates a petit-bourgeois political line, though we must be careful with our definitions of this term. We define the petit-bourgeoisie by their relations to the means of production, as an economic status, not just ideological principles. The fundamental point of debate with TTT is around the MIM(Prisons) scientific analysis of classes in imperialist countries, concluding that the vast majority of people in these countries are part of the petit-bourgeoisie. This is not because they have political views aligning with private property interests, but rather these views stem from their economic interests.