The Syli in the Room: Reviving Ahmed Sékou Touré

By Kevin McCleish

Afro-pessimism in its original iteration found use as a medium to explain the phenomenon of perpetual underdevelopment in Africa. As Mahmoud Mamdani notes, Afro-pessimists suggest Africa cannot rejuvenate itself from within due to the persistence of traditional culture. Kevin Ochieng Okoth describes how Afro-pessimism grew from incessant negative depictions of Africa in Western media, which portray an utterly hopeless continent.

In the face of post-independence failing states, raging epidemics, genocide, and worsening inequality, Afro-pessimism resonated with a global audience because it seemed to justify the interventions of actors ranging from saviorist NGOs [1] to agents of structural adjustment programs like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. If Africans proved incapable of solving their problems, a host of others appeared who claimed they could.

Emerging from the academy, what Ochieng calls Afro-pessimism (AP) 2.0 differs from its predecessor by focusing intently on the experience of black Americans and how, as Adolph Reed Jr. often and sarcastically puts it, “nothing has changed” since 1865. Reed describes AP 2.0 as an approach which…

“... postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal ‘anti-blackness.’ Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as the imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world.”

AP 2.0 proponents believe the uniqueness of anti-black oppression prevents collaboration with other oppressed peoples due to fundamental racial antagonism “condemning them to a life of social death.” AP 2.0 therefore hinders the development of the broad, class-conscious coalitions needed to overcome the hegemonic power of capital. This also renders it impotent against imperialism.

Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first post-colonial president of Guinea (1958–1984), understood that fighting imperialism requires collective action across racial and ethnic lines. Touré is best remembered for organizing an electoral rejection of a new French constitution on September 28th, 1958, which prompted immediate political independence for Guinea. Though the referendum was held in France and across all overseas departments and territories, Guinea had the impressive distinction of being the only political unit to vote “no” on the constitution and colonization. Through his organizing efforts, Touré achieved 85% voter turnout with 95% voting against the colonial arrangement.

After becoming president in October 1958, Touré quickly realized that political sovereignty meant little without economic sovereignty. So Touré adopted what he called a “non-capitalist” path of development in recognition that “the anti-imperialist struggle is the climax of class struggle.” Following this path was made all the more difficult by repeated attempts of international sabotage and economic isolation.

A committed pan-Africanist and fierce proponent of nonalignment during the Cold War, Touré played an immense and overlooked role during arguably the most critical juncture in human history: the Cuban Missile Crisis. When President John F. Kennedy directed a naval “quarantine” of Cuba after intelligence showed the construction of nuclear missile sites on the island in response to the American placement of missiles within striking distance of Moscow, the Soviets immediately began planning an airlift of critical military supplies to circumvent the naval blockade. To do so, however, Soviet jets would need to land and refuel prior to reaching the island.

In the fall of 1962, only the five West African countries of Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, and Morocco had airstrips long enough to accommodate jet traffic. To stop an airlift before it ever got off the ground, American officials lobbied African leaders to refuse Soviet air traffic. Though each country had its own set of diplomatic challenges, Washington was most concerned about Guinea.

Touré had just accepted Soviet assistance to improve Conakry’s airport runaways months prior. Coincidentally, though, Touré had also just returned from a state visit to Washington where he and Kennedy made good impressions on one another. Recognizing that the Guinean people had nothing to benefit by obliging the Soviet request, Touré, with his trademark independence, refused. His commitment to what he termed “positive neutrality” gave him the diplomatic flexibility to exercise an inordinate amount of influence during the Cold War. 

Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with the “Grand Syli” (Touré’s nickname; literally “Big Elephant”), are likely to see his revolutionary contributions as a dead end rather than a point of departure. Often overlooked in the Anglophone world, Touré’s radical pedigree, honed from the mass politics of labor organizing, shows how today’s leftists can use labor organizing to facilitate the formation of broad-based coalitions capable of agitating for radical political transformation. Such strategies are a welcome antidote to the alternative approach of AP 2.0, which does not challenge the foundations of the current political economy. 

Radical Roots Sprout a Labor Leader

Touré’s propensity for mass politics came from his poor peasant origins in Faranah, Guinea. As Saidou Mohamed N’Daou recounts, Touré’s social consciousness developed at an early age as he witnessed his deaf mother suffer abuse. His father died early, and mistreatment drove his mother to suicide shortly after. Orphaned at age seven, Touré found loving refuge in his uncle’s family. Touré entered primary school and showed great intellectual promise and an affinity for anti-colonial agitation — from challenging colonial curriculum to organizing protests against a headmaster who forced students to toil in his garden without compensation (the headmaster refused to take responsibility for a student who died of a snakebite whilst laboring in the garden) [2], to leading a food strike, which resulted in his expulsion as a teenager. 

Though his rebelliousness ultimately derailed a promising academic trajectory, Touré’s anti-colonial intransigence ensured he avoided becoming one of the évolués (Africans “civilized” through European education and assimilation) he later came to despise. Had Touré instead complied and wound up in the academy as another “misguided intellectual,” he may have turned out much like his rival and Négritude proponent Leopold Senghor. Touré took issue with Négritude, which — like AP 2.0 — had essentialist foundations.  He dismissed Négritude as a reflection of bourgeois class ideology that merely masked Western cultural imperialism. Touré held that African culture could not be disassociated from political, social, and economic contexts asserting:

“[T]here is no black culture, nor white culture, nor yellow culture…Négritude is thus a false concept, an irrational weapon encouraging…racial discrimination, arbitrarily exercised upon the peoples of Africa, Asia, and upon men of color in America and Europe.”

Rather than ascend to the ivory tower training the colonizer’s comprador class, Touré’s path through vocational school kept him grounded with ordinary Guineans ensuring his exposure and involvement in radical politics.

After several apprenticeships and a year as a clerk in the French Company of Western Africa, Touré passed examinations qualifying him to work in the Post and Telecommunications Department in 1941. Denied the ability to continue his scholarly endeavors through official channels, he continued his studies via correspondence education and took a “Red” turn by devouring the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Despite the French Communist Party’s (PCF) refusal to enroll local members in West Africa (in adherence to the orthodox view that Africa undergo a bourgeois revolution to precede a genuine anti-capitalist revolution), Touré became a founding member of the PCF’s first Guinean study group, Groupes d’Études Communistes, three years later in Conakry. Contemporaries remember the PCF “not being progressive enough” for Touré. But he found them useful to learn organizing methods from.

Not content with merely discussing theories of Marxist revolution, Touré’s political praxis led him to organize the first union in French-controlled Guinea, the Post, Telegram, and Telephone Workers’ Union (PTT), in 1945. The PTT, an affiliate of the PCF-connected French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), flexed its muscle in various labor actions under Touré’s leadership which landed him in jail, but also gave him the credentials necessary to organize the United Trade Union of Guinean Workers (USCG). Under this umbrella union, all CGT affiliates in Guinea consolidated just a year later in 1946. Recognizing “unionism is…a calling…to transform any given economic or social regime, always in search of the beautiful and just,” Touré became the most influential labor leader in French West Africa just five years after forming the first Guinean labor union.

Occurring simultaneously with his ascent in the labor movement, Touré’s reputation as an organizer enabled him to quickly climb the ranks of anti-imperialist political organizations operating in French West Africa, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Formed in 1946 at the Bamako Conference, the RDA, in cooperation with the PCF, attempted to coordinate the efforts of regional anti-imperialist leaders throughout French-occupied Africa. 

While the RDA formed with PCF support, it is mistaken to assume the leaders were all committed to a vision of “Red Africa.”

As it were, the PCF was one of few European political forces committed to anti-imperialism, which forced many associations of convenience. As Elizabeth Schmidt details, under Touré’s direction, the Guinean RDA chapter, later named the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) in 1950, certainly remained committed to the PCF and CGT far longer than its regional peers who feared anti-communist repression when the PCF lost governing power in 1947 France. Although the RDA officially broke from the PCF in 1950, Touré dubiously followed the RDA line in his political activities and continued cooperating with the CGT in his union work. Unlike the RDA in other regions whose membership was comprised of planters and chiefs, the PDG’s core membership were civil servants and trade unionists reluctant to sever ties with communist organizations.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

72-Day Strike and Electoral Victories

Touré soon integrated his labor and political acumen after becoming the secretary-general of the PDG in 1952. From that point forward, his labor and anti-colonial political activities converged into one indivisible force. The French administration felt the power of the peoples’ solidarity during the 72-Day General Strike of 1953, which set the stage for the famous 1958 independence referendum.

Both Schmidt and N’Daou produce excellent accounts of the 72-Day Strike, the impetus of which was a reduction of the workweek from 48 to 40 hours. Though a work reduction is typically welcome, pay fell proportionally by 17%. Guineans, who were already poor,  protested. But French management was unwilling to compromise. So Guinean labor leaders voted to begin a general strike on September 7th, 1953.

As he had done his entire labor career, Touré gave neighborhood speeches to thousands and continued education programs throughout the strike, urging workers to eschew ethnic strife and embrace their common bonds as workers. Composed of various ethnic groups — principally but not exclusively Malinke, Susu, and Peul — Guinea’s ethnic tensions proved more salient in the rural rather than urban areas due to the coercive power of the colonial canton chieftaincies. In the more cosmopolitan Conakry, calls to transcend significant social divisions using an eclectic mix of themes, found in the language of Marxist class antagonism, French liberal ideals, and selected African beliefs of honor, dignity, and racial pride united workers along class lines.

Like any effective organizer, Touré understood that the value of an idea is measured by its social utility. While some critique the “third way socialism” of Touré, it is unlikely Marxist-Leninist proselytization would have had the same impact on participants as his pragmatic ideological flexibility. By December 1953, workers won their wage increase with 80% of Conakry’s workers participating in the labor action. Trade union membership exploded, from 4,600 in the beginning of the strike to 44,000 by 1955. 

Touré’s foundation in and amongst the people is what made him successful. His effective organization of workers and their corresponding communities laid the groundwork for his coming electoral success and the resounding campaign to dismiss colonialism on September 28th, 1958. Touré’s broad-based coalition strategy became apparent leading up to the independence vote, when he campaigned throughout Guinea on behalf of the RDA/PDG, asserting that “the RDA is not a knife that divides, but a needle that sews [together].” Knowing that any anti-colonial coalition could not survive identitarian fragmentation, Touré relied on public pedagogy to elevate the political consciousness of the masses, declaring:

“We are against racial and ethnic prejudice. We are for qualified people whether they be European, Senegalese, Peul, or Bambara. Some of you say you will not vote for the RDA ticket…because a European is on it. This reasoning is stupid.”

Ethnic divisions proved more salient in the rural areas, where colonial-approved chieftains exercised coercive power over taxation, corvée labor [3], and — even though it had been outlawed in 1905 — slavery primarily made up of Dialonka people serving Peul-aristocratic chiefs in the region of Futa Jallon. It is estimated that 25% of the Futa Jallon region’s population were composed of slaves or their descendants in 1955. Residue from the colonizer’s imported Hamitic Hypothesis still plagued many amongst the Peul aristocrats, who believed they were of superior racial stock compared to non-Peul Guineans.

This second-class population divided by class and ethnicity were organized electorally by Touré and the PDG by referencing their exploitation at the hands of the colonial-connected chieftaincy and appealing to Islamic egalitarian principles. Ever pragmatic, Touré omitted Marxist references and spoke plainly about the exploitative conditions enforced by canton chiefs. Doing so, however, he carefully distinguished between their material and ethnic differences to ensure his broad-based coalition remained inclusive to all Guineans.

Communicating his message to overwhelmingly illiterate rural populations elsewhere, he continued in comprehensible terms:

“Man is like water, equal and alike at the beginning. Then some are heated and some are frozen so they become different. Just change the conditions, heat or freeze, and the original equality is again clear.”

Facing historic and manufactured social divisions proved no easy task. But Touré’s inclusive organizing paid off, as demonstrated by the electoral results from 1954 to 1957 where the PDG dominated municipal, regional, and territorial elections. Though the French initially managed to stem the tide of Touré through electoral manipulation, after 1954, the colonizers recognized that continuing to engage in obvious fraud would lead to backlash. It was clear who ruled the streets.

With his newfound legislative and executive authority, Touré set out to destroy the colonial chieftaincy through a parallel power structure of democratically elected PDG local committees who effectively replaced the hated colonial canton chiefs by 1957 and assumed their duties of tax collection and administering justice. After years of power-structure analysis, Touré knew their destruction would be necessary to remove the vestiges of colonial authority.

As president, Touré continued to combat ethnic and religious differences by moving bureaucrats outside of their home regions, banning groups organized on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, surrounding himself with ethnically diverse advisers, and continuing to communicate in various indigenous languages. In such a brief spell of political activity, the man who cut his teeth as an organizer engineered the only electoral rejection of French colonialism and fought against all odds to achieve genuine political and economic sovereignty.

Whose Touré is This?

Although violent resistance against capitalism is often fetishized, any Marxist worth their salt should be able to organize resistance at the point of production. Through his organizing career, the man who not only read Marx’s Capital but had, as Bill Haywood put it, “the marks of capital all over [his] body” from his time on the shop floor, transcended social divisions and united Guineans of all stripes against their colonizer. Recipient of the 1961 Lenin Peace Prize, Touré’s experience should not only be included in the tradition of “Red Africa,” but serve to illustrate the revolutionary possibilities of labor organizing as an alternative to AP 2.0. 

Touré’s ability to unite a diverse population on the basis of class antagonisms proves his mantra that content rather than form supersedes all concerns for those committed to overthrowing capitalism. By focusing on the common denominators and rejecting essentialist obstacles, Touré’s lifelong commitment to construct a better world is instructive. He unequivocally rejected the notion that black people could not exercise political agency, that cooperation amongst demographically diverse groups is impossible, and that a history of slavery precludes meaningful participation in civic life. Rather than accept condemnation to a “life of social death,” Touré instead embodied the words of Frantz Fanon, believing that:

“Man is a yes…Yes to life. Yes to Love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to the scorn of man. No to the degradation of man. No to the exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”

Kevin McCleish is a high school social science teacher and labor organizer from Illinois. His best work is found on the shop floor.

Footnotes

[1] Examples include George Clooney’s Not on Our Watch, which intervened in Darfur, and Invisible Children — the group behind Kony 2012.

[2] Touré does not indicate the headmaster’s race in his recollection. The omission is, perhaps, indicative of his position that imperialism does not operate exclusively along strict racial lines. The colonial education system functioned to maintain existing power relations using white Europeans, black Antilleans, and Africans of the comprador class. Resistance to the system was inherently anti-colonial.

[3] Corvée labor is a system wherein people must work unpaid for a feudal lord for a period.

Building a Real Left: Not One That Condemns Resistance and is Without Palestinians

[Pictured: 500,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 4 for a historic march that recognized the Palestinian right to resist]

By Ben Becker

Republished from Liberation News.

We are eight weeks into the war in Gaza and into a protest movement that has swept the country demanding justice for Palestinians. It is remarkable how much the political environment has transformed in the United States in general, and within the U.S. left in particular on account of the mass mobilizations organized by genuine anti-imperialist forces, both inside the United States and around the world. An honest reflection must admit, however, that eight weeks ago, many of the liberal leftists and “progressives” were paralyzed, bending to the pressures of bourgeois opinion, practically abandoning the Palestinian cause, and reserving their sharpest vitriol for anti-imperialists rather than apartheid Israel. 

From the very start, anti-imperialists rallied to the side of Palestine and so were called apologists for terrorism by mayors, governors, the White House and liberal leftist publications in one united chorus. While for a moment that meant the real, anti-imperialist left was demonized, caricatured and written off as a marginalized fringe by the liberal leftist organizations and some prominent liberal “influencers,” two months later there is now a mass anti-war movement taking the streets every night with anti-imperialist politics at the very center, and it is the liberals who are isolated.

The spineless “plague on both your houses” position held by liberal leftists and “progressives” collapsed within a week as Israel began its genocidal bombing, and as the broad spectrum of left forces and Palestinians united to demand an end to the siege of Gaza and a ceasefire. But the initial awful reaction from big sections of ostensibly “left” commentators should not be forgotten, and in fact should be learned from. It reflects a recurring line of division that will likely reappear as Israel’s siege enters a new murderous stage, especially if Palestinians begin to strike back outside of Gaza. This division is not about ideological minutiae but a fundamentally different approach to the colonial question. It speaks directly to the question of what type of movement we aim to build — either one that is tethered to a section of the liberal bourgeoisie, and so vacillates alongside it, or one that seeks to build anti-imperialist politics among the working class and is oriented towards unity with the Global South.  

To review: Four days into the genocidal bombing and siege of Gaza, with a massive ground invasion pending, the West’s most prominent left-liberal intellectuals stood up and spoke out against … the leftists on the streets for Palestine. Naomi Klein, Michelle Goldberg, and other self-proclaimed “left” writers immediately joined the ruling-class mob howling at those who had dared to demonstrate in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and their resistance, in the days after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. They declared there can be no “credible” or “decent” left that does not condemn the tactics of the Palestinian resistance — and that by “valorizing terrorism, these voices on the left are effectively choosing to stop contending for power in a serious way.”

Goldberg proposed that the left should declare instead: “We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not to commit atrocities in Gaza.” The sentence is a marvel. The feelings of horror are reserved for the actions of Hamas — not Israel — while Israeli atrocities are presented passively, a potential thing of the future, which could be hopefully stopped by U.S. government “pressure.” Ignored are all the core questions: what about the longstanding Israeli atrocities and the fact that the United States has always facilitated and funded Israeli crimes? And what should the Palestinians do in the meantime? Apparently, anything but fight back.

For her part, Klein called for “An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.”

Sift through the poetics of this paragraph and this is essentially a call for the left to put equal distance from all the sides of the battle, so that it can achieve pure and unadulterated morality. How decent! Perhaps the Palestinians should lay down their arms entirely so the international left can keep our hands and reputations clean. Under this liberal position (using left phrases), it is fine to retain the moral and political position that Palestinians are in the right against occupation, but to be “consistent” this must be combined with a condemnation of Palestinians when they actually rise up against that occupation. This is nonsense: the “left” as an abstraction rather than a social force that accompanies the living struggles of our time and the real people fighting injustice. The true betrayal of left principles is to lapse into pure pacifism and abstract humanism so as to create distance from the oppressed.

That distance from the oppressed was made literal in the following days, when the protests with that political line were attended by shockingly few Palestinians and scarcely a Palestinian flag in sight. Meanwhile, the anti-imperialist forces who were so demonized and declared to not be “contending for power in a serious way” united a broad coalition rooted in the Palestinian and Arab community for the largest pro-Palestinian march in U.S. history, which was estimated at 500,000 people. That unity was not built by equivocating on the central issues of Palestinian self-determination, or pandering to the mood of the liberal bourgeoisie. Doing so would have not made the march bigger but actually doomed it. Instead, it put out a clear, unmistakable message that tapped into the mass mood of struggle and defiance felt by people of conscience from all communities. 

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Whatever initial isolation was necessary for anti-imperialists, the last month of mobilization has shown that a different type of broad unity can be built — not with bourgeois liberals — but by going directly to the base, and orienting to the majority sentiments of the Global South. Viewed from a global scale, it is the liberals who are isolated, and increasingly struggling to stay relevant. Look at the supposedly “decent” “left” represented by figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC: they have never been less relevant to the actual movement of history as now, when it counts the most. Sanders has stubbornly refused to even call for a ceasefire while AOC has scarcely been better – in two month’s time she has voiced support for the Iron Dome, then called for a ceasefire, and this week voted for a slanderous House resolution that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. 

Klein, Goldberg and company focused their arguments after October 7 on the killing of Israeli civilians and noncombatants as war crimes. But this was just a convenient way to mask what was really a condemnation of Palestinian armed resistance as a whole. It’s not as if they defended under the rules of war the Al Aqsa Flood operation’s killing of an estimated 280 Israeli military personnel, or its taking dozens more soldiers and even generals as prisoners of war. What they really want is for Palestinians to remain peaceful and committed to nonviolent forms of protest. A more sophisticated and explicit version of this argument was presented at length in a New York Times essay calling for Palestinians to commit to “ethical resistance.”

Of course, Palestinian groups will debate among themselves what tactics and strategies are correct to advance their national liberation struggle, as they have in each phase of struggle. But not a single Palestinian party or faction (aside from the widely hated Mahmoud Abbas) condemned the Al Aqsa Flood operation — quite the contrary. Klein, Goldberg, et al should ask themselves why not. It is because the Palestinian people have attempted every type of march, protest and petition only to see the noose tighten around their necks. 

The Great March of Return consisted of weekly marches in 2018-19 at the Gaza border. Those mass marches, peaceful apart from mere rock-throwing, resulted in 223 Palestinian killed by Israeli sniper fire and thousands wounded. There was no international hue and cry; the settlements expanded and Israeli society shifted even further towards fascism. Now four years later, the Al Aqsa Flood fighters returned to those same border fences and bulldozed them. It is no wonder why three-quarters of all Palestinians explicitly support the October 7 attacks, and 89 percent support Hamas’s military wing. 

The Palestinian people as a whole, as a nation, understand that those who made nonviolent revolution impossible made the shift to full-fledged armed resistance inevitable. So in their insistence on an international left that condemns armed resistance, Klein and Goldberg are effectively asking for an international left without Palestinians. 

Without question, the experience of war is horrific, and no images shock the conscience quite like those of civilian casualties, especially women, children and the elderly. These images seem to require no context or explanation; they instinctively shape our emotions, stir our desire for justice, and compel us to show solidarity with the victims. But this is how and why imperialist war propaganda works time and again. Even though some people can in retrospect see the folly of many wars, in the moment of crisis they are selectively presented certain images, so that feelings of empathy and grief are easily instrumentalized as pretext for an invasion. The demand in a war fever is to feel anger and grief, to set aside analysis and critical thought. Hidden of course are the years of images of civilian death and mass destruction on the Palestinian side, the stories of trauma and terrorism they’ve endured, the names of their children. The whole world has never been instructed to join in their grief and to insist on their right to self-defense and retaliation against those responsible for that terrorism. 

War is always horrific and any student of military history knows the so-called “rules of war” are routinely violated – in fact they are not really considered at all by military strategists when they make their plans. Look at the US “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, which was just another way of saying “strike terror” into the hearts of all Iraqi society. Look at Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Rolling Thunder” operation to completely destroy the northern part of Vietnam, killing an estimated 182,000 civilians in three years. Look at even the “good wars”  like World War II, when the U.S. carpet bombed cities in Japan and Germany that had no military purpose, intentionally causing mass civilian deaths as a way of psychologically terrorizing the enemy into surrender. But no one questions the righteousness and necessity of the war against fascism. Those U.S. leaders who directed those mass civilian deaths never faced a day in court for war crimes, but instead had schools and airports named after them. 

The Vietnam Memorial in D.C. lists out the names of 58,000 U.S. service member casualties in the war, an emotional display that stretches around 500 feet. But if it had the names of the Vietnamese deaths, civilian and combatant alike, it would stretch two miles. The way the war has been presented and is understood emotionally in the United States is, again, totally selective. The fiction is thus maintained that one civilized side wages war within the “rules” and only the “barbaric” wage war with terror. In fact, all modern war contains elements of terror.

For its part, Hamas officially says it upholds the rules of war and Islamic prohibitions on the targeting of women and children, disputing the dominant narrative of October 7, and says that the breaking down of the border fences allowed undirected groups of Palestinians to enter nearby Israeli settlements. 

But regardless of what exactly transpired, and who ordered precisely what, that cannot be used to confuse the basics of the Palestinian question. It is a struggle for national liberation against colonialism. It is not a war between two conventional armies. One side has a massive, high-tech and sophisticated military with advanced weapons systems, while the other side is a collection of guerrilla forces. The Palestinians have no military bases they control, no advanced weapons systems they can buy, no control over their own borders or airspace, no internationally legally recognized force to strike back against enemy states and to defend their population. This is a totally asymmetrical war, and for years it has been rocks versus tanks with nearly all the bleeding on one side. 

To win their national liberation struggle, Palestinians have tried general strikes. They have tried to get other Arab armies in the region to intervene. They have conducted dramatic hijackings to get worldwide attention, often designed for maximum spectacle with minimal civilian losses. They have tried peace agreements and negotiations (Hamas itself only turned to armed resistance after about a decade of this). They have tried international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns. They have gone to international courts and tribunals. The First Intifada was built on mass rallies and mobilization, largely led by the left, and it was only after the Israelis conducted a campaign of mass imprisonment and assassination of its leaders that the era of suicide bombings began. The failure of all the promised peace accords produced the Second Intifada, this time more violent. And now after years of losing more and more land, being asphyxiated by the millions, a new phase has opened. But it is one continuous national liberation struggle. 

The only real analogy left is that of the Native Americans or the Algerians, whose guerrilla struggles were not to win over the settler population — seeing that as impossible — but to strike back so that they might leave stolen lands and to show their own people through force that the enemy state was not invincible. Those battles too often involved the bloody deaths of non-combatants, and the anti-colonial fighters were called “savages” in the mass media of their day. But after years of broken promises and treaties, continuous encroachment on land, misery and humiliation, such armed resistance and violent eruptions became inevitable. And looking back, is there really any confusion about what was the side of justice?

As Israel begins a new round of murderous bombardment of Gaza, all responsibility for renewed bloodshed must be placed on the occupying power. The world sees clearly the genocidal and terrorist character of the Israeli armed forces. The task in the United States is to channel this into a mass social force that makes it untenable for the U.S. government to continue financing and arming the occupation. Out of the horrors of the present, many within the Palestinian community also believe they are entering a new phase of liberation struggle; this powerful movement must be prepared to stand with them.

Palestinian Resistance and the Crisis of Liberal Humanism

By Yanis Iqbal

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was a huge blow to the settler-colonial state of Israel: Al-Qassam Brigades captured 20 settlements and 11 military sites in merely a few hours. The attacks on Israeli civilian and military outposts destroyed the narcissistic sense of security associated with the carefully orchestrated narratives of Zionist dominance, surveillance and intelligence. In the words of Saree Makdisi, the breakout “smashed, hopefully once and for all, the very idea that the Palestinians can just be ignored, talked to, or talked about rather than talking for and representing themselves, their interests and their rights.” Earlier, it was Palestinians who had to explain their presence and prove their humanity. Now, it is they are setting the contours of the narrative. That’s why Zionists are terrified.

Unqualified solidarity with the anti-colonial violence of the Palestinian resistance has been hindered by liberal humanism, a bourgeois ideology that uses abstract slogans of peace to accelerate the genocide of Palestinians. There are two components in this ideology. First, the supreme value of human life is proclaimed as an unproblematic moral statement, which everyone has to support. While liberal humanists may admit that the Israeli occupation has given rise to Palestinian violence, they remain adamant that the death of individuals can never be justified. Judith Butler, for instance, criticizes those who blame Zionist apartheid for contemporary violence, saying that “nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated”.

In the above conception, violence is conceived as an infringement of the individual human body, whose sanctity is guaranteed by an unquestionable morality. The physiological and juridical body is innately exposed to physical, psychological and moral persecution. This kind of body has no positive project; it is entirely defined by its vulnerability to attacks, which requires protection. Christopher Caudwell traces this ethical ideology to the systemic logic of the capitalist economy. In the struggle against feudal fetters, the bourgeoisie saw freedom as the abolition of social organization, as the ability of every individual to pursue his own affairs and interests. This is articulated “in the absolute character of bourgeois property together with its complete alienability.”

On the ideological terrain, this gives rise to the “bourgeois dream – freedom as the absolute elimination of social relations,” by which is meant the absence of any restraint on the ownership, acquisition and alienation of private property. Here, private property isn’t considered as a social restraint that should be abolished, as the bourgeois project is inevitably bound to its particularistic interests. When assembled into ethics, the bourgeois dream translates into ultra-individualist pacifism, wherein the purity of the soul has to be guarded from the “heinous guilt” of the “sin” that is violence. Caudwell calls this “spiritual laissez-faire,” which uses the commercial mentality of capitalists – its concern with economic status – to proclaim the right of remaining preoccupied with one’s own soul.

When liberal humanists talk about mushy-mushy sentiments of individual human life, it is crucial to ask whether such an abstraction even exists in the horrors of Israeli barbarism. On one side, we have settlers, whose material security is guaranteed by an authoritarian state apparatus. On the other side, we have natives, whose wretchedness is maintained through incessant violence. In this scenario, I ask you: where is the pristine divinity that you label as “human life”? I can only see the all-too onerous divides constructed by Zionist settler-colonialism. Preaching a higher moral reconciliation beyond these divides, trying to organize a peaceful dialogue between two completely antagonistic camps, is a pathetic attempt that is bound to fail. In the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, it is criminal to think that there is an ever-present and ready-at-hand reserve of morality that can calm the clamor of reality. We have to dive into reality, into its thundering materiality, if we want to shoulder the global responsibility of solidarity that has been forced upon us by the Palestinian resistance.

When an interviewer told Ghassan Kanafani that it would be better for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “to stop the war to stop the death,” Kanafani said, “Maybe to you, not to us. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights; these are something as essential as life itself.” By absolutizing life, liberal humanists ignore how such a life doesn’t exist in a settler-colonial society. The boundary between life and death is not clear-cut. Huey P. Newton said, “I tell the comrades you can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.” Liberal humanists ignore how death already walks among the Palestinians. This allows them to construe life as a personal capacity, as a possibility, that can be realized through a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized. For the colonized, life is never a possibility. Colonialism is the violent closure of possibilities for the colonized. In the words of Mehdi Amel: “It…became impossible to define the structure of the colonized countries’ specific trajectories of becoming except within the colonial relation. What was possible before this relation became impossible after. This is what is novel in the structure of these countries’ history.”

Kanafani dispels the naive hope of humanistic possibility in the colonial context, starkly portraying the inhuman impossibility of peace talks between Israel and Palestine as “a conversation between the sword and the neck”. There is no mention here of the personal, biographical details of an abstract human life; they are replaced by impersonal metaphors. Why so? Because the liberal focus on human life conveys an ambience of integrity and security in a situation that is marked by disorder and destruction. By preserving the edifice of individual, non-violent agency, liberal humanism says that violence is optional, it is a matter of condonation or denunciation. Kanafani explodes this pious optimism by depicting Zionism as a structurally violent tool that is indifferent to our subjective feelings. Between the sword and the neck, there lies no other possibility than death.

The elision of the historical depth of Zionist violence is a core component of liberal humanism. Slavoj Žižek denounced the “barbarism” of Hamas by writing that the choice is not between Palestinian anti-colonial violence and Zionist settler-colonial violence but “between fundamentalists and all those who still believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence”. The ruse of humanist possibility allows him to frame violence as a simplistic choice, whereas the toothless policy of dialogue comes off as the superior, more complex option. According to Joseph Stalin: “the Communists regard the substitution of one social system for another, not simply as a spontaneous and peaceful process, but as a complicated, long and violent process.” Here, the order of valuation is reversed. It is violence which is accorded the dignity of historical complexity. It is liberal humanism which is faulted for uncritically regarding the peacefulness of human life as an immediate, incontrovertible fact.

Reading Žižek, one is reminded of people whom Vladimir Lenin called the “spineless hangers-on of the bourgeoisie with intellectualist pretensions”. These “tyrannized, shocked and scared” intellectuals “have been flung into consternation at the sight of this unprecedentedly acute class struggle, have burst into tears, forgotten all their premises and demand that we perform the impossible, that we socialists achieve complete victory without fighting against the exploiters and without suppressing their resistance.” Decolonization is imagined as a peaceful project that can be “introduced” into the settler-colonial society. Liberal humanists forget how decolonization is forged in the intensity of national liberation, in “the struggles, the exploiters’ gnashing of teeth, or their diverse attempts to preserve the old order, or smuggle it back through the window”. What accounts for this ignorance? It can be traced to the liberal humanist delusion that a higher unity might emerge from the Zionist machine, that there is an element that might immediately unify the colonial compartments, that there is a humanist sensibility that lies hidden beneath colonialism. There is no such sensibility. Colonial violence has to be broken.

Instead of framing resistance in terms of the individual metric of human life, we have to take recourse to discourses that stress the concrete realities of colonized society. By inflating human life into a mythical capacity, liberal humanism paradoxically reveals a fundamental disregard for the human realities present in concrete societies. In order to avoid this extra-human concept, we must begin from the anti-colonial struggle. Liberal humanists begin with spiritual wishes for peace, attempting to convince people of an ideal method of resistance that will involve the least amount of death and suffering. Marxism doesn’t have any place for such a higher level of reconciliation. Lenin notes that Marxists appraise resistance “according to the class antagonisms and the class struggle which find expression in millions of facts of daily life.” Freedom is not a ready-made skill that can be invoked “in an atmosphere of cajoling and persuasion, in a school of mealy sermons or didactic declamations”. Rather, it is formed in the “school of life and struggle,” wherein the interests of the colonizers are exposed to the counter-interests of the colonized. Lenin puts it expressively:

“The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only real teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters’ resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited. The more varied the exploiters’ attempts to uphold the old, the sooner will the proletariat learn to ferret out its enemies from their last nook and corner, to pull up the roots of their domination, and cut the very ground which could (and had to) breed wage-slavery, mass poverty and the profiteering and effrontery of the money-bags.”

In a colonial situation, resistance is evaluated not according to the ethical ideology of human life but according to the contribution it makes to the opening of historical possibilities. Amilcar Cabral notes, “Resistance is the following: to destroy one thing for the sake of constructing another thing.” This terse statement is instructive because liberal humanists think of colonialism as a malleable arrangement that can be re-jigged to allow for a better outcome. Cabral brooks none of this. He identifies the inertia of colonialism that has to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to emancipate the colonized. It is because liberal humanists think that the possibility for life remains intact under colonialism that they are unable to appreciate the fight for such a life waged by the colonized. That’s why it is so clarifying to read Cabral’s searing words on the objective of national liberation:

“At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability. We have to destroy everything that would be against this in our land, comrades. Step by step, one by one if it be necessary – but we have to destroy in order to construct a new life…our work is to destroy, in our resistance, whatever makes dogs of our people – men or women – so as to allow us to advance, to grow, to rise up like the flowers of our land, whatever can make our people valued human beings.”

Pan-Africanism, Palestine, and the Colors That Bind Struggle

By Shauntionne Mosley

I went to Europe for the first time this year. I stayed for 10 days. Mostly in Paris, but two of those days were spent in London. I took a train from Paris to London with the intention of going to the Notting Hill Festival - a festival I’ve heard about and had been planning on going to for some time now. While in London, I specifically chose my lodging in Brixton because it’s the city's Blackest neighborhood. It was also the location of the Brixton Uprising of 1981. If you know me, I love Black people, Black history, and revolutions. It’s a neighborhood I thought it would be easy for me to blend into, southern American accent or not. I wasn’t entirely wrong. I was surrounded by brown skin of every shade, 4c hair and natural styles, and various accents different from my own. This only increased when I went to the Notting Hill festival itself. Never have I been engulfed by so many people of the diaspora. The roads were barely walkable with the amount of people around me. And their flags: Trinidad & Tobago, Haiti, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica (Jamaicans run London, ok?) and more… all draped on people’s bodies, hanging from the windows of apartments, flying proudly on the tents of different vendors. I cursed myself for not bringing my own. I was going to bring the Pan-African flag I keep at home, but my luggage was already filled to the zippers the day before I left the states. Maybe I could find one there, I thought. 

I went to three different vendors who were selling flags and none of them had Pan-African ones. One man had never even heard of it. I showed him a picture of it on my phone, and he shook his head and shrugged. “We don’t have American flags at Notting Hill,” he said with a chuckle and a thick Jamaican accent. That stung a little. To me, I wasn’t talking about an American flag. I rapidly (and playfully) explained the history of the Pan-African flag, how it was designed by a Jamaican man, and although it has been known to represent Black people in America, it’s really a symbol for the Black diaspora worldwide The vendor listened, then shrugged at me again. He said, “sorry, I’ll remember next year. I promise!” Then he went on to another customer and I went and got some curry goat.  I wasn’t angry at him for not knowing. Can’t even say I was surprised. I don’t expect those abroad to know about Black American history. Lord knows I didn’t learn more about the Black diaspora until college. No, this is not the first time my Blackness was overshadowed by my nationality. However, I did feel stupid again for not bringing my own flag. For it is why the Pan-African flag was created in the first place: Every Race Has A Flag but the Coon. 

I can’t speak for all Black Americans, but personally, I’m Black first and American second. To me, I’m an American because of a clause in the US constitution. I’m American because the African in me was violently beaten and bred out of my people. The continuous genocide of Palestanians in the Gaza Strip has confirmed this for me. As if American slavery, the police shootings of Black lives, disproportionate birth mortality rate of Black mothers, and blatant underfunding of overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods weren’t enough. The horrific deaths and intentional erasure of generations of people, and the bombings of hospitals and churches in Gaza do not only make the miserable migraine of colonization and the Civil Rights movement in America throb in my temple. These savage atrocities carried out by Israel, and funded by the US, force me to pose this question to the US government: how could I possibly be a “fellow American” when I’m Black?

Something that is darkly ironic and sinister about being Black and American during a genocide is when the president speaks. President Biden recently visited Israel and delivered a speech upon his arrival back to the Oval Office. “Good evening, my fellow Americans,” he started with. Was he talking to me? He’s the oldest president to be elected in US history and, like most presidents, from a wealthy family. While I dream of having a president that matches the median age of current America, and is a president that knows what a syrup sandwich is, President Biden continued: 

“The terrorist group Hamas unleashed pure unadulterated evil in the world, but sadly, the Jewish people know, perhaps better than anyone, that there is no limit to the depravity of people when they want to inflict pain on others.”

Better than anyone, he said. After visiting Israel, a country that is responsible for a land, air, and sea blockade over the Gaza Strip, and has been since 2007, making those in Gaza almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. While upholding severe restrictions on the movement of goods, information, and people. Restrictions that leave Palestinians dependent upon another country that has wanted them dead for 75 years. The president of the United States, a country that violently kidnapped people from Africa with the intentions of enslavement and relentlessly halted these people’s progress for 400 plus years. He is the leader of a country that led Native Americans down a Trail of Tears, occupied and abandoned Puerto Rico, and allowed ICE to put Latinx children in cages. 

I must mention that, in America, we learn about the horrors of the Holocaust from middle school through high school in every history class, while the horror history of the other ethnic groups that reside here are “elective” courses. This is not an oppression competition, but America has made it very clear on whose oppression should be discussed and mourned the most. The Never Again Education Act was signed into law by the president on May 29, 2020. The commitment to Holocaust education is written into American law. Meanwhile, the country’s own Black history curriculum teaches how slaves “developed skills'' that could be applied towards their pursuit of happiness and subjects like Black queer studies have been eliminated, the Black Lives Matter movement has been demonized, and reparations for descendants of enslaved Black people are deemed unreasonable despite historical precedence suggesting otherwise. Something the US government might know better than anyone. I doubt The Never Again Education Act will be teaching American students about that though. Or about the concentration camp that is Gaza. Nor will lessons go into detail about a Zionist prime minister committing a genocide. 

It wasn’t done on purpose, I’m sure, but the Palestinian flag has the same colors (aside from white) as the Pan-African flag. The colors of Palestinian flag are the Pan-Arab colors. Each of which represents the successors of the Prophet Muhammad who acted as religious leaders/government officials in Arab history (called caliphate or خِلَافَة). It was also  inspired by a verse crafted by one of the most beloved and emotionally honest poets of the 13th century, Safi al-Din al-Hili, when he wrote: 

White are our deeds, 

black are our battles, 

Green are our fields, 

red are our swords.

The Pan-African flags colors are red, black, and green. Created by Marcus Garvey, Red represents the color of the blood which men must shed for their redemption and liberty, black is the color of the noble and distinguished race to which we belong, and green is the color of the luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland. Both flags stand for these two oppressed groups and their persecution. These flags encourage pride in one’s people, even when there are others telling you there’s nothing to be proud of. The strife for liberation has been never ending for me and mine, and is a strife that Palestanians understand too well. Flagless in Notting Hill, I still danced, ate, and admired faces that looked like kin. I care about all the strangers I met, and felt a sense of relief looking out onto the sea of Black lives. Wishing I had my flag. This fabric of belonging, existence, and claim. Rebel flags must be flown from the river to the sea because the blood of innocent Brown and Black people murks the water. 

If Americans are not on the side of those who are oppressed — and from President Biden’s remarks, they are not — then this man with the highest title in this carnage fertilized land isn’t speaking to me and could never speak for me. I’m mourning the Palestinian past, present, and future that is currently being obliterated, cringing at the fact that the descendants of those who survive this won’t be able to trace their family history. Like Black Americans. I’m also doomfully thinking, maybe even selfishly, about the consequences that must surely come after yet another tragedy funded by America. And how these consequences will be applied to every ethnic group in America that has also been wronged by America; The ones who are only considered Americans in times of war or when we’re abroad and our passports are navy blue. If the soil of Palestine could talk it would cough up blood first, then scream. We the People must not let their, and our, screams go unheard. And we must not let their flags — nor their bodies, belongings, lineage, and livelihoods — disappear under rubble.

Liberatory Violence Is Never "Unprovoked"

By James Dugan

In today's world no one is innocent, no one a neutral. A man is either with the oppressed or he is with the oppressors. He who takes no interest in politics gives his blessing to the prevailing order, that of the ruling classes and exploiting forces." —George Habash

“Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding” —Frantz Fanon

With Israel in particular, it is immediately apparent how willfully ignorant Americans are to the level of sheer violence that it takes to uphold a settler society. Every day that Israel exists as an apartheid State is a violent event for Palestinians. Further, every missile that strikes Gaza and every raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank is propped up by financial support from the United States. The focus of condemnation should therefore be Israel and the United States for creating the material conditions that have necessitated a liberation movement.

The purported concern about violence rings empty when it is devoid of any reference to Israel’s history as a settler colonial project; without any reference to the Nakba of 1948 or the 11-day bombardment of Gaza in 2021 which resulted in hundreds of lost lives and thousands of destroyed residences. Throughout the onslaught, hospitals and news agencies were deliberately targeted by the air strikes—which of course utilized U.S.-made warplanes and bombs. The conditions of colonialism and apartheid ensure that even the most ordinary day is subjected to violence in less blatant forms (e.g. the violence like hunger and poverty that Kwame Ture described as being “so institutionalized that it becomes a part of our way of life” and is accepted as normal). But 2021 was also preceded and followed by other explicitly jarring events, such as the senseless shootings during the Great March of Return in 2018-2019 (over 8,000 hit with live ammunition, over 30,000 injured) and the settler rampage of Huwara earlier this year (leaving hundreds of homes and vehicles torched).

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY

All of this illustrates that, as put by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals.” Israel’s colonization of Palestine is the embodiment of violence—and any notion that violence is “committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer [ ] blurs the nature of the historical processes.” Dunbar-Ortiz’s point has been reiterated by many voices committed to self-determination, decolonization, and universal freedom. Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian educator instructed that "with the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed.” Walter Rodney, the radical Guyanese intellectual, put it similarly, "Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”

With this framework in mind, to call the recent militancy “unprovoked” is to ignore the systemic nature of oppression in Palestine. To those that opt not to ignore it, the response was inevitable for the same reasons that Angela Davis called certain tactics taken during the black liberation struggle inevitable: “Because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions. You have to expect things like that as reactions.” An acknowledgment of how violence permeates prior to the reaction is crucial.

And it should be clear that what we expect and what we desire are not always one and the same. Malcolm X, an early advocate of Palestinian liberation articulated this point well: "I don't believe in violence that's why I want to stop it. And you can't stop it with love. So, we only mean vigorous action in self-defense and that vigorous action we feel we're justified in initiating by any means necessary." When Palestine resists its oppression, it acts in self-defense; it aims at “the recovery of human dignity.” For anyone whose crucial guiding moral and political directive is self-determination and freedom, it is clear which side of the struggle we stand on.

To a Free Palestine in our lifetimes.

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them." —Assata Shakur

“The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. . . . [V]iolence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.” –Kwame Ture

Study, Fast, Train, Fight: The Roots of Black August

By Joe Tache

Republished from Liberation School.

In August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The centuries since witnessed the development of a racial system more violent, extractive, and deeply entrenched than any other in human history. Yet where there is oppression, there is resistance. Since 1619, Black radicals and revolutionaries have taken bold collective action in pursuit of their freedom, threatening the fragile foundations of exploitation upon which the United States is built. These heroic struggles have won tremendous victories, but they have also produced martyrs—heroes who have been imprisoned and killed because of their efforts to transform society.

“Black August” is honored every year to commemorate the fallen freedom fighters of the Black Liberation Movement, to call for the release of political prisoners in the United States, to condemn the oppressive conditions of U.S. prisons, and to emphasize the continued importance of the Black Liberation struggle. Observers of Black August commit to higher levels of discipline throughout the month. This can include fasting from food and drink, frequent physical exercise and political study, and engagement in political struggle. In short, the principles of Black August are: “study, fast, train, fight.”

George Jackson and the origins of Black August

George Jackson was a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party while he was incarcerated in San Quentin Prison in California. Jackson was an influential revolutionary and his assassination at the hands of a San Quentin prison guard was one of the primary catalysts for the inception of Black August.

A 19-year-old convicted of armed robbery, in 1961 George Jackson was sentenced to a prison term of “1-to-life,” meaning prison administrators had complete and arbitrary control over the length of his sentence. He never lived outside of a prison again, spending the next 11 years locked up (seven and a half years of those in solitary confinement). In those 11 years—despite living in an environment of extreme racism, repression, and state control—George Jackson’s political fire was ignited, and he became an inspiration to the other revolutionaries of his generation.

Jackson was first exposed to radical politics by fellow inmate W.L. Nolen. With Nolen’s guidance, Jackson studied the works of many revolutionaries, including Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Frantz Fanon. Nolen, Jackson, and other  prisoners dedicated themselves to raising political consciousness among the prisoners and to organizing their peers in the California prison system. They led study sessions on radical philosophy and convened groups like the Third World Coalition and started the San Quentin Prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. Jackson even published two widely read books while incarcerated: Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye.

Unfortunately, if predictably, these radical organizers soon found themselves in the cross-hairs of the California prison establishment. In 1970, W.L. Nolen—who had been transferred to Soledad prison and planned to file a lawsuit against its superintendent—was assassinated by a prison guard. Days later, George Jackson (also now in Soledad Prison) and fellow radical prisoners Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette were accused of killing a different prison guard in retaliation for Nolen’s death. The three were put on trial and became known as the Soledad Brothers.

That year, when it was clear that George Jackson would likely never be released from prison, his 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson staged an armed attack on the Marin County Courthouse to demand the Soledad Brothers’ immediate release. Jonathan Jackson enlisted the help of three additional prisoners—James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee—during the offensive. Jonathan Jackson, McClain, and Christmas were all killed, while Magee was shot and re-arrested. Ruchell Magee, now 80 years old, is currently one of the longest held political prisoners in the world.

On August 21, 1971, just over a year after the courthouse incident, a prison guard assassinated George Jackson. The facts regarding his death are disputed. Prison authorities alleged that Jackson smuggled a gun into the prison and was killed while attempting to escape. On the other hand, literary giant James Baldwin wrote, “no Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”

While the particular circumstances of Jackson’s death will likely forever remain contested, two facts are clear: his death was ultimately a political assassination, and his revolutionary imprint can’t be extinguished. Through the efforts and sacrifice of George and Jonathan Jackson, Nolen, McClain, Christmas, Magee and countless other revolutionaries, the 1970s became a decade of widespread organizing and political struggle within prisons. Prisoners demanded an end to racist and violent treatment at the hands of prison guards, better living conditions, and increased access to education and adequate medical care. Tactics in these campaigns included lawsuits, strikes, and mass rebellions. The most notable example may be the Attica Prison rebellion, which occurred in New York State just weeks after George Jackson was murdered. In protest of the dehumanizing conditions they were subjected to, about 1,500 Attica Prison inmates released a manifesto with their demands and seized control of the prison for four days, beginning on September 9, 1971. Under orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, law enforcement authorities stormed Attica on September 12 and killed at least 29 incarcerated individuals. None of the prisoners had guns.

This is the context out of which Black August was born in 1979. It was first celebrated in California’s San Quentin prison, where George Jackson, W.L. Nolen, James McClain, Willam Christmas and Ruchell Magee were all once held. The first Black August commemorated the previous decade of courageous prison struggle, as well as the centuries of Black resistance that preceded and accompanied it.

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY DONATING TODAY!

Political prisoners and the prison struggle

Observers of Black August call for the immediate release of all political prisoners in the United States. That the US government even holds political prisoners is a fact they attempt to obscure and deny. In reality, dozens of radicals from organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and MOVE have been imprisoned for decades as a result of their political activity. As Angela Davis, who was at one time the most high profile political prisoner in the US, explains:

“There is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be called criminal (though in many instances he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner… In this country, however, where the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offense, not for a political act… In all instances, however, the political prisoner has violated the unwritten law which prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of exploitation and racism.”

Prisons in the United States are a form of social control which serve to maintain the status quo of oppression. Over the last few decades, prisons have become an increasingly important tool for the US ruling class. Prisons not only quarantine revolutionaries, but also those segments of the population who have become increasingly expendable to the capitalist system as globalized production, deindustrialization, and technological automation decrease the overall need for labor-power. These shifts, which began in earnest in the 1970s, have hit Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities the hardest, as exemplified by the sky high unemployment and incarceration rates those communities face. These groups are also historically the most prone to rebellion. Angela Davis noted in 1971 that as a result of these trends, “prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order.”

Though that definition of political prisoner is unorthodox, it illustrates the political and economic nature of criminalization. This is why observers of Black August connect the fight to free “revolutionary” political prisoners to the broader struggle against US prisons. Mass incarceration is a symptom of the same system that political prisoners have dedicated their lives towards fighting.

As increasing numbers of the US working class are “lumpenized,” or pushed out of the formal economy and stable employment, the potential significance of political struggle among the unemployed and incarcerated increases. George Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye that “prisoners must be reached and made to understand that they are victims of social injustice. This is my task working from within. The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential.”

George Jackson’s own journey is a perfect example of that revolutionary potential. Jackson didn’t arrive in prison a ready-made revolutionary. He had a history of petty crime and was apolitical during his first years in prison. He would have been dismissed by many people in our society as a “thug.” But comrades who knew that he held the potential inherent in every human being found him and took him in. They helped him understand his personal experiences within the context of capitalism and white supremacy. In turn, George Jackson dedicated his life to doing the same for others incarcerated individuals.

Black August today

August, more than any other month, has historically carried the weight of the Black Liberation struggle. Of course, enslaved Africans were first brought to British North America in August 1619. Just over 200 years later, in August 1831, Nat Turner led the most well-known rebellion of enslaved people in US history. This historical significance carried into the 20th century, when both the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Watts Rebellion—an explosive uprising against racist policing in Los Angeles—occurred in August during the 1960s.

Even today, the month remains significant in the struggle. John Crawford, Michael Brown, and Korryn Gaines were three Black Americans who were murdered in high-profile cases of police brutality; Crawford and Brown in August 2014, and Gaines in August 2016. Their deaths have been part of the impetus for a revived national movement against racist police brutality. Finally, on August 21, 2018, the 47 year anniversary of George Jackson’s death, thousands of U.S. prisoners launched a national prison strike. They engaged in work stoppages, hunger strikes, and other forms of protests. The strike lasted until September 9, 47 years after the Attica Prison Uprising began. Like the Attica prisoners, the 2018 prison strike organizers put forth a comprehensive list of demands that exposed the oppression inherent to the U.S. prison system, and laid out a framework to improve their conditions.

Each of these historical and contemporary events reveal a truth that the Black radical tradition has always recognized: there can be no freedom for the masses of Black people within the white supremacist capitalist system. The fight for liberation is just that: a fight. Since its inception in San Quentin, Black August has been an indispensable part of that fight.

In the current political moment, when some misleaders would have us bury the radical nature of Black resistance and instead prop up reformist politics that glorify celebrity, wealth, and assimilation into the capitalist system, Black August is as important as ever. It connects Black people to our history and serves as a reminder that our liberation doesn’t lie in the hands of Black billionaires, Black police officers, or Black Democratic Party officials. Those “Black faces in high places” simply place a friendly face on the system that oppresses the masses of Black people in the United States and around the world, often distorting symbols of Black resistance along the way. Black liberation lies, as it always has, in the hands of the conscious and organized masses. Study, train, fight, and in the words of George Jackson, “discover your humanity and your love of revolution.”

Artificial Intelligence and the Class Struggle

By Chris Fry

Republished from Fighting Words.

Since the earliest days of the industrial revolution, workers have fought company owners over their use of automated machinery to step up the pace of exploitation.

“Programmable” looms in textile mills allowed owners to hire children to work 12 to 14 hours a day at half pay.

Famously, workers used to throw their wooden shoes called “sabot” into the machine gears to force them to stop, hence the word “sabotage”.

At the Flint sit down strike in 1936, workers barricaded the doors to prevent General Motors from removing the assembly line machinery and setting it up at another location. This tactic helped the workers win the strike and force union recognition.

Today, the focus of automation has moved from mechanical to digital, particularly with the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence).  Webster’s dictionary provides two related definitions for AI: “1) a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers; and 2) the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.”

Current AI applications depend on vast databases of different fields of knowledge (e.g., street maps, pictures, languages, literature, etc.) plus powerful computer hardware and software to interact with those databases to allow applications to simulate human intelligence, speech, behavior, appearance and more.

The incredible pace of AI’s increased use has even alarmed some of its developers, so much so that 1,000 of them wrote an open letter calling for a six month pause for AI’s most powerful technologies, as a May 1 New York Times article reports:

In late March, more than 1,000 technology leaders, researchers and other pundits working in and around artificial intelligence signed an open letter warning that A.I. technologies present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

“Powerful A.I. systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said.

“Our ability to understand what could go wrong with very powerful A.I. systems is very weak,” said Yoshua Bengio, a professor and A.I. researcher at the University of Montreal. “So we need to be very careful.”

These systems can generate untruthful, biased and otherwise toxic information. Systems like GPT-4 get facts wrong and make up information, a phenomenon called “hallucination.”

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Automated weapons systems – the Pentagon’s “Terminator” syndrome

The most dangerous application of AI to humanity is its use in modern imperialist warfare. On July 9, PBS held an interview with Paul Scharre, Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, a war industry “think tank”, who said that the Pentagon is already preparing autonomous weapons in its proxy war in Ukraine:

Well, we’re already seeing drones being used in Ukraine that have all of the components needed to build fully autonomous weapons that can go out over the battlefield, find their own targets, and then all on their own attack those targets without any further human intervention. And that raises very challenging legal, and moral and ethical questions about human control over the use of force of war.

Of course, these “questions” have not stopped the war industry’s head-long rush to implement AI technology. Scharre complained in his interviewer that the Pentagon is moving too slowly:

Well, they’re not keeping up. That’s the short version, they’re woefully behind because the culture is so radically different. And the bottom line is, you can’t buy AI the same way that you might buy an aircraft carrier. The military is moving too slow. It’s mired in cumbersome bureaucracy. And the leadership of the Pentagon has tried to shake things up. They had a major reorganization last year of the people working AI and data and software inside the Defense Department.

But we haven’t seen a lot of changes since then. And so the Pentagon is going to have to find ways to cut through the red tape and move faster if they’re going to stay on top of this very important technology.

In the famous Terminator movies, autonomous robot weapons destroy their own creators before attacking humanity in general. In a recent blog from the British Campaign for Nuclear disarmament, that scenario was described in a U.S. military simulation:

Also in May, the Royal Aeronautical Society hosted the ‘Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit’ conference that brought together over 200 delegates from around the world to discuss the future of military air and space capabilities. A blog reporting on the conference mentioned how AI was a major theme and a presentation from Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the Chief of AI Test and Operations, USAF, warned against an over reliance on AI systems and noted that they were easy to trick and deceive. They can also create unexpected strategies to achieve their goals, and he noted that in one simulated test an AI-enabled drone was told to identify and destroy ground-based missile sites.

The final firing decision was to be made by a human, but the system had been trained that destruction of the missile site was the top priority. The AI decided therefore that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission and, in the simulation, it attacked the operator. Hamilton was reported as saying that the human operator would tell it not to kill the threat, “but it got its points by killing that threat. So, what did it do? … It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.” Although the system was trained not to kill the operator, it started destroying the communication tower used to connect with the drone.

The Pentagon excuses itself for developing these dangerous weapons AI applications by saying that the People’s Republic of China is also developing these systems. But it must be pointed out that it is the U.S. fleet that is parading its nuclear-armed warships just off the coast of China in its arrogant and provocative “freedom of navigation” campaign, giving China no warning time to respond to an attack. U.S. Imperialism has no such justification.

AI and the strike by the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds

Artificial Intelligence is a major issue  in the ongoing strike by writers and movie production workers, including actors, and the entertainment industry’s corporate owners, called the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP). This “alliance” includes such giants as Amazon, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, HBO and The Walt Disney Company, the parent company of ABC News.

This is the first combined strike by these two groups of workers since 1960. The real pay for these workers after inflation has greatly declined in the last decade while the pay for owners and executives has skyrocketed. Along with demanding higher pay, these unions are demanding that AI applications not be used against them to lower their compensation.

AI applications like ChatGPT can “scrape” millions of documents from the internet without the writers’ permission to create new documents, or in this case, new story scripts. The writers call AI “plagiarism machines.”

For the writers, they demand that their writing not be used to “train” AI applications, and they not be tasked to correct AI generated scripts, for which they would receive less pay.

As one striking worker put it:

On Twitter, screenwriter C. Robert Cargill expressed similar concerns, writing, “The immediate fear of AI isn’t that us writers will have our work replaced by artificially generated content. It’s that we will be underpaid to rewrite that trash into something we could have done better from the start. This is what the WGA is opposing, and the studios want.”

The Screen Actors Guild has parallel demands regarding AI as their fellow strikers from the Writers Guild. As ABC News reported on July 19:

In addition to a pay hike, SAG-AFTRA said it proposed a comprehensive set of provisions to grant informed consent and fair compensation when a “digital replica” is made or an actor’s performance is changed using artificial intelligence. The union also said it proposed a comprehensive plan for actors to participate in streaming revenue, claiming the current business model has eroded our residual income for actors.

These AI issues may seem obscure to many members of the working class and oppressed communities. But it is important to remember that artificial intelligence in the hands of the Wall Street billionaires and Pentagon generals will lead to more and more exploitation for our class and increase the chances of a global nuclear catastrophe for our planet.

AI could offer tremendous social benefits, such as medical cures and economic scientific planning, but only if it is controlled by the workers through a socialist system.

Burkina Faso’s New President Condemns Imperialism, Quotes Che Guevara, and Allies with Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba

[Pictured: Burkina Faso’s Revolutionary President, Ibrahim Traoré (center), attends the closing ceremony of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou on March 4, 2023. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP]

By Ben Norton

Republished from Geopolitical Economy Report.

The new president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed to fight imperialism and neocolonialism, invoking his country’s past revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara and quoting Che Guevara.

The West African nation has also formed close diplomatic ties with the revolutionary governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, as well as with NATO’s arch-rival Russia.

In January 2022, a group of nationalist military officers in Burkina Faso toppled the president, Roch Kaboré, a wealthy banker who had fostered close ties with the country’s former colonizer, France, where he was educated.

The military officers declared a government run by what they call the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR), led by a new president, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.

They pledged to seek true independence from French hegemony, condemning the neocolonial policies and economic, political, and military control that Paris still exercises over Francophone West Africa.

Burkina Faso ended its decades-long military agreement with France, expelling the hundreds of French troops that had been in the country for years.

The new president, Damiba, was initially popular. But support waned as he was unable to defeat the deadly Salafi-jihadist insurgents that have destabilized the country.

In September 2022, discontent led to a subsequent coup in Burkina Faso, which brought to power another nationalist military leader named Ibrahim Traoré. He was just 34 at the time, making him one of the world’s youngest leaders.

Traoré has pledged to carry out a “refoundation of the nation” and comprehensive “modernization”, to quell violent extremism, fight corruption, and “totally reform our system of government”.

The charismatic Burkinabè leader frequently ends his speeches with the chant “La patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons!”, the French translation of the official motto of revolutionary Cuba: “Patria o muerte, venceremos!” – “Homeland or death, we will prevail!”

As president, Traoré has brought back some of the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Sankara.

Sankara was a Marxist Burkinabè military officer and committed pan-Africanist who ascended to power in a 1983 coup.

Sankara launched a socialist revolution, transforming the impoverished country through land reform, infrastructure development, and expansive public health and literacy programs.

Under Sankara’s leadership, Burkina Faso also challenged French neocolonialism and pursued an anti-imperialist foreign policy, forming alliances with revolutionary struggles across the Global South.

These leftist policies were reversed in 1987, when Sankara was overthrown and killed in another coup, led by his former ally Blaise Compaoré – who subsequently moved hard to the right and allied with the United States and France, ruling through rigged elections until 2014.

Today, Ibrahim Traoré is drawing heavily on the legacy of Sankara. He has made it clear that he wants West Africa, and the continent as a whole, to be free of Western neocolonialism.

This July, the Russian government held a Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg. Traoré was the first African leader to arrive to the conference. There, he delivered a fiery anti-imperialist speech.

“We are the forgotten peoples of the world. And we are here now to talk about the future of our countries, about how things will be tomorrow in the world that we are seeking to build, and in which there will be no interference in our internal affairs”, Traoré said, according to a partial transcript published by Russian state media outlet TASS.

TASS reported:

In his speech, the Burkinabe head of state also focused on sovereignty and the struggle against imperialism. “Why does resource-rich Africa remain the poorest region of the world? We ask these questions and get no answers. However, we have the opportunity to build new relationships that will help us build a better future for Burkina Faso,” the president said. African countries have suffered for decades from a barbaric and brutal form of colonialism and imperialism, which could be called a modern form of slavery, he stressed.

“However, a slave who does not fight [for his freedom] is not worthy of any indulgence. The heads of African states should not behave like puppets in the hands of the imperialists. We must ensure that our countries are self-sufficient, including as regards food supplies, and can meet all of the needs of our peoples. Glory and respect to our peoples; victory to our peoples! Homeland or death!” Traore summed up, quoting the words of legendary Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The 35-year-old president of Burkina Faso was attired in a camouflage uniform and red beret during the summit.

On July 29, Traoré had a private meeting in Saint Petersburgh with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In their talks, the Burkinabè leader praised the Soviet Union for defeating Nazism in World War II.

Burkina Faso strengthens ties with Latin American revolutionary movements

The new nationalist government in Burkina Faso has also sought to deepen its ties with revolutionary movements in Latin America.

In May, the West African nation’s prime minister, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, traveled to Venezuela.

Tambèla met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who pledged to “advance in cooperation, solidarity, and growth… building a solid fraternal relation”.

In July, the Burkinabè prime minister traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the 44th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution.

Tambèla attended the July 19 celebration of the revolution in Managua, at the invitation of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Following the September 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, the new president, Traoré, surprised many observers by choosing as his prime minister a longtime follower of Thomas Sankara, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla.

Tambèla was an ally of Sankara during the Burkinabè revolution. When Sankara came to power in the 1980s, Tambèla organized a solidarity movement and sought international support for the new leftist government.

Tambèla is a pan-Africanist and has been affiliated with communist and left-wing organizations.

Traoré said in a speech in December that Tambèla will help to oversee the process of the “refoundation of the nation“.

By appointing Tambèla as prime minister, Traoré tangibly showed his commitment to reviving the revolutionary legacy of Sankara.

In his remarks at the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Tambèla discussed the historical legacy of solidarity between the revolution in Burkina Faso and that of Nicaragua.

Burkina Faso’s President Thomas Sankara with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega in 1986.

Tambèla recalled that Sankara visited Nicaragua in 1986, and the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega visited Burkina Faso that same year.

When he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in 1984, Sankara declared,

I wish also to feel close to my comrades of Nicaragua, whose ports are being mined, whose towns are being bombed and who, despite all, face up with courage and lucidity to their fate. I suffer with all those in Latin America who are suffering from imperialist domination.

In 1984 and 1986, Sankara also visited Cuba, where he met with revolutionary President Fidel Castro.

“For people of my generation, there are things that unite us with Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and Commander Daniel Ortega”, Burkinabè Prime Minister Tambèla said in his speech in Managua on July 19, 2023.

“We have learned to know Nicaragua. When the liberation struggle began, I was small, but we followed, day by day, the context of Nicaragua’s liberation. I went in July of ’79, and when they entered Managua we were happy, people of my age celebrated that”, he recalled.

And then, when Thomas Sankara came to power, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Revolution was something happy for us; we as students studied a lot the history of Nicaragua, we followed its evolution.

Tambèla added that Burkina Faso supported Nicaragua in its International Court of Justice case against the United States. Washington was found guilty of illegally sponsoring far-right “Contra” death squads, which waged a terror war against the leftist government, as well as putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports. (Yet, although Nicaragua won the case in 1986, the U.S. government has still to this day refused to pay the Central American nation a single cent of the reparations that it legally owes it.)

“Nicaragua’s struggle is also that of our people”, Tambèla stressed.

In his July 19 speech, the Burkinabè prime minister also sent special greetings to the diplomatic delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

“We have very close relations with Cuba”, Tambèla added.

President Fidel Castro has been and was a very important person for the revolution in Africa; we have excellent memories, both of Cuba and of President Fidel Castro.

Ben Norton is an investigative journalist and analyst. He is the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report, and is based in Latin America. (Publicaciones en español aquí.)

Niger Is the Fourth Country in the Sahel to Experience an Anti-Western Coup

By Vijay Prashad and Kambale Musavuli

Republished from Independent Media Institute’s Globetrotter report.

At 3 a.m. on July 26, 2023, the presidential guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Troops, led by Brigadier General Abdourahmane Tchiani closed the country’s borders and declared a curfew. The coup d’état was immediately condemned by the Economic Community of West African States, by the African Union, and by the European Union. Both France and the United States—which have military bases in Niger—said that they were watching the situation closely. A tussle between the Army—which claimed to be pro-Bazoum—and the presidential guard threatened the capital, but it soon fizzled out. On July 27, General Abdou Sidikou Issa of the army released a statement saying that he would accept the situation to “avoid a deadly confrontation between the different forces which… could cause a bloodbath.” Brigadier General Tchiani went on television on July 28 to announce that he was the new president of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie or CNSP).

The coup in Niger follows similar coups in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021) and Burkina Faso (January 2022 and September 2022), and Guinea (September 2021). Each of these coups was led by military officers angered by the presence of French and U.S. troops and by the permanent economic crises inflicted on their countries. This region of Africa—the Sahel—has faced a cascade of crises: the desiccation of the land due to the climate catastrophe, the rise of Islamic militancy due to the 2011 NATO war in Libya, the increase in smuggling networks to traffic weapons, humans, and drugs across the desert, the appropriation of natural resources—including uranium and gold—by Western companies that have simply not paid adequately for these riches, and the entrenchment of Western military forces through the construction of bases and the operation of these armies with impunity.

Two days after the coup, the CNSP announced the names of the 10 officers who lead the CNSP. They come from the entire range of the armed forces, from the army (General Mohamed Toumba) to the Air Force (Colonel Major Amadou Abouramane) to the national police (Deputy General Manager Assahaba Ebankawel). It is by now clear that one of the most influential members of the CNSP is General Salifou Mody, former chief of staff of the military and leader in the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, which led the February 2010 coup against President Mamadou Tandja and which governed Niger until Bazoum’s predecessor Mahamadou Issoufou won the 2011 presidential election. It was during Issoufou’s time in office that the United States government built the world’s largest drone base in Agadez and that the French special forces garrisoned the city of Irlit on behalf of the uranium mining company Orano (formerly a part of Areva).

It is important to note that General Salifou Mody is perceived as an influential member of CNSP given his influence in the army and his international contacts. On February 28, 2023, Mody met with the United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley during the African Chiefs of Defense Conference in Rome to discuss “regional stability, including counterterrorism cooperation and the continued fight against violent extremism in the region.” On March 9, Mody visited Mali to meet with Colonel Assimi Goïta and the Chief of Staff of the Malian army General Oumar Diarra to strengthen military cooperation between Niger and Mali. A few days later on March 16, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Niger to meet with Bazoum. In what many in Niger perceived as a sidelining of Mody, he was appointed on June 1 as the Nigerien ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. Mody, it is said in Niamey, is the voice in the ear of Brigadier General Tchiani, the titular head of state.

Corruption and the West

A highly informed source in Niger tells us that the reason why the military moved against Bazoum is that “he’s corrupt, a pawn of France. Nigerians were fed up with him and his gang. They are in the process of arresting the members of the deposed system, who embezzled public funds, many of whom have taken refuge in foreign embassies.” The issue of corruption hangs over Niger, a country with one of the world’s most lucrative uranium deposits. The “corruption” that is talked about in Niger is not about petty bribes by government officials, but about an entire structure—developed during French colonial rule—that prevents Niger from establishing sovereignty over its raw materials and over its development.

At the heart of the “corruption” is the so-called “joint venture” between Niger and France called Société des mines de l’Aïr (Somaïr), which owns and operates the uranium industry in the country. Strikingly, 85 percent of Somaïr is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies, while only 15 percent is owned by Niger’s government. Niger produces over 5 percent of the world’s uranium, but its uranium is of a very high quality. Half of Niger’s export receipts are from sales of uranium, oil, and gold. One in three lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium from Niger, at the same time as 42 percent of the African country’s population lived below the poverty line. The people of Niger have watched their wealth slip through their fingers for decades. As a mark of the government’s weakness, over the course of the past decade, Niger has lost over $906 million in only 10 arbitration cases brought by multinational corporations before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the International Chamber of Commerce.

France stopped using the franc in 2002 when it switched to the Euro system. But, fourteen former French colonies continued to use the Communauté Financiére Africaine (CFA), which gives immense advantages to France (50 percent of the reserves of these countries have to be held in the French Treasury and France’s devaluations of the CFA—as in 1994—have catastrophic effects on the country’s that use it). In 2015, Chad’s president Idriss Déby Itno said that the CFA “pulls African economies down” and that the “time had come to cut the cord that prevents Africa from developing.” Talk now across the Sahel is for not only the removal of French troops—as has taken place in Burkina Faso and in Mali—but of a break with the French economic hold on the region.

The New Non-Alignment

At the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit in July, Burkina Faso’s leader, President Ibrahim Traoré wore a red beret that echoed the uniform of the assassinated socialist leader of his country, Thomas Sankara. Traoré reacted strongly to the condemnation of the military coups in the Sahel, including to a recent visit to his country by an African Union delegation. “A slave that does not rebel does not deserve pity,” he said. “The African Union must stop condemning Africans who decide to fight against their own puppet regimes of the West.”

In February, Burkina Faso had hosted a meeting that included the governments of Mali and Guinea. On the agenda is the creation of a new federation of these states. It is likely that Niger will be invited into these conversations.

Currency Crisis In The West (1965)

By Hsiang Chung

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Editor’s Note from BAR: This 1965 essay appeared in Kwame Nkrumah’s journal, The Spark. If it were around today, The Spark would probably carry a warning in the US that it was “state-affiliated media.” Its editors probably wouldn’t care. The Spark was published by Kwame Nkrumah’s Bureau of African Affairs and its explicit mission was to build socialism in Ghana and to aid in fomenting working-class revolution throughout Africa.

The Spark’s content reflected this mission. The weekly paper ran essays articulating the theory of Nkrumaism and published detailed analysis of neocolonialism and imperialism, and of socialism and development. It considered the class struggle in Africa and examined anti-colonial struggles across the continent. In its pages appeared statements of solidarity with Cuba, Algeria, and Black America, and contributions from Amilcar Cabral, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera. When W.E.B. Du Bois passed away in 1963, an issue appeared in his honor.

For the US State Department, The Spark represented a dangerous tendency within Nkrumah’s Ghana.  In January, 1964 the US Central Intelligence Agency issued a classified report titled “The Leftward Trend in Ghana .” The report noted that the US Embassy in Ghana had characterized a recent speech of Nkrumah’s “as perhaps his most extreme anticapitalist and revolutionary performance.” The speech, according to the CIA, “included [Nkrumah’s] first known specific use of such phrases as ‘class interests’ and ‘class politics,’” it criticized the US “as the citadel of reactionary opposition to progressive forces everywhere,” and it aligned Ghana with “the international ‘socialist’ fraternity.” “Subsequently,” the report continued, “[Nkrumah]  has increasingly tended to mouth the Communist-derived jargon appearing continually in The Spark.”

In their summary of the situation in Ghana, the CIA concluded that, “Barring a successful coup against his regime, it will probably be increasingly difficult for the West to maintain an effective presence in Ghana.”

Nkrumah was overthrown by a CIA-backed military on February 24, 1966.

Below we reprint an article from The Spark titled “Currency Crisis in the West.” Its author is Hsiang Chung, a Chinese economist of whom, we admit, we know little more than his name. Even so, the essay has a crystalline analysis of how monetary policy has been used as a tool of imperial and neocolonial rule. Moreover, in charting the historical reasons for the rise of the dollar’s global supremacy in the twentieth century, it establishes the historical conditions precipitating the dollar’s imminent twenty-first century fall. This is being republished for both historical perspective and relative analysis to the current state of the US dollar. It is important to note that much has changed since this was written in 1965, most notably the varying methods of imperialism/colonialism that have developed by the US and West, the fall of the USSR, and the abandoning the gold standard in 1971.

***

Hsiang Chung, “Currency Crisis in the West,” The Spark: A Socialist Weekly of the African Revolution, January 29, 1965.

The imperialist scramble for world domination is usually marked by a struggle for financial supremacy, for monetary policy is one of the heavy weapons of the imperialist countries in their drive, for expansion--a weapon they use to strangle their rivals and extend their spheres of influence.

In the struggle for monetary supremacy, an imperialist country invariably uses its political and economic power to establish a monetary bloc in which its own currency is made to take a leading position while the currencies of its colonies and dependencies as well as other states associated with it are reduced to a subordinate status.

It has to link to currencies of the monetary bloc members with its own, and at the same time to make them keep their gold and foreign exchange reserves in its central bank to be used by them for “unlimited buying and selling” on foreign exchange market at fixed rates. Consequently, its commodity in capital exports will not have to suffer from the fluctuation of the currency of the monetary bloc members and it will not have to pay more for raw material imports because of the devaluation of its own currency.

Moreover, since the gold and foreign exchange reserves of its monetary bloc members are deposited in its own central exploitation, and this leads to the formation of a financial centre within its own sphere of influence over which it is able to establish its financial supremacy. That is why currency warfare in capitalist international finance is an important means in the imperialist scramble for markets, outlets, for investment and sources for raw materials, as well as an indispensable factor in their constant redivision of the capital of this world.

The Monetary System Crisis Sharpened

The deepening of the general crisis of capitalism, especially the emergence of the crisis in the capitalist monetary system, has intensified the monetary warfare among the imperialist powers. As a result of the world economic crisis of 1929–33, normal financial relations among the capitalist countries were disrupted as never before; the gold standard completely collapsed, and the monetary system of the capitalist countries became chronically unstable.

From that time onwards, in their efforts to maintain currency stability, and to ward off the crisis in the monetary system, monopoly capitalist groups in the imperialist countries were compelled to resort to government intervention on a larger scale than before and adopt such measures in the field of international finance as  moratoria on foreign debts currency depreciation, foreign exchange  restrictions and control etc., in order to consolidate their position in the better struggle for markets and spheres of influence. However, all the steps, which were designed to shift the crisis onto others failed to extricate the imperialists from their plight, but instead made the struggle still sharper and more complicated.

Following the end of World War II, as a result of the formation of the socialist camp and the upsurge of the national liberation movement the areas dominated or exploited by the imperialist countries have become smaller and smaller. In this predicament, the inter-imperialist struggle for markets and spheres of influence has become more acute and currency has been used on a still larger scale as an instrument in defeating their adversaries. Not only have they subjected the currencies of their colonies and dependencies to their own as in the past; they have also exerted great efforts to make their own currency the dominant one within the shrinking imperialist camp. At the same time, the deepening of the general crisis of capitalism has been accomplished by an intensified crisis in the monetary system, and the imperialist countries have been forced to take further steps to intervene in various forms in the field of international finance. However, whenever they are taken by the strong to bully the weak or the weak to counteract an adversary’s pressure, the steps are bound to aggravate the imperialist monetary struggle, and make it more severe than was the case before World War II.

Domination vs Independence

The characteristic of postwar inter-imperialist relations is that US imperialism has increasingly endeavored to consolidate and extend its dominant position while the other imperialist powers refused to reconcile themselves to US control from which they have done all they can to free themselves. This rivalry between US imperialism and the other imperialist powers struggle between domination and independence— is also reflected in capitalist, world finance.

During World War II, US imperialism amassed enormous wealth and greatly expanded  its productive capacity and export trade. In the early post-war years, Washington took advantage of the temporary disappearances of three fascist countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan from the capitalist world arena of competition and of the heavy destruction suffered by the two old imperialist powers, Britain and France; it went all out for economic expansion abroad and consequently had a huge surplus in its balance of international payments and piled up vast gold reserves. In 1938 the US gold reserves amounted to $14,594 million or 56.1 per cent of the gold reserves of the capitalist world. In 1948, they jumped to $24,399 million, or 70.3 per cent of the capitalist world’s total. During this period, the other capitalist countries incurred huge deficits in their international accounts with the United States, resulting in a serious “dollar shortage” and massive gold outflows to the United States.

In the decade between 1938 and 1948, the gold reserves of Britain, the sterling area and the West European countries dropped from $9,511 million to $5,707 million, and their share of the capitalist world's gold reserves fell from 36.6 per cent to 16.4 per cent. At that time the disruption of domestic production, the heavy increases in budgetary deficits, and the impact of deficits in the payment of international payments brought about serious currency depreciation in most of the capitalist countries except the United States. Under the circumstances, the governments of these countries were constrained to their foreign exchange restrictions and controls to achieve, and to stabilize the value of their currencies by artificial means. The result was that they’re currencies became “soft”, i.e., could not be freely converted into other foreign currencies, they were in no position to compete with the dollar, a hard currency which was freely convertible.

Shift in Economic Power

This shift in economic power was much to the advantage of US imperialism in its greedy bid for world leadership. It has made every effort to form a big dollar bloc to dovetail plans to build an unprecedentedly big empire in the world. In addition to adopting political, military, economic and other measures, US imperialism, in order to fulfill this grandiose plan, must take the following steps in the monetary field. On the one hand, it needs to consolidate the external value of the dollar and maintain its “free convertibility” so that fixed exchange rate between the dollar and other currencies can be preserved, and the dollar can have the same status as gold in the capitalist world's current reserves.

This would provide favourable conditions for New York to become the capitalist world’s sole international financial centre.

On the other measures both at home, and in the currency blocs, they control in order to check economic penetration by their competitors. US imperialism therefore found it necessary to do the utmost to intervene in their international financial policies and foreign exchange systems, thus enabling it to maintain normal trade relations with them, and paying the way for its further economic expansion.

In effect, this US imperialist rapid plan is nothing but a refurnished version of the currency blocs established by Britain, France, and other old imperialist powers in their colonies and spheres of influence. But in order to ward off the strong opposition of other imperialists, the United States had to resort to more covert and slyer tactics in pushing forward this plan in the capitalist world.

Price of Gold Kept Down

In the first place, relying on its substantial gold reserves, US imperialism artificially kept down the price of gold in its dealings with other governments or their central banks. It is common knowledge that as early as 1934 the US government prescribed the external value of the dollar, i.e., the parity between the dollar and gold, at $35 an ounce. But since the latter part of the 1930s and particularly since World War II, the value of the dollar has been frequently devalued internally because of inflation. In 1948 the purchasing power of the dollar was only 57.8 per cent of what it was in 1939. In 1963 it further dropped to 44 per cent. In order to stabilize the external value of the dollar by artificial means, the U.S. government, irrespective of the frequent devaluation of the dollar internally, has always exchanged it for gold at the official rate of $35 percent ounce in its dealings with other countries. And so the external value of the dollar has long been out of tune with the extent of its internal devaluation while the price of gold has been greatly kept down.

Other capitalist countries were then suffering from a widespread “dollar shortage” and they virtually had very little or no dollars with which to buy US gold. Therefore, keeping the price of gold down actually meant compelling other capitalist countries to sell gold cheaply to the United States in order to make good their dollar deficits. This increased the surplus in the US balance of international payments, and gave it the opportunity to rake in gold at a low price made it difficult for the latter to relieve their “dollar shortage”. And this also became a pressure under which they had to accept the Marshall plan and other types of “aid,” and thus subject themselves to enslavement by US imperialism.

Another major aim of US imperialism in keeping down the price of gold is to irrigate the same role as gold to the dollar, whose external value was artificially stabilized, and serving as a world currency. Since the currencies of most other capitalist countries were unstable and their foreign exchange reserves, along with, and in preference to pound sterling. This facilitated US imperialism control of their currencies in one way or another, and it’s becoming the biggest International exploiter in capitalist world finance.

Washington’s Building Tactics

In the second place, in the early post-war years, Washington spread such false ideas as “the elimination of foreign exchange control,” “the stabilization of exchange rates,” and “avoidance of competitive currency depreciation.” These were designed to compel other countries to abandon their foreign exchange restrictions and controls, and relatively stabilize their exchange rates in a way advantageous to the United States. It pushed this policy in order to ensure that the proceeds of America commodity exports and the remittance to the United States of profits from overseas investment may be protected from other countries’ foreign exchange restrictions.

It is true that US imperialism, at least on the surface, has not imposed downright control over the currencies of its “allies.” In reality, however, it did all it could to achieve this purpose by bullying tactics and cajolement. As mentioned above, Washington compelled the recipients of its “aid“ to accept such terms as the introduction of free convertibility within a certain period of time and the scrapping of their foreign exchange controls and restrictions.

A notable example of this took place when Britain received a big US loan amounting to $3,750 million in 1945 and two years later was compelled to introduce free convertibility for the pound sterling, which lasted for only five weeks. Of great importance is the fact that the International Monetary Fund set up in the early postwar years— a major instrument of US imperialism in the international monetary field— dangled the bait of short term loans before member states in order to induce them to accept conditions involving the loss of national sovereignty. These included the abolition of foreign exchange, controls and restrictions, the definition of the foreign exchange value of a currency in terms of the dollar containing a specific weight of gold and the obligation to obtain the funds agreement to specific changes in foreign exchange rates.

Struggle Between Dollar and Pound

All these measures were naturally resented by other imperialist powers. However, West Germany and Japan were then dominated by Washington, and it was on the basis of formulas prepared by the US government that the exchange rates for the West German mark and the Japanese yen were established. Inflation of considerably serious proportions and a rapid deterioration in the balance of international payments overtook France and Italy; the franc and the lira were frequently devalued; it was difficult for them to compete with the dollar. Only the pound sterling could initiate limited counter- offensives against it. Although Britain’s power has declined since World War II, it still has the backing of the sterling area in international finance, the pound remains the reserve currency of sterling area countries and a number of other capitalist countries in the world network of overseas banks, which was set up by Britain in the last century, retains considerable influence. In these circumstances, the struggle between the dollar and the pound was naturally the most prominent one in the imperialist currency warfare.

The comprehensive system of foreign exchange restrictions and control set up by Britain in the sterling area was a powerful fulcrum strengthening British imperialist exploitation of the commonwealth countries and checking US economic penetration. And it was a serious handicap to US imperialist expansion in the capitalist world.

In the first few years since World War II, by means of loans, “aid” and pressure by different US controlled international organizations, Washington devised every possible means to compel Britain to open the door to the sterling area, and restore the free convertibility of the pound so as to pave the way for the control of the whole sterling area, including Britain itself. For a time British imperialism refused to take orders from Washington and adopted delaying tactics. But in 1949 a pound was devalued by 30.5 per cent against the dollar, followed by a corresponding currency to valuation by 35 other capitalist countries–to a large extent the result of pressure from Washington.

Nevertheless, Britain and other imperialist powers, wherever possible, dealt Washington’s high-handed policy, a rebuff. The sterling area and the currency blocs of other imperialist countries—such as the franc bloc—clung stubbornly to their spheres of influence. Moreover, on the question of the price of gold, because gold produced in the sterling area makes up more than 70 per cent of the total annual production of the capitalist world, Britain and South Africa have more than once battled for a rise in the gold price as a countermeasure to US control. They eventually succeeded in wrestling some concessions from Washington and were permitted to sell their gold for industrial purposes on the free market at a higher price than the official US price of $35 per ounce. The International Monetary Fund's demand for the abolition of foreign exchange controls, and for the institution of a fixed parity between the dollar and other currencies were ignored by many countries. France and Italy, for instance, did not institute fixed exchange rates until the mid-1950s. This shows that, despite Washington’s desperate efforts to put the capitalist world's monetary system under its control, other imperialist powers have been unwilling to accept permanent subordination, they have exerted every effort to free themselves from the claws of the dollar. With the shift in the balance of forces between the United States and other imperialist powers, both Washington’s efforts at domination in the monetary field, and the other imperialist’s resistance are growing more intense.

No More Dollar Dominance

With the advent of the 1950s and the aggravation of the uneven development of capitalism, new changes have taken place in the balance of forces among the imperialist countries. Propped up by the United States, West Germany, Italy, and Japan, have recovered from their position as defeated countries. The power of France has steadily increased, enabling it gradually to speak on equal terms with the United States. Although it keeps getting weaker, Britain too has no desire to be at the mercy of Washington. US dominance, which was attained during and immediately after World War II, has begun to falter.  

This shift in the balance of forces which is unfavorable to US imperialism is also reflected in international finance. After the war of aggression against Korea broke out in 1950, deficits began to appear in the US balance of payments and outflow of gold started, because its policies of war and aggression made it increasingly difficult for its trade surplus and proceeds from overseas investment to meet its huge military expenditures, foreign “aid” commitments and private capital export.

A similar situation recurred during US economic crisis of 1953–54. After 1956, taking advantage of the Anglo-French aggression against Egypt, the United States sold a large amount of oil and cotton to Western Europe, and this helped to bring about a turn for the better in the US balance of payments. However, from 1950 to 1957, the US gold flow to other countries amounted to $1,700 million. Added to this were mounting short term debts, and the annual rate of deficit in its balance of payments averaged about $1,200 million. During the same period the gold reserves of other capitalist countries increased by $3,700 million and their dollar reserves by $6,400 million. By the 1950s, the widespread “dollar shortage” of the early posts were years had virtually become a thing of the past.

A New State

After 1958, a new state was reached in the struggle between the United States and other imperialist powers to strengthen their respective positions in world finance. On the one hand, as a result of its intensified policies of war and aggression, US imperialism had to spend on an average more than $10,000 million a year for its overseas military expenditures, foreign “aid” and private capital export. This led to an increase in the serious dollar crisis, which was manifested in the form of balance of payment deficits, and of gold outflows. The dollar crisis and the recurrent economic crisis erupted either simultaneously or alternately.

Whatever methods it uses, it is impossible for US imperialism to prevent a continual deterioration in the position of the dollar. On the other hand, with the rapid growth in their political and economic power, the tremendous improvement in the balance of payment, and the big increase in their gold reserves, other major capitalist countries, and particularly several of the Common Market Six with France and West Germany as their nucleus, were able greatly to strengthen their currencies on the international finance market. From 1958 to 1962 the gold flowing from the United States to other countries totaled $6,800 million. These rises in the short term debts owed to other countries made for an average annual rate of deficits of about $3,000 million from 1950 to 1957. At the same time, the increase in the gold reserves of other capitalist countries amounted to $8,700 million. If increases in foreign exchange holdings are added to this the total increase in their gold and foreign exchange reserves during the period was $14,500 million. Most of these increases went to West European countries. France’s increases amounted to $3,400 million, Italy’s $2,200 million, and West Germany’s $1700 million. Next came Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Dollar Crisis— Incurable Disease

By 1963, the incurable disease of the dollar crisis remained serious. The deficit in the US balance of payments in that year still stood at $3,000 million. At the end of December, its gold and foreign exchange reserves totaled $32,179 million, of which gold accounted for $19,790.million, or 47% of the capitalist world's total. Thus US gold reserves are far below their pre-war level while those of the West European countries are far above it.