WHAT I BELIEVE IN NOW
Assessing the forty-eight years of organizing in compliance with the policy of criticism and self-criticism causes one to take stock of what was done and what needs to be done.
The movement for African Americans in the 1960s/70s/80s for national democratic rights (equality) in American society was basically spontaneous. While we mobilized millions of African Americans, and our allies, to break down de-jure segregation (apartheid with signs “separate but equal”), we were not able to transform that movement beyond charismatic personal leaders, or organize the African American working class to propel the entire American working class for a structural overthrow of the present capitalist system.
Over the years we created, among other forms of organizations, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), Black Panther Party (BPP), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, African Peoples Party (APP), Republic of New Africa (RNA) and African American electoral forms, i.e. campaigns, NBIPP, etc. All of these organizations, to some extent, were vanguard formations that had quasi-democratic programs, but few addressed the class issues of the African American working class on a local basis.
Often we talked about land and a national territory, without achieving or asking our people on the local level what they wanted. While we developed cadre, based on organizations, we were preoccupied with a short-range vision of a constant struggle, and failed to properly develop a “collective cadre” that continuously recruited young cadre to advance a protracted struggle. We forgot Ella Baker’s thinking of “creating a process that develops indigenous leadership”.
So our charge, after all these years, is how do we educate and develop indigenous, self-reliant leadership that attempts to solve issues that the masses are concerned with on a neighborhood basis? This does not negate workplace organizing, but combines the neighborhood with the workplace, (community) to raise the consciousness of the majority of African Americans in the city to view themselves as the Philadelphia African American working class fighting for its own interests. From this process, it is hoped that a permanent African American working class organization led by a “new indigenous leadership” comes into being. Such an organization would have to be a democratic collective (Queen Mother). Achieving such a goal, in my estimate, should be the goal of PCIAS.
What kind of worldview would such an organization have?
I think it should be a revolutionary internationalist one. The African American workers’ organization would be the base for a citywide multinational or multiracial People’s Party. After years of preparation it would legally try to take over the city.
Therefore, I am in agreement with PCIAS’s December 12, 2006 Summary Outlook and Overview of Institute Goals, which reads, in part:
The purpose of the Institute we propose to build is to insure the development of principled, disciplined indigenous inner city grassroots leadership prepared for generations of protracted struggle.
We intend to establish community legitimacy, our membership and our pool of participants through the creation of Umoja Circles based on the ward structure or what other historically cohesive grassroots environment we find in each section of the city that offers PCIAS an opportunity to provide leadership training with a concentration on the training of youth.
We intend to produce regularly scheduled Black Public Issues Forums to encourage all facilitate dialogue and debate on the history, progress and challenges facing the African American Community in the Delaware Valley; its leadership in every sphere of public life, as well as those who aspire to lead, those who aspire to organize, those who have questions about the challenges we face and those who offer alternatives.
It is proposed that the Umoja Circles will mature and develop indigenous, self-reliant, neighborhood (ward based) African American Workers Councils, organized to deal with the issues that concern the urban poor.
If our work building the Umoja Circles and the African American Workers Councils is patient, thorough and inclusive, we foresee the momentum created by the PCIAS building a citywide African American Workers Congress. The Congress should, in turn, initiate the formation of a citywide African American Workers Association that will elect its own leadership, develop its own program and determine its citywide priorities.
One model for this is the Eastern Service Workers Association, an organization that has been in existence for thirty years with a membership of twenty thousand workers.
THE PHILADELPHIA COMMUNITY INSTITUTE OF AFRICANA STUDIES, INC. will contribute to the development of African American Workers Councils and their program by providing research, analysis and political education in the service of developing and testing principled, independent alternatives to the status quo, while drawing on, learning from and sharing lessons from the struggles, initiatives, mistakes and successes of progressives everywhere.
In dealing with the three line struggle of African Americans achieving self-determination; going back to Africa, achieving national independence for the New African Nation in the black belt South, or integrating into a socialist America, can only come after a socialist revolution. Then a plebiscite (vote) can be taken among the African American people, where they determine their destiny.
First, I want to address the need to re-orient cadres, beyond revolutionary Black Nationalism, to a more revolutionary internationalist position. For instance, the Republic of New Africa (RNA) concept was advancement over the Nation of Islam, but that was an impractical concept for American development in that it does not negate the African American’s right to self-determination up to secession and reparation if they want. We, as activists, have no right to decide for our people, before they decide for themselves or that it will be ultimately decided in the process of a socialist revolution.
I no longer hold the thesis of a black belt nation; it is both mechanical and impractical. My position is that the socio-political productive forces of imperialism negate the national consciousness of African Americans because of the interdependence of African Americans on the system. Our quasi-nationality status allows the system to systematically cut the economic and political underpinnings of self-reliance. It distorts our culture through the electronic media, practicing ”cultural imperialism” and subdues “national consciousness” among African Americans. The rise of national consciousness (expectations) among African Americans often leads to revolutionary action by them, stimulating the same in other sectors of the multiracial, multinational and dual-gender proletariat. Cadres need to become reoriented.
If millions of African Americans are not eliminated by institutional racism by the year 2056, they will constitute 30% of the workforce of the United States, while Hispanics will constitute another 30%. That is 60% of the United States proletariat. With Asians and a section of European Americans, a radical/revolutionary People’s Party would have the potential of seizing power, either through the electoral process, or in the streets. Our perspective should be protracted.
While I still believe that African Americans need independent, revolutionary organization, we must form coalitions and alliances with other ethnic groups to be successful in a protracted struggle for socialist revolution in the United States. I see this coalition effort in the context of a multiracial People’s Party.
There are other economic factors occurring that are too complex to address here, but I will try to outline some of them. Due to the scientific-technical revolution, plastic is replacing steel. It is now much easier to transport machinery parts by truck, rather than by train or boat. The interstate highway system that circumvents cities has enabled assembly plants to relocate to interstate intersections. The assembled parts can then be easily shipped anywhere. In addition, urban villages (white, ethnic) have emerged around these plants, with malls and retail businesses around them. The economic growth that has come about within the past twenty years has created a Bantu situation around the major central cities. A new form of high tech apartheid system is evolving into residential segregation.
I am in agreement with ninety percent of C.L.R. James’ writing, particularly the U.S.S.R. as a state capitalist degenerated form of a workers state or statism (a new form according to Samir Amin) before it collapsed. I also agree with Fidel Castro, who said it was not socialism. In the beginning it had the support of the people, but the incorrect handling of the peasantry by Stalin and the Party (bureaucracy), the KGB, and the Red Army caused them to lose the people’s support. Fidel took a different course.
I feel that James and Grace Lee Boggs were the clearest thinkers (Facing Reality Correspondence) group. In summary, much of my/our collective development is due to them, with Queen Mother Audley Moore, of course, on the question of reparations.
While I agree with Grace Lee Boggs on her program and model for a green “organic” local development, I disagree that her model applies to all cities. In addition, the model doesn’t advance class struggle. Even in Detroit, the struggle to unionize the service industries, hospitals and universities, continues. She(James Boggs) is correct in the sense that the scientific-technical revolution has led to structural transformation of the mode of production in the United States, Canada, Europe, and many places in the Third World. The need to update Dialectical Materialism to Dialectical Humanism is right on, but cadre need to study Dialectical Materialism first. This will help them to understand where and why it failed, how it advanced humanity, and what positives can be taken from it in harnessing the “spiritual will” of humanity in harmony with nature.
In Philadelphia, out of a population of a million and a half people, African Americans constitute approximately 678,000-700,000, or 45% to 48% of the total. Of that there are approximately 200,000 African American Muslims.
The areas for the struggle for parity, (national democratic), still exist within the construction industry (the building trades) which is 85% white, living outside of Philadelphia. Being a city with a port, we need to investigate the docks in terms of unionization, and an “African American class consciousness”. This is where African American working class leadership has historically come from.
The hospitals and universities are the largest employers of African American workers in the city. The University of Pennsylvania, University and Hospital is the largest, with Temple University being number six. We must address the question of revolutionary political education. We should establish schools without walls that teach the dialectics of organizing, as well as prepare cadre in African American history, particularly local struggle, along with mathematics and the higher sciences (The Algebra Project).
The Philadelphia School System of 210,000 students is 85% African American, 14.5% Hispanic, 14.2% white and 5.3% Asian American. We should make a concerted effort to develop cadres among them, tied to the service sector working class, as well as to achieve equality in the building trades in the city.
I presently think that, by creating a process of temporarily solving or winning small victories, first around issues that the community is concerned with, we will be able to develop the disciplined cadre that is able to sustain on a protracted basis, an alternative movement utilizing solar energy, cooperative businesses, urban gardens, etc. Within this process we should concern ourselves with how to uproot reactionaries, counterrevolutionaries, enemies of the people and the corrupt, who pose as revolutionaries in Philadelphia.
I feel that all revolutionaries should join the NAACP and utilize its resources to advance the struggle. While we need to talk about self-determination, self-education, self-defense, self-reliance and self-discipline, we need to deemphasize nationalist rhetoric and consciously educate young cadres.
We should be concerned with control of our communities, ward organizations and working both within and outside, building the infrastructure for the eventual emergence of a grassroots People’s Party in Philadelphia, based on the demand for jobs, with a livable wage, for the working class.
We must encourage African Americans to build a network and to develop young leadership. I feel that we should advance a program for the economic reconstruction of America. We should call for the nationalization of banks and big business, for the government to regulate 70% of the economy, advance monies to establish workers’ cooperatives with 15% of the economy, allow 15% for private enterprise and free health care and university education (mixed economy). This is what I think we should project to the public as mass demands.
Muhammad AhmadPage 111/15/2018