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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/no-compromise-no-retreat-defeat-war-against-africanblack-people-us-and-abroad">https://www.blackagendareport.com/no-compromise-no-retreat-defeat-war-against-africanblack-people-us-and-abroad</a></font>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">No Compromise, No Retreat: Defeat the War Against the African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits"> Ajamu Baraka,
03 Jun 2020</div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-line-height4 gmail-reader-show-element" dir="ltr"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>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.</p>
<p><strong><em>“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.”</em></strong></p>
<p><em>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. </em>(<a href="https://blackallianceforpeace.com/newsletter/georgefloydstructuralviolence" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">BAP Newsletter<span><span> </span></span></a>)</p>
<p>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.<strong> </strong>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><strong><em>“The mobilizations clearly disrupted their plans for “normalcy” with the forced opening of the economy.”</em></strong></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>In my original Facebook post I said: </p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p><strong>The white outside agitator trope</strong>. 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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><strong>Antifa as a terrorist group</strong>: 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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><strong>Instruct/encourage police to engage in public relations</strong> <strong>stunts</strong> 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.” </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Hundreds of Black and Latinix people are dying every day from what the <a href="http://blackisbackcoalition.org/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Black is Back Coalition<span><span> </span></span></a> 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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><strong><em>“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.”</em></strong></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><strong><em>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.</em></strong><strong> He
was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the
Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism. <em> </em></strong></p>
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