Activism In Backlash Times

Introduction: The following article is taken from a talk last month given by Amiri Baraka as part of a panel presentation during the University of Michigan's 10th Annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Symposium. The topic for the panel, "Activism in Backlash Times" was just one of over 100 programs presented in celebration of Dr. King 's birthday by the Symposium on U-M's Ann Arbor campus. This particular event was sponsored by Student Activities Leadership and the MLK Symposium Planning Committee. Amiri Baraka is a world-renowned poet, writer, essayist, and activist.

Before I address the question of "Activism in Backlash Times" there is a poem of Langston Hughes that he sent to me with his own signature that I have on my wall in the living room - it's called "The Backlash Blues" ("white backlash" used to be a terminology used in the 40s and the 50s so it's not new): Mr. Backlash Mr. Backlash who do you think I am Make me live in a house with rats and roaches Send my boy to Vietnam Make me live in a second-class neighborhood in a second-class school You must think I'm a second-class fool. .. I can 't recite it all but you can see that it's not new.

The principal work to read on this kind of thing would be "Black Reconstruction" by W.E.B. Du Bois. If you have not read that book you shouldn't really consider yourself an American intellectual. Along with that, of course, works by Marx and Lenin and Mao and Stalin and Engels and Amilcar Cabral. In terms of looking at this question of backlash there are three things we have to consider. First is the question of chattel slavery. Du Bois said that many other people - Asian peoples, European peoples, workers and farmers - all suffered as much as the slaves but he adds that none of them was real estate. So the United States is a society that asks the question: Can real estate become a citizen? So that's where we begin with that.

So, if we see chattel slavery then the next thing we have to understand is what Du Bois laid out as the Sisyphus Syndrome. I know that if you don' t learn anything else from this education system you'll learn something about Greek mythology. In terms of the Sisyphus Syndrome - what that was is Sisyphus was the son of the Wind god and when Death carne to kill him he pulled an Emmet Smith-move on Death and Death missed him. So then Death got the most powerful people - they called them the gods - to sentence Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a rock up a mountain and whenever he got the rock up to the top of the mountain, the rock would come back down on his head.

Du Bois outlined that the problem of the Afro-Americans in the United States is essentially the Sisyphus Syndrome. The things that we are struggling for now were supposed to be ended in the 1960s and the things we fought for in the 1960s were supposed to be ended in the 1860s - that each time, based upon the expansion and contraction of the economic system, the rock gets to the high point, which is liberalism, then as the market contracts, it rolls back down - which we have now: extreme conservatism.

The main struggle in the U.S. now is a struggle for democracy. I'm a communist. That means I'm black and red, and a lot of times I'm blue. The main struggle in the United States now is for democracy and that is a revolutionary struggle when you consider the crime bill, when you consider that one out of three American men - my youngest son included - is either in jail, or under the domination of the criminal injustice system. If you understand how Bill Clinton has disenfranchised the welfare people: affirmative action is going out of style, affirmative action is going out of style, just like forty acres and a mule went out of style. They say forty acres and a mule forty acres and a mule, forty acres and a mule, forty acres and a mule and then the superstructure turns that around and forty acres and a mule becomes a bad word just like affirmative action, affirmative action. Then they turn that around in the superstructure and it becomes a bad word and everybody says, "boo !" They never knew what it was in the first place. You don 't like affirmative action? Try full employment.

At the base of this society is the question of slavery and the national oppression of the Afro-American people. Why? Because that is the fundamental issue that holds the United States into pre-capitalist mores, into pre-democratic mores, in the same way that czarism in Russia was a form of absolutism, or feudalism in China was a form of absolutism. So that slavery, which passes into national oppression, allows the U.S. to divide and conquer the different nationalities and also to have a permanent unemployed labor army which can always threaten those that work. If those that work can get $3, the ones that are unemployed can threaten them. And even these white workers if they get $4 you have some Black workers standing around that don't have a job and they can threaten the white workers with unemployed Black workers. And then threaten all of them with unemployed women workers, and say: "If you don't do right the nigger will get your job; if you don't do right these women will get your job!" That's all it is. National oppression is like slavery. It's a direct method of disorienting the American people and covering the profit-taking methodology of the ruling class.

But national oppression is not racism. Racism is part of national oppression in certain cases. For instance, in the question of Bosnia where you have the Serbians and the Croats - they're both "racially Europeans." National oppression means the denial of rights, robbery, and super exploitation. What racism does is exacerbates national oppression because it makes it easier to identify you. That's why they put stars on the Jews arms in Europe in Germany so that they could say , "Hey you, come over here !" Same way with us, with Afro-Americans and with the other nationalities who can be identified racially. They can say, "Hey you, come here!" They see you. You understand? Racism means exploitation by physical characteristics. National oppression is denial of rights, super exploitation and robbery.

Any violation of democracy is to make more money for the small group of people that rule. Equality means that they have to give up money. That's all it means. All the rest of that stuff is just garbage and b.s. - all that metaphysical gibberish is all about money. If you want to know the point, search for the smell of the bucks and you know what's happening.

So, how do we begin to struggle? First, we must organize ourselves. In whatever way, whatever focus we are involved in, we must begin to organize around that. We cannot be merely one against the world. We must organize ourselves around like-minded things. For myself, of course, I would like to see a multi-national communist party for the United States and the American nations - the Afro-American nation, the Indian nations, the Chicano nation - all joined into one multi-national communist party.

I think that wherever we are we have to start study circles. You students - you have to study. What you're learning in school is not to overthrow this system but to maintain it. What you're learning in school is not to get rid of national oppression and racism but to maintain it in slicker ways with a new kind of jargon. You must get together and study independently of the school. You must come together once a week and talk about a book. You can drink and smoke and do anything you want to as long as your brain is clear. But you have to begin to talk independently about the world, outside of this university.

What do we need? We need study circles in whatever organizations or wherever we are in the United States. Finally we need mass democratic organizations which are united fronts against imperialism. We need a democratic workers party - they say a third party. This is the least democratic political system among the industrial nations. All the industrial nations of Europe have a multiparty parliamentary system which means even if you get 3% of the vote you got two dudes in the parliament. They might not win anything but they can stand up there and make a lot of noise and say, "You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong!"

Here in the United States we have the winner-take-all electoral system which is completely undemocratic. "There's no such thing," as Mr. Schultz said when he went to South África and the man said "What we want is one-man one-vote." Schultz said, "Wait a minute, we don't even have that in the United States." Meaning - that if you have two senators from each state and nobody lives in Utah and all those people live in New York - that's not one-person onevote. You need to get rid of the Senate first of all, from the jump. The Senate is not representative. The Senate comes from the House of Lords which is hereditary in England. You get that when you're born - Lady Winthrop and Lord Plushbottom - when they come out they're already in the House of Lords. These Senators are all millionaires. They don't represent you. They represent business. They make certain that business maintains its control over the government. What you need is one large congress with one-person one-vote. In that sense, democratic struggle means to organize and to study - to study and to organize. First you have to study the structure of the United States government itself as anti-democratic. How can you have a Supreme Court appointed for life? The Supreme Court's supposed to be voted for like everything else. The electoral system itself must go. Do you know that if you win in Michigan by one vote you get all the electoral votes. This is a winner-take-all system. If you got 7,000,000 votes to 6,999,999 the one who has seven million votes gets all the electoral votes so that all the other people who do not agree with that majority are iced. In order to create an actual democratic parliamentary system you have to have one-person one-vote.

We need a constitutional convention. And for the Afro-American people our major thing now has to be a declaration for self determination and democracy and a declaration for reparations for those 255 years that we are enslaved. And those reparations to me should take the form of education for all Afro-American citizens and the social structure necessary to put that together. And since white people will not let us do that alone - eventually all of the working class will get a free education which is what we want in the first place.

The principal struggle now is the struggle in the superstructure. What is the superstructure? The superstructure is that structure of institutions and ideas that are created by the economic base. Since you have an imperialist economic base, an economic base which favors national oppression, the ideas whether in the media, the movies, the schools, the newspapers, all are ideas that come directly from the economic base. For instance, read any description now of Oliver Stone. Every time they mention Oliver Stone - and I have seen this three successive days in three different newspapers - they have an adjective in front of his name: the bizarre Oliver Stone, the crazy Oliver Stone. In a minute, when y 'all pass away you haven't seen the picture JFK, crazy will be his first name.

Just like Du Bois said of the Afro-American people after reconstruction. He said for 65 years they showed us as Sambo, Step-n-Fetch-it, sleep-n-eat, you understand? What's the little guy named, all them little funny looking Negroes who were scared of ghosts, who hid in clocks, who turned white ... all the people I grew up with? Why? Because they didn't want to show you Nat Turner. They didn't want to show you Harriet Tubman. They didn't want to show you those 180,000 American soldiers who swept through the South to the sea and destroyed the socio-economic structure of the South. They didn't want you to see that. Because ultimately there was nobody in the South loyal to the United States of America but the slaves who liberated it.

So, if you show us the Sambo, and Uncle Tom, and Uncle Jeff, and Clarence Thomas, and people like that, that means that when the international question is raised - "Why aren't these people allowed to be integrated into America as citizens since they fought for their freedom?" - then they say: "But it's not us, you see. It's the Bell Curve, you see. They're inferior." As they said in the 19th century, "They don 't want to be free. They have drapetomania." Drapetomania was a "scientific" disease in the 19th century. They explained that the slaves really were not running away from slavery. What happened is suddenly a fever would hit them and they would turn red and their eyes would roll around in their head and they would "drap" the tools and run away. Henee the name, "drapetomania." You can study drapetomania in the encyclopedia. Do you understand what I'm saying? So now they got the Bell Curve: "It's not that we don't want them to be citizens. It's not that we don't want them to be equal. They 're inferior."

And it is the struggle in the superstructure, particularly for you college students, the struggle around ideas, the struggle in the media, the struggle in the arts, the struggle in criticism - this is key . Where are our theaters? And where are our art galleries? Where are alternative newspapers that are really alternative, not just naked Village Voice things where you think revolution is taking off your clothes and smoking a bunt?

Where are our revolutionary alternatives in the superstructure? That is one key method of activism today. What do we do? We have to form study circles to study the issues, to study history, to study revolution in the social system and changing historical political forms (and for me to study Marxism). We must communicate locally and as widely as possible. We must raise the level of organization based on the principles of unity, on work and finance, and ultimately we must deal with the question of political organization in all its forms both open and closed, both visible and invisible, dealing with propaganda and agitation, demonstrations and petitions, boycotts and strikes, the electoral system, and whatever else because the question of revolution is the question of the seizure of power.