Address to the Black Masses
By Comrade Pan Afrikan Maoist
Attention to all my black Brothers and Sisters in the US; It is no secret that society as we can see it today is in a state of turmoil. Inflation is up, a potential World War as a result of competition between Ukraine and its allies vs the Russian Federation, the continuation of a world pandemic in the form of the Covid-19 Virus, which continues to mutate and form even deadlier strands that seems to make the baseline effects of the original Covid strained even worse and requires continued Immunization, lest the Virus become endemic much like the common cold or Flu.
To compound on top of this, it seems our politicians, those who we elected and choose to serve us, are not making the situation any better. In particular, we saw the culmination of the Crypto-Fascist former president Donald Trump and his appeal to the white settler working class, on January 6th, 2021 CE, when a large group of his supporters attacked the US Capitol Building. Groups that participated in these attacks included QAnon, Proud Boys, 3 Percenters and Oath Keepers amongst other far-right groups, all of whom have members who are/were law enforcement and military, and all have professed either admiration of or outright support of Trump in the past and present. Further within the past years, specifically the years 2016-now, we saw the rise of the dubbed Alt-Right movement, a collection of Neo-Conservative, Fascist, Neo-Nazi and other far-right tendencies that sprang up in the rise of Trump during the latter half of the 2010s. However let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, despite my seeming emphasis on Trump, I want to state first and foremost that Trump himself is not the issue. Donald Trump is the logical conclusion, the culmination of years of Capitalist ideology and economy, and the existence of settler-colonial states such as the United States of America, Israel, Australia and the like. Individuals such as Lauren Southern, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Mike Enoch, Jordan Peterson, Gavin McGinus are the result of Capitalism’s inherent contradictions seeking to be resolved in the most reactionary of ways. Let me explain.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s and the large-scale overthrow of the System of Feudalism, that system many of you might recognise or associate with Lords and Serfs of the Middle European Ages, Capitalism has become a global phenomenon. Within Capitalism however, exists a number of flaws, tendencies and contradictions that can be seen and have negative repercussions not just on one particular country’s economy, but to the world as a whole. Relating to us specifically, it is no secret that the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, which began in 1619, and ended in the US in 1865, happened, history shows as such. However, many would be quick to dismiss this history as being in the past and having no effect in the present. Let me assure you that this is further from the truth as can be.
Many of you might remember my usage of the phrase Settler and Settler-Colonialism earlier in the document, let me explain these terms. What we define as settler-colonialism is the process in which a country or continent, in our example the US, we have Europe, traveling to and colonizing a different section of the world for the purpose of usage of Land. This is differentiated between classic colonization as in the case of settler colonization, instead of the people residing in these territories being used and under the control of the Colonizer country, the Colonizer country instead actively genocides and depopulates the territory so that the people of said Colonizer country can use the land as their own. These people who move to this territory from the Colonizer country to the Colonized and depopulated territory are settlers. In the case of the United States, the various existing Native American populations who for thousands of years existed on, maintained, and used the land were largely wiped out, or forcibly moved to reservations, small snippets of their own land, while the majority of the territory was occupied by French, Spanish, English, Portuguese and other colonial powers to become one of their earliest settler colonies. As such, the various people who came from these countries and into the new territory would be described as Settlers. Our history books tell us that these various people started out as simply seeking freedom from religious persecution. How ironic then, would it be that these people and the powers they represented, oppressed the Natives and their religions, forcing upon them Christianity, which supposedly they were attempting to escape.
With that explanation out of the way, where do we as black people fit into the picture? Unlike the various white populations of Europe, who chose to migrate to this new territory to make a new life for themselves, we Africans, our ancestors, were forcibly brought here by various European Colonizers to be the mass workforce that would build this new country, dragged from our home contenint Africa, and dragged to these “new” Continents which would be known as North and South America, with majority of us being brought to the country that would be called the United States. For years until the American Civil War, we would be forcibly worked day and night, picking cotton and other materials from the land for the profits of White Settlers. Even during the Industrial Revolution, and the founding of large industrial textile and other mills in the North of the US, cotton which was used for textile, was being traded from the South to the North. In other words, we didn’t just build the Southern US, we built the North as well.
With this in mind, we all know of the American Civil War. Many wish to attempt to interpret the war in the eye of States Rights, that the American South was being oppressed by the North and that the war was fought over the right of states to have differing laws to one another, in this case, whether or not slavery would be legal. This attempt at changing the interpretation of the war is mostly perpetrated by mostly right wing, mostly reactionary figures who wish to change the lens of history to ones that paints America as a bastion of rights that bled over itself to give us blacks Freedom. This also tends to coincide with the white liberal position on Black people in America, that it is through liberalism, non-violence and due process that we were granted the rights that we have today, painting the liberals as the benevolent givers of rights while we blacks sat idly by with puppy eyes, hoping someone in their pity would see our mistreatment, and work for justice on our behalf.
To put it bluntly, this is Bullshit. The American Civil war wasn’t fought out of the kindness of Abraham Lincoln, or for states rights. It was fought because the ruling class, what we call the Bourgeoisie particularly the American Bourgeoisie was afraid that black slaves, if continued to be mistreated would rebel in overthrow everything that the American Bourgeoisie, and the settlers wanted to build. We see this in the Hatian Revolution, the uprising by Nat Turner, in the leadership and the expediting of slaves to free countries, and the killing of would be settlers who wanted to reclaim their “property” by Harriet Tubman. Revolutions and uprisings like these were common and inevitable in the Americans so long as the Bourgeoisie continued the system of chattel slavery. So to prevent this, the ruling class, through their representative Abraham Lincoln, current US President at the time, wrote up a document known as the Emancipation Proclamation, and freeing the slaves in the Northern Territories. The Southern Bourgeoisie, who owned large crops of private property(keep this in mind for later) and capital in the form of land and slaves, which were considered property and not persons, wanted to keep their slaves and their agrarain economy. As such, states began to secede from the Union and formed their own union known as the Confederate states of America. This led to the American Civil War, and can be accurately identified as the real reason why slavery as a system was seemingly abolished in US.
Take note of the word seemingly, because slavery was not in fact abolished wholesale. You see, in the amendment that is the 13th, which is the amendment that was proclaimed to abolish slavery, a provison was put in to allow slavery or involuntary servitude under the condition that a person or party be convinced of a crime. What this essential translates to, is that if you are convicted of a crime, legally the state can subject you to slavery or involuntary servitude.
This provision would become key as soon after the civil rights era. After the failure of the Reconstruction Era that followed after the American Civil War, black Americans were treated on the whole as second class citizens. We were not afforded the same privileges as the White Settlers, nor were we economically reimburse or assisted by the US Government during this period. As a result, Black Americans found themselves on the bottom of the American economic hierarchy, drastically below the income of average whites during the time period. This unfortunately did not improve, and became a lot worse during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and the 1930s. Even after the economic boom of America after WW2, black Americans could still be found on the bottom rung of American society, not only economically but socially as well. THis is where we transition into the civil rights era.
In school we hear many stories about Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa parks and other various civil rights leaders. More importantly however, we hear about all the non-violent ones, and how through their non-violence protests, sit-ins and other demonstrations, were they blessed by the graceful Lyndon B Johnson with his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However I should let you know, that the special focus on these individuals, in the framework of non-violent resistance and exclusively civil rights, is a lie of omission. In truth, these individuals, while playing a good part in the movement, were not the main reason why the civil rights act was passed. It was passed because like before with slavery, the American Bourgoisie feared the black powderkeg. The fear that the black working class in unity with itself and other sections of the working class or the proletariat as it is officially known, would dismantle everything the Bourgeoisie had spent at that point centuries to build. Racism both in the economic base or the economic system as well as the superstructure or the social and cultural aspects of society has been used by the Bourgeoisie as both a means to create and use a section of the working class, in this instance black americans, and as a means to keep the working class weak and inept, in this case preventing unity with the White proletariat and the proletariat. But what does this word mean? The word Proletariat simply means those who earn their income by selling their labor power, or more simply, those whose primary way of earning money is by working for someone else. We contrast this with the Bourgeoisie, those in the ruling class, who don’t work, but instead earn their income from the exploitation of and the labor of the proletariat, and capital. It is this class, the Bourgeoisie that seeks to partition the wider proletariat in America to keep us weak and inept, and through the raising of False Consciousness, in this instance among racial lines, that keeps us divided. So then the question is, what can we do to remedy these issues? Simple, Communism, under the direction of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party.
Many might be taken aback by this. After all, isn’t Communism when a big bad government, 100 Million dead, no Innovation, no iPhone, and everyone starves?
Meming aside, the answer is no. Communism is not the boogeyman that the ruling bourgeoisie has taught you and in fact is the key to our liberation. First off Communism is a historical mode of production, much like Capitalism and Feudalism. When people think of Communism, they think of the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, and other countries. None of these countries were communist. With the exception of Venezuela, which has and always was Capitalist, These countries were, Socialist. When we say Socialism, we define it as the transitional period between Capitalism and Communism, where steps are made to transition away from Capitalism and toward Communism, these steps being the abolition of Private Property, abolition of Market Economy and implementation of Planned Economy, and the establishment of what we refer to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and the subsequent suppression of the the Bourgeoisie, who you remember are the ruling class in Capitalism. To quote Vladimir Lenin “The goal of Socialism is Communism”.
See earlier when I mentioned the lie of omission there are also a couple of lies of commission or what we call just lies. First, I should make it clear that in the following paragraphs, unless explicitly stated, I will be using Communism to refer to Socialism and socialist countries, as when the ruling class bring up the two, they tend to blend them, as such all points that refute these anti-communist lies, also are meant to refute the lies told about socialist countries. To begin, Communism did nit in fact brutally murder millions of people. The main source of these figures come from a book called the Black Book of Communism. Said book contains a large amount of Historical Revisionism, Inflated Numbers, Lies, and conclusions that are so bad, that even wikipedia, which is infamous in not being the most reputable source on information by itself, has had to admit that the book contains these errors, enough errors in fact, for the book to be completely rejected and thrown into the waste bin of history as a complete fabrication of history and a bold lie meant to deceive everyday individuals. Despite this Bourgeois academics and figures cite these statistics laid out in the book as the supposed death count of Communism. They also fail to mention the death count of Capitalism, which vastly outnumbers the supposed death count of communism every YEAR. When talking about the deaths of communism, most historians point to the so-called Holodomor, or the purposeful starvation of Ukranians by Stalin and other communists. This of course is not true. The starvation instead came as a result of Kulaks, who were the ruling peasants in Ukraine, purposefully burning their own crops, and killing their own livestock as a result of the collectivization of grain and other materials by the Soviet Union during the first five year plan. The second major source is the Great Leap Forward in Mao era China, during their second five year plan. While mistakes were made during this period, the actual death toll is nowhere near the amount proposed in the book, and even to this day bourgeois sources continue to change the toll at random as they can’t decide it seems. Another part of this comes from the Great Purge 1936-1938.
Innovation in Communist countries was just as good if not better. The first mobile phone, lasik eye surgery and tetris was made in the Soviet Union. The soviet union went from a semi-feudal backwater within the Russian Empire and it’s surrounding countries to a space exploring superpower by the 1950s. You don’t get there without innovating and socialism is perfectly fine at doing so. In fact there is much more reason to innovate under socialism than in Capitalism as in Capitalism goods are made to make money and thus sticking to formula what works in the past is better than exploring potentially new ideas that won’t make money, hence why in the movie industry for example the dominant moves are all Superheros and why new mediums such as Star Wars, Terminator and the like, new Ideas at the time, have received crappy remakes in comparison to what was released back then.
In Socialist countries, after collectivization efforts were achieved, these countries in particular Russia and China, never experienced cyclical hunger after these efforts were completed.
Finally, the final part is that these countries were dictatorships. It should be noted, that in the Soviet Union, despite what Bourgeois academics may say, in reality Stalin was 100% applicable to the people. Stalin himself could be removed by the Central Committee at any time and not all of his policies he wanted were passed, nor where all of his opponents were killed. Kalinin and Molotov opposed some of his propositions yet were still allowed in the chambers of government.
Some of you might be saying “Well this sounds all good, but how does any of this relate to us?”. I’m glad you asked. If you recall earlier, I had mentioned some lies of omission by the schooling system a while back. What I mean by this, is the existence of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party, founded by Huey P Newton, and Bobby Seale, was an org founded in the 1960s for the purpose of self defense against settler vigilantes who routine engaged in lynchings and killings of Black men, women and children, as well as the police who as I will explain in a bit, are complicit and part of the Capitalist system that oppresses us. When going to buy their first shotguns, the group sold books, one of which was Mao’s little red book, to college kids for money. This continued until one decided to read and study the words the book contained, and from there the BPP interest in Mao and Mao-Zedong Thought began. Huey further expanded on these works with his theory of Intercommunalism and and his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide. He in particular wanted special attention to be paid to the Lumpenproletariat, that class that sits below the proletariat that gets their money from illegal means, such as drugs, gun running and other criminal activites, and in contrast to the Lumpenbourgeoisie, who are the leaders of these groups such as Gangs, Cartels and Human Trafficking rings. Majority of the time individuals enter into these groups as they tend not to have many other options when it comes to seeking gainful employment as this was during a time when mostly white high paying jobs were not too keen on hiring black citizens to work in their firms. As such the members of these organizations, if reached out to, could coalesce into the wider movement as these individuals had nothing to lose and everything to gain. We also can commemorate Malcolm X, another figure that until high school, I was never taught about. Malcolm above all exposed how liberalism, especially white liberals, are our enemy, as they seek to deter and route the movement for liberation into electoralism and due process, while we routinely continue to suffer day in and day out. He also showed how violence, and fear of violence is the driving force on many of the decisions the bourgeoisie class have made historically in regards to the black proletariat, and how rights are not given by the graciousness of figures, but are earned by bloodshed and violence.
During this period however, we also saw the rise of Gang Violence and Drug use amongst our neighborhoods, being kicked off the war on drugs, and the founding of gangs such as the Crips, Bloods and their various sets. This major war on drugs was a method the Bourgeoisie used in combination of harsh sentences for simple possession and selling of drugs, even weed. With this came a boom in incarceration particularly of Hispanic and black populations, mostly men, in these institutions, where legally the were required to labor on behalf of the US state.
Many might say that because this is all in the past, we should move on, however as before, they are extremely incorrect. As many may know, recently in this year 2022 CE a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York took place in which a settler by the name of Payton Gendron, went into a grocery store located in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, and shot dead 10 people and wounded more, carry body armor and deliberately targeting only black victims. Many may also remember 2020 as the year in which Ahmaud Arbery, was killed by two settler Vigilantes, for supposedly breaking into a construction site, and George Floyd, was forcibly choked out by Settler Police officer Derek Chauvin, who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for 10 minutes, as well as Breyonna Taylor, who was murdered by police in here own apartment after the police initiated a no-knock raid on the apartment as they believed that her then boyfriend was a suspect in an investigation. We can also see the shooting of Jacob Blake, who was shot while attempting to break up a fight, and was shot 7 times in the back. This led to the Kenosha uprising in which a 17 white settler named Kyle Rittenhouse who came from Illinois, shot 3 individuals who were participating in the protests.
Further back we can see individuals such as Travon Martin, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner were more examples of Settler violence both statewide and by individual settlers.
In short, the Panthers choose Communism as Communism offered the only means by which we as black people can truly experience National Liberation and Self Determination for ourselves. These killings that I listed above are going to continue in the future unless we organize ourselves and destroy the system of Capitalism and this Settler Colonial project we call the United States. What type of Communism should we choose however? Studying history we can see special emphasis being put on National Liberation by the policies of the Bolsheviks, who wanted to unite Russians with other oppressed groups such as Lithuanians, Lativans, Belurussians, Ukrainains, etc. As well as implementing Anti-Racist policies that can be attested to by Indiviutals like Paul Robeson and Margaret Glasgow. We can commemorate individuals like Assata Shakur who alongside Eldritch CLeaver, founded the Black Liberation Army, and Robert F Williams, who founded Radio Free Dixie, both of whom fled to and were protected by Castro in Cuba, after being persecuted by the US state and Law Enforcement. Mao Zedong, also invited and was upheld by the panthers as an influential figure in their ideology. For these reasons as well as others, I choose Maoism, the highest form of Marxism, which itself is the most scientific form of Communism, being put into practice both today and in years past. Only through Maoism, thorough revolution and uniting with the White Proletariat and other sections of the Proletariat, can we achieve true liberty and freedom.
Works Cited:
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/black-skin-red-land-african-americans-and-soviet-experiment
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/reconstruction.html
https://www.axios.com/2020/06/16/china-racism-black-panthers
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/harriet-tubman
https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/
https://maoismforthemasses.wordpress.com/2022/11/05/dictatorship-in-name-only/
Media I recommend to learn more about communism and debunking of anti-communist myths:
Youtube:
Playlists:
Quora:
https://maoismforthemasses.quora.com/
Blogs:
https://maoismforthemasses.wordpress.com/
Includes a great reading list to be up to date on Maoism
https://blacklikemao.medium.com/
https://www.bannedthought.net/Peru/index.htm
http://www.bannedthought.net/India/CPI-Maoist-Docs/index.htm