Africanist liberation theory

[Langalibalele]

PAIDS or Dialectics in the Black Revolution


by I. Langalibalele

Crowds of people in our community have an aversion to the class question. At the same time, there is hardly any justification for working blacks to feel this way. We can understand the middle class having a phobia.

A close examination of racism shows that it is merely an expression of the class conflict. If politics is economics concentrated, then racism is the concentration of the class question, and Neo-colonialism dilutes this concentrated class struggle. However, we must continue to maintain a class analysis so we can defeat both neo-colonialism and class-based national ("racial") oppression. And national oppression is called COLONIALISM, the historical mode of capitalist slavery.

Classes existed before racism, in any society where there were peasants and kings, slaves and lords, workers and bosses. This existed long before the concept of race. Racial identity was created out of diverse peoples being forced together because of capitalist and colonialist social conditions. For the first time in history, people got abducted and trafficked across vast oceans to slave away on foreign soil for a foreign power.

Racism exists precisely because of class, period. Racism derives from the white ruling class effort to subvert Africans at the bottom of society. That is class struggle. A class of Africans or Mexicans or Turtle Islanders or Asians doing the dirt work and barely surviving, while the white ruling class lives opulently atop the mass of humanity. Anybody who says this is not the essence of the class question denies that the self-led black proletariat (such as Nkrumah, Cabral, Fanon, Rodney, Mugabe, etc.) is fit to lead the African revolution. Without a class analysis, there will be no African revolution.

Indeed, the black petty bourgeoisie has failed to expand the class analysis. This class does not work for international African unity and other principles which may have accelerated our liberation struggle. The black petty bourgeoisie fails to understand how to build Solidarity in our movement, and cannot realize anything beyond "civil" rights and a servile relationship to Imperialism. This sector of our community does not understand the class struggle, neo-colonialism nor the world anti-imperialist movement.

Among black leaders, whosoever lacks an analysis of capitalism causes African people to fall behind the curve. Nothing short of a class analysis has liberated one single person from colonialism from the Twentieth Century onward. All the great freedom fighters of the last 100 years developed a class analysis. The great Nkrumah extended the class analysis of Lenin's 1917 work Imperialism, so that today we have a scientific understanding of Neo-Colonialism. Nkrumah said that neo-colonialism is the final stage of Imperialism, which we learnt from Lenin to be the highest stage of capitalism.

What this means, when neo-colonialism is exhausted as a political phenomenon, it will cause the collapse of Imperialism. This does not imply that Imperialism will fall on its own, and in so doing the forces of reaction will be contained. No, this means that a revolutionary class struggle must defeat neo-colonialism, and ultimately strike down Imperialism.

Dialectical materialism helped Nkrumah anticipate this period in capitalist relationships. Today we see that Imperialism is in crisis and that it is wooing a ne(gr)o-colonial stooge to bail it out of a mess which was contrived without pressure from workers, foreign nations or any sector other than the US capitalists themselves.

Still, the black middle class will strongly advise us not to make trouble for our "black" president. Our job is to sharpen the struggle at the point of production, that is, everywhere capitalism strives to rape African people, no matter who is in power.

We must remain true to a scientific class analysis. So while it may appear "European" because a Caucasian first codified its principles and gave it a name, the contribution known as Dialectical-Historical Materialism has some independent origins among African people. We can say this because African societies have lacked rigid class structures and caste systems. Referring to Cheikh Anta Diop, the African peasantry belonged to the same caste as the kings (altho they belonged to different economic sectors).

Craftsmen, such as metalworkers and textile makers, belonged to a different group. However, the vicious antagonisms found in warring European societies never found its way into Africa until the colonial and neo-colonial era. This is due to vicious class contradictions under Imperialism, itself defined as the fusion of banking and industrial finance into INTERNATIONAL FINANCE CAPITALISM, and the highest stage of capitalism.

Karl Marx worked out the principles of Dialectical-Historical Materialism, the guiding theory of revolutionary thinkers. VI Lenin politicized this thought so that it became a tool for organizers who needed to understand how to analyze and overthrow the capitalist class system. This theory has been the fundamental liberation tool within the colonized sphere from Africa and Asia to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Metaphysics has played absolutely no role whatsoever in the liberation movements nor in the development of economies. If anything, it has stunted the development of African people because it reflects nothing relevant to the modern world except in creating drones and delaying the advancement of scientific socialism. In this it assists capitalism.

It is anachronistic to cite Kwame Nkrumah's theory about neo-colonialism on the one hand, then introduce metaphysics as a system of knowledge on the other. Metaphysics is not a system of knowledge, anymore than is the study of werewolves or the toothfairy. Knowledge derives from the real world, which exists independent of the mind. Metaphysics, conversely, teaches that the mind is the center of all being, which is false.

Neo-colonialism, the final stage of Imperialism, has its basis in economics. We cannot understand economics thru the church, masjid, temple, prayer, meditation or any other religious institution. You cannot mix myth with dialectics. You cannot have Willie Lynch, the Legend of Yakub, the Curse of Ham or any other color theories of racial confrontation to supplant the reality of class. It is THE CLASS THEORY OF RACIAL CONFRONTATION which history will prove to be accurate.

Historical (African) materialism guides our understanding of matter and material forces. Society also has objective forces within it called classes. You cannot derive an objective understanding of social movements from race because races are subordinate to class formations. The African race across the Motherland, the Caribbean and North America submits to the bourgeois class values imposed upon it. That is the reason for the "sub-imperialist" conflicts raging across the Continent today. Class plays the primary role in the wars between Hutu and Tutsi; class warfare defines who will manage the diamond and coltan mines versus who will be press ganged into work.

You can develop a revolutionary movement from an understanding of class. It is thru the concept and analysis of class which led Nkrumah to extrapolate his brilliant understanding of neo-colonialism.

We cannot have it both ways! We cannot cite Nkrumah when it is convenient, then repudiate him when we want. If Kwame Nkrumah developed the modern theory of Pan Africanism, then anything less than a revolutionary class analysis applied to the Black liberation struggle is either revisionism or eclecticism. When we fall into revision, that is to say we have a better understanding than Kwame Nkrumah, that we reject scientific socialism. There are people who claim to be Pan Africanists and followers of Nkrumah and hell on neo-colonialism, yet reject scientific socialism. Do they want to build a movement for black liberation, or just vent?

We need a black revolutionary center for building an anti-imperialist movement. Such a center must be able to absorb many ideas and methods of work, yet it must have a unified outlook and be at the center of the black revolution. We do not want individuals with PAIDS, as Cde. Mongezi Sifika Nkomo characterizes it: Politically Acquired Ideologically Deficient Syndrome.

Both revisionism and eclecticism lead to opportunism, which is the economic basis of neo-colonialism. What does this mean? It means that if you are an opportunist within the Pan Africanist trend, then you preserve or encourage neo-colonialism. By “the economic basis of neo-colonialism”, PAIDS means you aim to get paid for selling out.

If politics is economics concentrated, that means that a particular group in society has concentrated all wealth and power in its hands. If racism is the concentrated class struggle, that forms the method for the power structure to focus its strategies. Hence, thru revolutionary class struggle the self-led African proletariat strives to end the concentration of wealth and power in the world and redistribute everything: knowledge, technology, industry, wealth and power. That forms the very essence of revolutionary struggle.

IZWE LETHU I AFRIKA!
POWER TO THE PEOPLE