Diversity, Equity & Inclusion or Class Struggle, Community Control and Socialist Reconstruction? Part 3 of 4 ~~ Collectivist Action

Part 1 of the series - https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2024/05/diversity-equity-inclusion-or-class.html

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Part 2 of the series -  https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2024/05/diversity-equity-inclusion-or-class_27.html

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion or Class Struggle, Community Control and Socialist Reconstruction?   

     Part 3 of 4       

By

Collectivist Action

. . .By the mid 1970s the Congress of African People,  one of the most strident black nationalist organizations of the period, had moved from nationalism to communism.  Poet/playwright, Amiri Baraka, CAP’s chairperson, principal theoretician and former acolyte of cultural nationalist Maulana Karenga, proclaimed that the organization was now guided by “Marxism, Leninism and Mao Tse Tung Thought”.

Increasingly,  for my generation (politically -active1950s-born baby boomers) diversity, equity or inclusion were not our major political goals nor were they seen as as paths to liberation. Furthermore, the most radical forces in the Movement were starting to identify the capitalist system itself as the objective enemy of freedom, social justice and prosperity. . .

Arguably one of the most influential organizations in the BLM and U.S.-based class struggle, particularly after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Emerging in the wake of the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles and a militant Southern-based  ‘Black Power’ movement,  inspired by the Lowndes County, Mississippi Black Power Movement, the BPP represented, among other things, a categorical rejection of the diversity, equity and inclusion strategy to freedom. 

The Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program

Written October 15, 1966

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/primary-documents-african-american-history/black-panther-party-ten-point-program-1966/

Point 3 of their 10-Point program called for an “end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities.” 

Point 1 defined 'freedom' as “the POWER to determine the destiny of our black community”; iow, 

COMMUNITY CONTROL.

By the 1970s the BPP has discarded MOST of its revolutionary nationalist political program. . .

                            

In his provocative and oft-overlooked theory of 'intercommunalism', (first introduced  in 197O) Black Panther co-founder and chief theoretician, Huey P. Newton,  describes the world as a vast collection of communities, rather than nations,  ALL dominated by a small reactionary community of imperialist forces, or, an empire. This social contradiction could only be resolved,  according to Newton, by a global alliance of  communities,  UNITED AGAINST the small community of reactionary, imperial  rulers..

I find this view to be not only relevant but also  highly useful  in the 3rd decade of the 21st century, especially IF we define community as not just territorial places.

Long before the advent of internet communication, there were communities based on everything from land to religious affiliations; familial relationships to scientific associations; historically oppressed and exploited communities to benevolent societies; radical political formations, and, of course,  communities designated by class, color, culture, gender, sex, etc.  Many of these communities continue to exist.

(The 2nd edition of Roget’s 21st century Thesaurus offers the following synonyms for COMMUNITY which transcend physical space:  public, populace, people, commonality, body politic and association.

Moreover,  intercommunalism  recognizes that human communities often  intersect and interpenetrate each other. Communities change, grow, decline and go out of existence. Not unlike basic, universal, social formations like families and households communities will continue to change even as they remain  useful and practical ways of organizing human societies. . . .

(To be continued)