By Any Means Necessary
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The Black Liberation Movement at the Crossroads* Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford, Jr.)
In the late 1970s, the Black Liberation Movement began to slowly regroup from the state’s (U.S. Imperialism’s) attacks waged against it during the 1960s and early 1970s. The United League of Mississippi successfully fought the KKK, and united fronts and coalitions formed and mobilized against police murders and racist mayors. The Nation of Islam reorganized as a collective force, the Republic of New Afrika and the African People’s Party survived, despite a continuous ten-year onslaught by the police against them. Revolutionary Nationalists became a leading viable force, mobilizing some 5,000 New Afrikans to march on the United Nations, demanding prisoner of war status for captured BLA soldiers and charging the U.S. government with the crime of genocide against New Afrikans and oppressed nations of the world. As the 1980s approached, the mass movement of the Black Liberation Movement seemed to be on the rise once again. The Miami Rebellion (an embryonic insurrection) and the general call for a National Black United Front and a National Black Independent Political Party, both of which have become defunct, were concrete positive developments. This gave the appearance that the movement was advancing at a faster pace than it actually was. With obvious compliance with the military-intelligence-industrial complex, a powerful, politically sophisticated, and illegal paramilitary right-wing army numbering at least two million began to surface. It has terrorized hundreds, if not thousands in the last ten years with little or no publicity. Such a counter-revolutionary military onslaught caught many New Afrikans by surprise, because even many revolutionaries failed to realize that bourgeois democracy is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The impending crisis for imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism, is mounting; the right-wing element of the bourgeoisie has gained hegemony in the monopolistic capitalist class circles. They are opting for fascism, military dictatorship, genocide, or any combination of these to ward off the internal contradictions that the international capitalist crisis is producing. As a result, racism (national chauvinism) is again being fanned to further divide the U.S. proletariat (which is already divided) using “Reborn Christians” and “Make America Great Again” as its cover for a “native born American style Fascist movement.” With this crisis, the New Afrikan nationality is grossly affected. New Afrikan youth are 60-80% unemployed, are grossly affected by the increased use of automation and robotization in industries; and as things get worse, unemployment among all New Afrikans will increase. Thus, at a time when New Afrikan nationalist formations are re-emerging, the New Afrikan nationality is facing its worst crisis since the late 1880s. What is the weakness in the Black Liberation Movement? The central weakness is there is no tactical plan of action for New Afrikan revolutionaries inside the imperialist U.S. There is no theoretical guide using a humanist, dialectical, materialist approach to address the “real” unique conditions New Afrikans face, described in terms New Afrikans can understand; there is no Malcolm X style program for the New Afrikan movement for self-determination, human rights, and democracy. Before the New Afrikan proletariat can fulfill its historical task as leader of the Black Liberation Movement, it must be awakened to both its national and class interest. Being in the belly of the beast, the New Afrikan proletariat will not move on its own interest unless it consciously understands its interest as a proletariat of an oppressed nation. This is called “national consciousness.” Only when the New Afrikan proletariat reaches a * Note: The original draft was written and circulated in the mid 1980s, re-edited in 2008, and attempted to update in 2018 as a guide for activists of the new movement.