Today those who represent almost all tendencies of neo-Pan-Africanism, from radical to conservative, claim to be carrying forward their ideological viewpoints on the basis of the heritage of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah and Edward Blyden. In making this claim, they present a homogenized version of the views of these men—some of whom advocated opposing ideologies. In this way, the neo-Pan-Africanists attempt to batten on the authority of historic figures to gain credibility for their mixed bag of unscientific, bourgeois ideology masquerading as Pan-Africanism.
This is a “Pan-Africanism” which hardly resembles that of the father of this concept, Du Bois, nor of Nkrumah, who, in the years before his overthrow, moved toward Du Bois’ views. Instead it reflects far more closely the concepts of Padmore, who broke openly with Nkrumah.
The ideology of these historic figures does not, as was discussed in a previous chapter, constitute a single line of development within the Black experience, as today’s neo-Pan-Africanists would have us believe. Thus, it is unfortunate that even such critics of neo-Pan-Africanism as Robert Allen, Adolph L. Reed and Earl Ofari—all of them young and talented—appear to accept in some degree the basic aspects of the very version of “Pan-Africanism” they apparently seek to challenge.
Robert Allen, for example, is one of those who express the view that 20th Century Pan-Africanism involves only a single line of undifferentiated development within the continuum of Black history:
In the last half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, blacks from the West Indies and North America traveled to Africa or met with Africans in Europe. Among these Pan-African travelers were such well-known figures as Edward Blyden, Henry Sylvester Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and C.L.R. James, to name a few. Although these men differed in their political and economic views, all were staunch advocates of black self-determination. Taken together, their activities in the Pan-African movement contributed directly to the ideological birth of African nationalism, and the consequent rise of national liberation in Africa. (An Historical Synthesis: Black Liberation and World Revolution. by Robert Allen, appearing in The Black Scholar, February, 1972, page 15.)
While Allen takes note of the differing “political and economic views” of these men, he nevertheless lapses into the neo-Pan-Africanist myth that obscures the fundamentally different trends these men represent in the history of the Black liberation movement in this country, as well as in the liberation movement on the African continent. Their roles within the 19th and 20th century struggles against racist oppression cannot be “taken together.” The differences in their ideologies and roles are too vast to be so easily dismissed.
For instance, Frederick Douglass made a monumental contribution to the strategy that smashed the slave power. In the same period, however, Edward Blyden’s role can be described only as objectively playing into the hands of the slavocracy. Nor did Blyden contribute to the “consequent rise of national liberation struggles in Africa.” On the contrary, he assisted in ideologically preparing the way for the establishment of U.S. capitalism’s beachheads on the African continent. Thus, Blyden was the ideological predecessor not of Du Bois, but of Marcus Garvey and George Padmore.
Blyden, Garvey, Padmore and C. L. R. James can indeed be “taken together.” They were the forerunners of contemporary neo-Pan-Africanism. And it is to neo-Pan-Africanism that the U.S. imperialists have assigned a special role in diverting the Black liberation movement in the U.S. and—by enlarging upon Blyden’s initial “contribution”—to assist in their strategy of massively expanding neo-colonial beachheads on the African continent.
Certainly Robert Allen is correct when he writes, in the same article, that “the new stage of imperialism has necessitated a class and ideological struggle within Africa. Racial unity alone is no answer to neo-colonialism.” Nor is racial unity alone the answer to Black oppression in the United States!
Thus, in overlooking the fundamental differences between Du Bois and Padmore, Allen contradicts himself. Du Bois stood for racial unity. He sought that unity through an ideology and program which came increasingly into conflict with the concepts of Padmore, who a racial “unity” around separatist, anti-Communist policies—representing an abandonment of the masses of Africans and of Black people in the U.S. to the class aims of the Black elite on both continents, consequently encouraging accommodation to neo-colonialism and imperialism.
Unlike Padmore, Du Bois never counterposed racial unity in Africa and the United States to wider anti-imperialist struggles encompassing the working classes and oppressed peoples of the world. Du Bois rejected the racial separatism and anti-Communism at the core of Padmore’s non-struggle policies of accommodation to imperialism.
When, at the turn of the century Du Bois stated that “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line,” he also boldly asserted that liberation could come only through unity—in place of capitalism’s division of the peoples at the line of difference in color and nationality.
The 1905 Russian Revolution took place at the time when Du Bois was organizing the Niagara movement. He immediately recognized this struggle as one involving the unity of many nations and races within the prison of imperialism—with its working-class solidarity across the “color line”—as the harbinger of the solution to the problem of the 20th Century. Though the 1905 Revolution was defeated, Du Bois hailed it as the prelude to the October Socialist Revolution:
Courage, brothers! The battle for humanity is not lost or losing. The Slav is rising in his might, the Yellow minions are testing liberty, the black Africans are writhing toward the light, and everywhere the Laborer is opening the gates of Opportunity and Peace. (Wm. Du Bois, Scholar and Humanitarian Freedom Fighter, a collection of articles prepared by members of the Africa Institute of the USSR Academy of Science, other Research Institutes and African and Soviet leaders. Novosti Publishing House, Moscow, 1971, page 61.)
In an earlier chapter, the final break between Du Bois and Padmore was discussed as occurring when Padmore maneuvered Du Bois’ exclusion from the All-African Conference in Accra, Ghana, in 1958. It is significant that on the eve of this Conference, Du Bois was in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, One of the five Central Asian Republics formed of the many peoples freed by the October Revolution from Czarist oppression.
Denied an invitation to the Accra Conference, Du Bois managed to have a message presented to the gathering. While not explicitly mentioning Padmore, Du Bois’ statement—which called for Africa’s solidarity with the socialist countries, for commitment to world-wide socialist, anti-imperialist unity—was unequivocal in its rejection of Padmore’s anti-Communist, separatist policies.
At that time Padmore’s policies were having their intended effect—they were influencing Ghana’s internal and external positions in favor of neo-colonialism and its accomplices within the country. As Padmore came into increasingly open collision with Du Bois, it was inevitable that Nkrumah would move closer and closer to Du Bois’ internationalist, anti-imperialist Pan-Africanism. Climaxing his open break with Padmore’s anti-Communist, anti-Soviet perversion of Pan-Africanism, Nkrumah invited Du Bois to join him in Ghana. Before coming to Ghana, Du Bois announced his membership in the CPUSA.
In his message to the Accra Conference, Du Bois stated that the socialist countries:
. . . which with infinite sacrifice and pouring out of blood and tears, are at last able to offer weak nations needed capital on better terms than the West . . . Its acceptance involves no bonds which a free Africa may not safely assume. It certainly does not involve slavery and colonial control which is the price which the West has demanded, and still demands. (The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, International Publishers, New York, 1968, page 403.)
Du Bois then went on to say that imperialism:
. . . offers to let some of your smarter and less scrupulous leaders become fellow capitalists with the white exploiters, if in turn they induce the nation’s masses to pay the awful cost . . . strive against it with every fibre of your bodies and souls. A body of local private capitalists, even if they are black, can never free Africa; they will simply sell it into new slavery to old masters overseas. (Ibid., page 403. My emphasis—H.W.)
Thus Du Bois’ message exposed both the internal and external implications of the “Pan-Africanism” concocted by George Padmore. Du Bois demonstrated that neo-Pan-Africanism—despite its demagogic emphasis on internal racial unity for Blacks—in reality foments disunity among oppressed Africans and Blacks in the United States. This is its effect because it subordinates the masses and their to the narrow nationalist aims of a minority.
Du Bois showed that in its external manifestations, neo-Pan-Africanism—in the name of “racial” unity against “white” Communism—seeks to separate the liberation in Africa and the United States from the world anti-imperialist revolutionary process. Du Bois exposed neo-Pan-Africanist ideology which interprets brotherhood in terms of skin—aiming to separate the oppressed peoples from their natural allies of all colors in and out of the socialist countries, while advancing the unity of the Black “fellow capitalist with the white exploiters.”
The essence of neo-Pan-Africanism—Padmore’s anti-Soviet, anti-Communist, separatist views—fits into the strategy of imperialism. This strategy was aptly described by Amilcar Cabral, leader of the people of “Portuguese” Guinea and its Partido Africano da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), who, like Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by agents of neo-colonialism. Cabral wrote:
The objectives of the imperialist countries was to prevent the enlargement of the socialist camp, to liberate the reactionary forces in our countries which were stifled by colonialism and to enable these forces to ally themselves with the international bourgeoisie. The fundamental objective was to create a bourgeoisie where one did not exist, in order to strengthen the imperialist and the capitalist camp. (Revolution in Guinea, by Amilcar Cabral, Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1969, page 71.)
Cabral’s views were, of course, identical with those in Du Bois’ message to the Accra Conference, Cabral was also as one with Du Bois in his opposition to the anti-Sovietism of neo-Pan-Africanism when Cabral spoke of “the socialist countries who are our historical associates.” (Ibid., page 71. My emphasis—H.W.)
And when he went on to state:
the essential characteristic of our times. . . . is the general struggle of the peoples against imperialism and the existence of a socialist camp, which is the greatest bulwark against imperialism. (Ibid., page 147.)
He was simultaneously challenging neo-Pan-Africanism and the Maoists’ revolutionism—and their alliance in divisiveness on the African continent.
In fact, the contradictions in the recent radical attempts at a critique of neo-Pan-Africanism can be traced to the influence of—and the affinity between—Padmore’s anti-Communist perversion of Pan-Africanism and the Maoist revision of Marxism-Leninism. It is in part this influence which has led Robert Allen and Adolph L. Reed Jr. to join with Stokely Carmichael and others in equating the Black condition in the U.S. with that of colonially oppressed majorities outside the United States. This unscientific, anti-Marxist concept obscures the differences between a strategy for colonial majorities fighting against imperialism for liberation and national self-determination, and a strategy for the liberation of the Black minority within the stronghold of imperialist, international capital in the U.S.
The struggle against Maoist influences has become a crucial part of the struggle against imperialism, for the unity of the world’s working classes and peoples in the fight against racist, national and class oppression.
On every continent where bourgeois nationalism is an obstacle to the unity of the oppressed, Maoism serves as an ideological arsenal for national betrayal within the liberation movements. This is why even the most conservative nationalist supporters of neo-Pan-Africanism welcome any type of “radicalism” influenced by Maoist “theories.” The reactionary bourgeois nationalists, like their neo-colonialist patrons, recognize that Maoism has nothing in common with the anti-imperialist nature of Marxism-Leninism.
Nothing pleases U.S. imperialism’s ideological strategists more than widespread circulation of Maoist conceptions which aim at destroying the relationship between the Socialist camp and its Soviet bulwark and the liberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. And Robert Allen reflects a central aspect of Maoism, regrettably weakening his critique of neo-Pan-Africanism, when he writes:
Today the major political and military forces capable of setting the stage for the final destruction of imperialism are gathering in the Third World. This is the chief dynamic of modern history. (The Black Scholar. February, 1972, pages 15-16. My emphasis—H.W.)
In this concept of a “third world” one can trace Mao Tse-tung’s departure from even the semblance of a working class, internationalist outlook to a Chinese great power chauvinist position. For the Maoists, the purpose of this “theory” is to isolate the liberation struggles on every continent from the Socialist camp—the “bulwark” and “historical associates,” in Cabral’s words, of every struggle against imperialism, neo-colonialism and class and racial oppression.
It is via this “theory”—which portrays the liberation struggles of Africa, Asia and Latin America as an independent entity without internal class contradictions, separate from the total world revolutionary process—that Maoism projects a strategy that fragments the international, anti-imperialist struggle.
This “theory” of the “third world” as the “chief dynamic” of history is based on the Maoist substitution of race for class as the motive force of history. As depicted by Maoism, the non-white “countryside” of the world is in struggle against the “white metropolitan City”—a racial concept concealing the true motive force of history.
By using such terms as “superpowers” to both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the Maoists would make it appear that their breach of the Socialist world camp unity is no cause for alarm in the world liberation movements. If, as they claim, the “third world” is an independent “zone” between the “two superpowers,” then surely there is no need for unity with the Soviet “superpower” against imperialism—especially since the main contradiction, the “chief dynamic,” is allegedly between the “non-white, third world” zone and the “white metropolitan” world that includes the “two superpowers.”
One cannot hold to a false theory without falsifying facts as the Maoists do in, for instance, depicting the Soviet Union as “white.” In reality, the Soviet Union is a multi-racial, multi-national society born out of a struggle based on the solidarity of the Russian working class with the working classes of more than fifty oppressed nations and peoples—including almost every race in today’s “third world.” It was this kind of proletarian internationalism that won these oppressed peoples for a united multi-racial, multi-national, anti-imperialist struggle culminating in the October Revolution. Not a skin strategy but a class strategy was the “chief dynamic” of this historic breakthrough—resulting in liberation from imperialism for the first time in history.
Ever since the October Revolution, the contradiction between the Socialist and capitalist systems has been the central contradiction—the “chief dynamic”—in the world, shaping the course of the class struggle everywhere. The Soviet Union and the Socialist countries united with it constitute the chief contradiction against imperialism, accelerating and intensifying the final crisis of capitalism and hastening a new epoch in human history, an epoch in which the stormy advances of the Socialist countries, merging with the struggles for class and national liberation in the capitalist world, fuse to form a single invincible anti-imperialist component of the revolutionary process. Every expression of the class struggle nationally and internationally spurs the forced retreat of imperialism and accelerates the transition of society from capitalism to socialism—the abolition of all forms of class, racial and national oppression. This is the central fact of the period in which we live.
Without a scientific understanding of the central contradiction today—between the world system of Socialism and declining imperialism—it is impossible to arrive at a strategy for the liberation of oppressed peoples and classes. The recognition of this contradiction as the “chief dynamic” of the class and national for liberation in no way diminishes the role of “third world” peoples and nations within the dynamics of the anti-imperialist struggle.
On the contrary, only by understanding the contradiction between the Socialist and imperialist systems as the “chief dynamic” can each class and people exploited by imperialism be seen as an indivisible part of the world revolutionary process. By recognizing this central contradiction, each can develop a strategy to unleash the potential of its particular liberation struggle, reinforcing and harmonizing with the world fight against imperialism and neo-colonialism.
Maoism has departed from the principles that brought victory to the Chinese revolution, and without which today’s struggles against neo-colonialism cannot be won, i.e., world anti-imperialist unity.
Neo-Pan-Africanism, the doctrine that breaks with the Pan-Africanism of Du Bois, diverts the Black liberation struggle in the U.S. and the struggle in South Africa—each with its own specific historical conditions and requirements—away from a liberating strategy. It does this by blurring class distinctions with regard to the oppressed peoples and their oppressors.
When Ron Karenga, for instance, who appears to be closely identified with Baraka’s views, writes that “the insistence on stressing ’class differences’ among blacks is counter-productive,” (“Overturning Ourselves: From Mystification to Meaningful Struggle,” by Ron Karenga. The Black Scholar, October, 1972, page 12.) it becomes apparent that he wishes to obscure class differences in order to stress his own class position—neo-Pan-Africanist nationalism—within the Black liberation movement. Karenga confirms this impression when he states:
Politically we need also to develop our perspectives in the framework of nationalist ideology. We must understand that our fundamental struggle is for space. We must occupy and control space in every area that serves our interests. Space is essentially an institutional concept and can be defined as an area or unit of identifiable interest. Wherever our collective interests are involved we must have the power to protect them and we cannot do it if we do not occupy and control adequate space . . . Developmental space is tied up with the notion of expansion of a people extending itself in the ocean of infinite possibilities available. It involves building alternative solidarities, systems and institutions whose main function is to develop as opposed to defend or simply to survive. (Ibid. Page 13. My emphasis—H.W.)
Behind the facade of this skillfully manipulated rhetoric is the bourgeois nationalism of those who would betray the Black masses by abandoning the strategy for Black liberation in this country just as surely as the neo-Pan-Africanists in South Africa and their Maoist supporters betrayed the liberation movement when they chose “alternative solidarities” to a united struggle against the white imperialist government of South Africa.
Karenga, who identifies “space” as the aim of the Black people’s struggle, implies that the ghetto space the racist oppressors force Blacks to occupy is inadequate. But he nevertheless offers what can only be interpreted as a U.S. variation of the disastrous separatist alternative found in the fragmented apartheid Bantustans of South Africa.
Projecting separatist “alternative solidarities” in place of a united strategy for defeating monopoly control of the government is a betrayal of the struggle against racist oppression—on a par with the separatist and emigrationist alternatives of those who opposed Frederick Douglass’ strategy against the slave power.
Karenga confuses systems with institutions. Every Black institution and organization in the Black community should have as its purpose the winning of democratic control of those communities. But not as an end in itself. Community control does not open up the possibility of an alternative economic system for the Black masses, either in a separate state or region or in a series of ghetto “Bantustans” scattered across the country.
He is, in effect, saying, “Forget about fighting for your right to full and equal participation in the great productive economic system you helped build. Don’t use the strength of your self-organization, of your communities and your millions of workers to fight for jobs and equality. Abandon the fight to build a united struggle against monopoly—a struggle that would open the way to destruction of racism and oppression through socialism.” Karenga, in other words, offers Black people in the U.S. a domestic version of the neo-Pan-African separatist “alternative” that has strengthened the racist South African government’s power.
Does anyone believe Blacks in the U.S. will accept a U.S. counterpart of the apartheid “liberation” that the people of South Africa, led by the African National Congress and the Communist Party of South Africa, are heroically fighting?
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