If I have dwelt at some length on the separatist concepts of Baraka, Carmichael, Foreman, etc., it is because liberation cannot come from an ideology that would have the effect of misdirecting the battalions striving for Black liberation, separating them from today’s “great strategic ground.” It is for this reason that I felt it an imperative necessity to expose the ideology of neo-Pan-Africanism. And I have challenged these talented but tragically mistaken proponents of self-defeating separatism in the hope that they will seriously reappraise their views.
I not only oppose monopoly’s plunder of the material fruits of Black oppression. I also oppose its appropriation of the intellectual capacities of Black people. All who would fight for liberation must move away from concepts and strategies that serve to strengthen the enemy against the people. To do this calls for the kind of courage that will place the saving and advance of Black liberation ahead of “saving face.”
In an interview given two days before the 1972 elections, but released—in line with Nixon’s instructions—after the elections, Nixon revealed many of the aims behind his campaign deceptions.
Against a background of years of unbridled terrorism in Vietnam, increased to an unprecedented level during his first term as President, Nixon made the following statement regarding the U.S. international role: “Let me say on the world scene, I would change it just a little.” (New York Times, November 10, 1972) Without his expanding armaments budget, Nixon went on—accompanied by reductions in funds for social, educational, housing, health and job needs—we would have “a weaker America, turned inward without the U.S. on the world scene, smaller nations would be living in terror, because where there is a vacuum, that vacuum is filled.”
Does not Vietnam expose what Nixon means by a “vacuum”? When the long Vietnamese struggle for self-determination succeeded in driving out Japanese and then French imperialism, U.S. imperialism interpreted this to mean that a “vacuum” had been created! But this “vacuum” turned out to be the heroic, embattled Vietnamese people successfully resisting the greatest and most brutal military power in history.
And now, even after the people of Vietnam and the United States have had to pay so dearly for Wall Street’s vain attempt to fill the “vacuum” in Vietnam, Nixon has elevated his “vacuum” doctrine to the center of U.S. imperialism’s strategy in relation to the liberation struggles in all of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
On the domestic scene, Nixon spoke out sharply against “permissiveness.” This is the man whose record of permissiveness to corruption in government and politics, to bankers, Pentagon generals and corporate war profiteering, and to racism and racists exceeds that of all past administrations. Nixon, of course, was opposing “permissiveness” for those who insist that the people need jobs, and an end to war, racism and inequality.
The election results mean, according to Nixon, that it is not “government’s job everytime there (is) a problem to make people more and more dependent it to give way to their whims.”
By disposing of demands for an end to racism, decent jobs, education, housing and health as “whims,” Nixon made it clear that his “vacuum” doctrine of aggression against liberation movements internationally is also basic domestic policy. This doctrine contains the seeds of the threat of fascism and still more war.
There can be no doubt that monopoly aims at replacing “benign neglect” with the iron boot. The threat of this ominous national strategy is so great as to overshadow the betrayal of Reconstruction, the rise of the Klan, of lynch law and jim crow. As Lenin said of this earlier betrayal, reaction in the U.S. today is prepared to “do everything possible and impossible for the most shameful and despicable oppressions.”
While these new oppressions would first be unleashed against Black people, they would not end there. They threaten labor and the oppressed and exploited of all colors with something worse even than a return to the days when it was a crime to organize. What is involved now is the threat of the “despicable oppressions” of fascism.
Some 15 years ago, Henry Kissinger wrote that leadership requires a:
. . . willingness to define purposes perhaps only vaguely apprehended by the multitude. A society learns only from experience: it “knows” only when it is too late to act. (Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, p. 431.)
Nixon, like Kissinger, operates on the premise that “the multitude” learns only when it is “too late to act”. And it is true that monopoly’s real aims during the 1972 elections were not “apprehended” by millions because of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of deception.
After the elections, Nixon laid claim to a “new majority.” But there is only one really meaningful majority that can be formed in the U.S. today—a great anti-monopoly majority. It is “too late” for monopoly to prevent the emergence of this new people’s majority!
While clearly recognizing the grave new dangers in monopoly’s strategy, we must also recognize that the key factor emerging from the elections is the broader opportunities for struggle against this sharper threat. These opportunities are the basis for the “great strategic ground” in the fight for Black liberation, in the battle against new escalations Of racism, poverty, reaction and war.
It is interesting to remember that bourgeois nationalists—from super-radicals like Eldridge Cleaver to conservatives like Roy Wilkins—opposed Martin Luther King’s efforts to project a new strategy for the post-civil rights period. Opposition came from Wilkins and from others on the Right because of their anti-Communist, gradualist resistance to mass struggle. And opposition came also from such pseudo-radicals as Carmichael, Foreman and Huey Newton (who has since gone full circle to the Right) because they were looking for adventurist, instant solutions. Neo-Pan-Africanism appears now as a catch-all ideology, objectively bringing about a strange kind of unity between “militant” and conservative forces in the Black liberation movement. This unholy alliance has emerged as one of the main road- blocks to regaining the offensive based on a new level of Black self-organization and action within a broad anti-monopoly struggle.
Paradoxically, with all their talk of Africa, the neo-Pan-Africanists in the U.S. reject the central lesson to be learned from the African struggle, a lesson that should be applied to the Black liberation struggle in this country: Africans are not writing off the importance of their struggles to win political independence despite the fact that independence from neo-colonialism is far from completed in most cases. Nor do they dismiss the importance of independence struggles because of the day-to-day life of poverty and exploitation by international capital that are still with them and have in fact even increased in certain countries since political independence. The peoples of Africa understand post-independence as the new stage in the struggle against neo-colonialism.
In the U .S., those who underestimate and even downgrade the civil rights struggles do not understand the relationship between the civil rights period and the post-civil rights stage—that is, they do not grasp the relationship between democracy and liberation.
The neo-Pan-Africanist, separatist disparagers of the civil rights movement because it did not end poverty and oppression are unwitting ideological aides of the racist monopolists who are trying to turn back the clock, to drive the Black people still further to the back of the bus of oppression and poverty.
In the aftermath of the 1972 elections, U.S. imperialism seeks to develop new and ever-more threatening offensives against the oppressed and exploited, nationally and internationally. To regain the people’s offensive against monopoly is the challenge of our time. This is the imperative that motivated Dr. King in his search for a post-civil rights strategy to restore the momentum of mass struggle based on a new anti-war, anti-poverty, anti-monopoly program based on a coalition of the working class, and the poor and oppressed of all races. As Martin Luther King wrote:
This is the challenge. If we will dare to meet it honestly, historians in future years will have to say there lived a great people—a black people—who bore their burdens of oppression in the heat of many days and who, through tenacity and creative commitment, injected new meaning into the veins of American life. (WHERE WE GO FROM HERE?. Bantam Edition, New York, 1968, p. 158.)
Next: SOURCES OF NEO-PAN-AFRICANISM