BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT IS DEAD
LONG LIVE CLASS STRUGGLE!
By Collectivist Action
After witnessing the mad rush of almost everyone who identifies-as-a-black activists, organizer or leader - along with the sisters & brothers of ‘another’ mother - and others, jump like maggot brains on the latest ‘soul train’ of the dying U.S. empire, I will be the first, but hopefully not the last, to bring the bad news: the 600 year-old Black liberation is dead.
https://youtu.be/rRx5zjxtxXE?
As much as colonial white supremacy and the systemic USA nationalism which proceeded it has always sought to scandalize its name and and totally extinguish its flames since the first Africans rebelled in the bowels of slave ships, it took 21st century black neoliberalism (& bourgeois feminism to a lesser extent)) to drive the fatal dagger into the BLM. Moreover, less than half a decade after the biggest black-led Rebellions in the U.S., and probably the world, black radicalism, no matter how it is defined, is DEAD in the water.
Perhaps we could mourn its untimely demise.
Or should we?
To be sure, some of us saw this coming. . .
There are those who trace the beginning of the end of the BLM to the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. . .the inability, or refusal of the triumphant ‘Union’ wing of the U.S. ruling class to definitively suppress the defeated but unrepentant confederate insurgency. This resulted in an unprecedented wave of terrorism, which arguably made sheer black survival, NOT freedom, justice, independence or ‘equality’, the urgent order of the day. Some say that this was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement; a movement that, though necessary at the time, was co-opted and contained from the very beginning by liberalism.
Some trace the decline to the demise of Universal Improvement Association (UNIA), after the deportation of Marcus Garvey.
Then there are those who trace the beginning of the end of BLM to the 1950s iteration of the Civil Rights Movement, when our black ‘leadership’ cut a deal with the white ruling class that entailed among other things, mitigating the most egregious aspects of systemic white domination in exchange for, 1) declaring our undying allegiance to the U.S. state 2) purging and/or suppressing black radicalism, ie, leftism (anti capitalism and anti-imperialism). As-quiet-as-it’s-kept, this was a major pillar of the fascist tendency known as McCarthyism.
There are others who identify the beginning of the end to the demise of the ‘Rainbow Coalition’ in the 1980s; what appeared to be an unprecedented, black-led alliance of most of the major social justice movements in the U.S. . . figure headed by Reverend Jesse Jackson, an acolyte of MLK. The Rainbow became a part of two LOSING Democratic Party presidential campaigns
Still others would attribute the BLM’s demise to the Obama “Yes We Can” presidential campaigns, even as our dear brother Ta Nehisi Coates characterized it as “our (?)8 years in power”.
Wherever we start, imo, there is now a more than credible case to be made that the BLM is DEAD. . .we can stick a fork in it. . .
Nevertheless, LONG LIVE CLASS STRUGGLE.
“Let all illusions suffer. Prepare to struggle” Mao
As some of our best historians have told us, ‘ours’ was a class struggle from the very beginning: unpaid ENSLAVED LABORERS vs SLAVE OWNERS.
In his groundbreaking work, How Black Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, the late Manning Marable said that these enslaved workers represented some of the earliest PROLETARIANS in the Old & New World. Of course, now we know that the ‘New World colonialists, esp. the Spanish enslavers, enslaved indigenous people and ‘indentured’, ie, temporarily enslaved poor Europeans - before they bought and sold and kidnapped Africans. We also know that well before the founding of the U.S. nation state, the British colonial ruling had consolidated a strategy of labor control and divided & conquered the multicultural colonial working class ‘inventing’ and reinforcing the myth of white supremacy. These truths are still conveniently omitted from most of the best conservative and liberal and leftists historical narratives.
Nevertheless, we’ve learned that the capitalist rulers are quintessential and clever shapeshifters, and, like capital itself, can be and look like almost anything.
Anyone can be bought.
Anybody can be bought off.
Everyone has a price.
Power, no matter how petty, corrupts.
Marx called it the “cash nexus”.
Now, a credit card will do.
LONG LIVE THE CLASS STRUGGLE.
Richie Havens - Working Class Hero
Finally , I can’t see how even the ‘blackest’ self described black nationalist (or pan africanist for that matter) can claim that a Black Liberation Movement remains intact nor viable or visible in the U.S after the CURRENT shameless, feeding frenzy taking place, particularly, by PEOPLE-CLASSIFIED-AS BLACK, at the neoliberal Democratic Party trough.
The present vice president and Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential candidate - a woman of African and Indian ancestry, who couldn’t win a single race in the 2020 primaries is now, not only, almost over nite!, the most inspirational and influential ‘leader’ of African Americans, and women, but also our Harriet Tubman against MAGA ‘chaos’ and fascism . . . and the savior of the empire. . .???
I ain’t buying it.
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