[News] No Compromise, No Retreat: Defeat the War Against the African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.blackagendareport.com/no-compromise-no-retreat-defeat-war-against-africanblack-people-us-and-abroad
No
Compromise, No Retreat: Defeat the War Against the African/Black People in
the U.S. and Abroad
Ajamu Baraka, 03 Jun 2020
------------------------------

The justice for George Floyd mobilizations today reflected the state’s
worst nightmare – a multi-national and multi-racial action initiated by
Black people with Black leadership.

*“A shift must occur away from the focus on individual justice for Floyd
back to a critique and opposition to the ongoing structural violence of the
system.”*

*So, we say: Justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir
Rice, Sandra Bland; for our political prisoners; for the super-exploited
Black and Brown working class; for oppressed Indigenous nations; and for
the millions subjected to U.S. warmongering, sanctions and criminality. We
say this to shift the focus from the individualization of this week’s
rebellion back to the objective structures of white supremacist, global
colonial/capitalist domination. *(BAP Newsletter
<https://blackallianceforpeace.com/newsletter/georgefloydstructuralviolence>
)

The ruling class is befuddled and confused about how to respond to the
ongoing street demonstrations sparked by the murder of George Floyd. The
mobilizations clearly disrupted their plans for “normalcy” with the forced
opening of the economy. The ferocity of the demonstrations that had not
been seen since the brief uprising in 92 in response to the Rodney King
verdict seems to have caught the authorities completely by surprise.

In the 1992 street actions in Los Angeles the nation and the world saw the
first multi-racial, multi-national street action that was very different
from the Black rebellions that rocked the U.S. in the 1960s. The racial
configuration of the participants captured the range of non-European
national minority communities and migrant peoples from across the Americas’
region.

*“The mobilizations clearly disrupted their plans for “normalcy” with the
forced opening of the economy.”*

But even in a departure from what occurred in 92, the justice for George
Floyd mobilizations today reflected the state’s worst nightmare – a
multi-national and multi-racial action of whites, Latinx, LGBTQ, immigrant
and migrant workers and Black youth, initiated by Black people with Black
leadership. The response from the rulers was predictable but unsurprising
in its ideological and strategic coherence to break that emerging coalition
of social forces.

I posted a comment on Facebook in response to what I saw as the
counter-moves being made by the state. I was asked by several people to
elaborate on those points, which I offer here.

In my original Facebook post I said:

“The enemy knows how to quickly adapt in the ideological struggle: 1)
undermine the emerging unity with white agitator propaganda, 2) follow up
with declaration against something called Antifa as a terrorist group, 3)
instruct the police to join demos and express solidarity, 4) release
statements from police chiefs and others pushing the bad apples theme, and
most important, 5) keep the focus on the individual and call for "justice"
for that individual to avoid attention on the systemic and enduring
elements of Black and Brown colonized oppression.”

*The white outside agitator trope*. If it wasn’t frightening enough to see
images of young white kids marching shoulder to shoulder with African and
other colonized peoples, seeing white kids actually engaged in militant
engagement with police authorities, which went beyond the approved forms of
resistance, triggered a cognitive dilemma almost as serious as when they
tried to comprehend and explain how China could escape the COVID-19 with
five thousand deaths while the virus was killing tens of thousands in the
U.S.

That cognitive dissonance could only be achieved by resurrecting the
outside agitator notion that emerged in the 30s and was directed at
organizers from the Communist Party and militant union organizers who were
working in the U.S. South. But that trope was given its fullest form in the
Civil rights struggles in the 50s and 60s.

It’s redeployment today is geared to 1) delegitimizing Black agency by
implying that resistance of this sort had to be directed by white folks,
and, 2) generating suspicion and even hostility toward white participants.
Granted, issues of counter-productive tactics and police infiltration are
real issues. But the state saw a vulnerability in evoking the white
agitator trope that the black petit-bourgeois administrators in various
cities enthusiastically embraced.

*Antifa as a terrorist group*: With the ideological foundation of the white
outside agitator, the next step was creating a more understandable target
by inventing an organizational form in order to give the threat a more
serious and ominous character. The problem should have been, though, that
Antifa is not really an organization but an idea with a loose network of
some organizations and mostly individuals, many of whom are anarchists with
many other political orientations, who believe that the U.S. is facing a
neofascist threat that should not be ignored.

But the fact that Antifa is a mirage is secondary when the objective is to
drive an ideological agenda. The success of this, however, is yet to be
determined.

*Instruct/encourage police to engage in public relations* *stunts* like
taking a knee or even walking with the demonstrators in some locations.
Shrinking the distance between the police and the demonstrators is easy
when the issue is being framed as “justice” for George Floyd, and by
implication the idea that his killers were “bad apples.”

Those kinds of political stunts are not even inconsistent with a
simultaneous display of military prowess and heavy-handed treatment of
demonstrators, especially if the idea is taking hold that it is the “bad
apples” among the demonstrators that are deserving of policing.

The bad apple trope plays right into the monumental political error being
made by resisters by keeping focus on George Floyd as an individual, even
if by extension the critique extends to the police and policing as a whole.
The bad apple notion exempts a condemnation of the institution as a whole
and diverts attention away from a deeper understanding of the role of the
police as the leading edge of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist
state.

Hundreds of Black and Latinix people are dying every day from what the Black
is Back Coalition <http://blackisbackcoalition.org/> calls the colonial
virus known as COVID-19. Yet because we are not watching grandma take her
last breath on the ventilator after having been laying around the hospital
for days, her unnecessary death and the literal deaths of thousands of our
people did not bring the people out of their houses during lockdown and
into the streets.

Those deaths will continue long after the other cops are charged, and the
military secures the cities and people go home, because those deaths are
generated by the contradictions of capitalism. They are produced by the
structural violence that is inherent in a system that devalues all life but
especially the life of non-European workers and the poor.

So, the state has responded. The challenge for us is how do we counter the
state’s attempt to pre-empt the development of a new movement.

The definition of the “people” is an historic one that emerges out of
concrete struggle with specific historical conditions. The deep structural
crisis of the system of national and global capital are creating the
conditions for neofascism as a capitalist reform strategy. Therefore, we
must not allow the state to undermine the basis for building new forms of
solidarity among people who are finding their voice.

*“The bad apple notion exempts a condemnation of the institution as a whole
and diverts attention away from a deeper understanding of the role of the
police.”*

And while Trump may be the face of this movement and the public attention
fixed on his most bombastic statements and the spectacle of armed citizen
groups showing up at various state capitals, he does not have complete
power over the real rulers of capital. Trump barely controls the Executive
branch and has had his program of radical nationalist economic reform,
including gutting Obamacare, curtailed. Instead, he has become an
administrator of the neoliberal agenda like the last five presidents before
him.

It is those ruling class forces who fear the masses and will give Trump or
even Biden, if he is elected, free reign to continue to jettison the last
vestiges of liberal democracy in order to maintain the rule of capital.
When it was clear to the Obama Administration that he was not going to be
able to co-opt the occupy movement, he moved with decisive action to shut
it down across the country.

Trump will move just as decisively and with same level of ruling class
support to shut down the protests when he sees it politically advantageous
to do so.

Two things must happen fairly quickly. On the ideological level, a shift
must occur away from the focus on individual justice for Floyd back to a
critique and opposition to the ongoing structural violence of the system.
It is clear that the state is unwilling and unable to protect the
fundamental human rights of the people. The demand for People(s)-centered
human rights provides a broad, radical framework for advancing concrete
demands that can unite broad sectors of the population.

And secondly, and most importantly, the theme and message around the
importance of organization must be aggressively advanced. Mass
mobilizations have a place but developing the organizational forms that
will build and sustain the power necessary to bring about radical
fundamental change is the primary challenge and historic task.

*Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and
was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka
serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership
body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and
contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing
columnist for Counterpunch.** He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial
2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in
journalism.   *

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