The latter half of the 50’s and most of the 60’s were marked by new, parallel—but not identical—stages in the liberation struggles on the African continent and in the United States.
During this period an increasing number of African countries gained their political independence. In this—the first stage of liberation from imperialist oppression—open, direct colonial control of most of the African continent was broken, the exceptions being NATO and U.S.-backed Zimbabwe, South Africa and the Portuguese dominated countries.
In the United States, it was the time of Rosa Parks, of sit-ins, of Martin Luther King, of the great civil rights movement—marking a new stage of Black Liberation struggle within the last stronghold of racist imperialism.
As these developments unfolded, it became increasingly apparent that United States corporate monopoly would never passively reconcile itself to even the formal acquisition of political independence in Africa or equality of citizenship in the U.S.—or to the people’s liberation struggles anywhere in the world. It was a time in which the U.S. fiasco at the Bay of Pigs was followed by the unleashing of U.S. escalation of its criminal war in Vietnam, by the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and genocide in Indonesia.
Today, most of the peoples of Africa have entered the second stage of their struggle against imperialism and colonial enslavement. This new stage—in which the countries that had won formal political independence would soon find themselves confronted with new forms of neo-colonialist, imperialist penetration—was ushered in with the overthrow Of Nkrumah by international capital and its accomplices, who are to be found wherever a struggle for liberation from race, class and national oppression and exploitation exists.
The maneuverings, plots and pressures of international capital, headed by U.S. imperialism, continue to threaten the independence of nations on the four continents. They are aimed especially against the Soviet Union and all the socialist countries, but they are more immediately directed against those countries in Africa and elsewhere that show even the slightest sign of moving in a non-capitalist direction as the basis for safeguarding their newly won independence for opening the road to social progress.
While these newly independent countries—those with conservative as well as more progressive leadership—must all contend with neo-colonialist penetration, this does not mean that open and direct violence have disappeared from vast areas of Africa. On the contrary, tens of millions in the Portuguese, South African and Zimbabwe areas are faced ever more intensively with the old forms of colonialism, apartheid and violence maintained with the aid of the investments and weapons of Wall Street and Washington.
As the struggle in Africa moved to its present stage, a parallel—but not identical—struggle was unfolding in the United States. The massive racist violence unleashed against the spontaneous upsurges in Watts, Detroit and Newark, and the assassination of Martin Luther King (not too long after the overthrow of Nkrumah) marked the end of one stage and the beginning of a new stage of Black liberation struggles in the US.
In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah was removed from the scene just as he was struggling seriously to overcome past errors, moving more consistently to develop policies that would give substance to independence through social progress internally and to the achievement of broad anti-imperialist unity in Africa and the world.
At approximately the same time, Martin Luther King was also rapidly moving toward more advanced political, ideological and strategic positions, aimed at carrying the struggle beyond the goal of civil rights which, though crucially important, could not alone embody the substance of genuine equality. King recognized that the descendants of the slaves could gain the substance of liberation only through a strategy in which the unity and self-action of the Blacks would be expressed as part of a wider anti-monopoly formation. With such a strategy the monopoly power would be confronted with a new majority of the oppressed and exploited of all colors. This would be the contemporary counterpart of the Frederick Douglass-Karl Marx strategy that brought about the defeat of the slave power in the Civil War.
But this strategy is not the objective of certain anti-Marxist pseudo-revolutionaries who, together with the advocates of Black Capitalism, find common cause behind the banner of a new variant of Pan-Africanism. These seemingly conflicting elements, extreme radicals on the one hand and adherents of Black Capitalism on the other, have come together on the ideological quicksand of neo-Garveyism and anti-Communism. Some of them even masquerade as adherents of the Pan-Africanism of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois—though, in certain cases their activities have been known to be funded by government agencies and corporate capital.
While the anti-monopoly strategy that King came to support is the only one that could effectively turn back the racist offensive of the monopolies and put the Black liberation struggle on a broader, firmer basis, these newly-hatched apostles of neo-Pan-Africanism continue to play into the hands of the racist monopolists who are trying to push Black America back to the pre-civil rights days—and worse!
The ideology and policies of these current variations of Garveyism are unrelated to the realities either of Africa or of Blacks in the United States, and are consequently unrelated to the Pan-Africanism of Du Bois.
This new ideological flight from reality equates the situation of Africans with that of Blacks in the United States, and hence confuses the strategy appropriate for the former with that suited to the latter. But these Garveyite versions of Pan-Africanism are as much an accommodation to the racist monopoly power of our time as were the policies of the emigrationists to the power of the slavocracy. Frederick Douglass branded this emigrationist version of Pan-Africanism (often funded by slave owners at the very time that they were expanding slavery and the slave trade) as accommodation to the expansion of colonialism in Africa and slavery in the United States. In similar fashion, neo-Pan-Africanism today only serves to aid the racist monopolists in their offensive against the Black liberation movement in the United States and against independence and liberation in Africa.
Today’s advocates of Pan-Africanism misinterpret the meaning of the simultaneous appearance in Africa and the United States of two successive parallel stages in the struggle against racist imperialism: they are able to do this in a seemingly plausible manner because of the coincidence in time between the modern independence struggles in Africa, followed as they were by the post-independence stage, and the civil rights struggles in the U.S., followed in turn by the post-civil rights stage here.
Of course, the struggles of the peoples of Africa and of those of African descent in the United States evoke memories of a common heritage, of the experiences of centuries of struggle against racist oppression. And it is natural that the bond of solidarity which should unite the oppressed and exploited of every country and every race would create a special affinity between Africans and Blacks in the U .S., who are struggling against oppression on the home grounds of U.S. imperialism—one of the most powerful sources of oppression in Africa. This special affinity can add solidarity and strength to all the forces of class and national liberation, involving every race on every continent in the anti-imperialist revolutionary process.
But today’s neo-Pan-Africanist anti-Communists, while claiming to speak in the name of Du Bois—the father of Pan-Africanism—are betraying the principles of this great man. All of the works of this giant among the giants of history led him inexorably towards Communism, and when he joined the Communist Party he proclaimed its principles as the highest and clearest expression of the aspirations motivating his entire life.
From his earliest days, Du Bois was inspired by the struggles of the African peoples. but he never interpreted this special affinity with Africa as in any way in conflict with the solidarity of all the oppressed against international capital. That is why he hailed the October socialist revolution which brought emancipation from Czarist racism and imperialism to many formerly oppressed nations.
It was as a member of the Communist Party of the United States that Du Bois went to Ghana where, to the very last, he gave of his great intellect and spirit in support of a project that expressed his own affinity and that of Black people in the United States with the peoples of Africa. And to the end he continued to identify the socialist countries, and first of all the Soviet Union, as the stronghold of solidarity of all workers and oppressed peoples of the world. For Du Bois, the affinity between oppressed Black-skinned peoples everywhere was an inseparable part of that larger affinity expressed in proletarian internationalism, based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism, its science, philosophy and world outlook.
The goal for which Du Bois gave his last days and strength was that African countries, with the support of the Soviet Union and all the world anti-imperialist forces, guarantee their independence by taking a consistently anti-imperialist, non-capitalist path toward socialism. This culminating effort of his long life was at the same time an integral part of the struggle to adapt the broad Abolitionist strategy advocated by Marx and Douglass against the slave power during the Civil War to today’s battle against monopoly capital in the United States.
The life and works of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois must be seen as totally at variance with the views of the neo-Pan-Africanists, who consider solidarity between Africans and Blacks in the United States to be in contradiction to solidarity between Blacks and the non-Black oppressed and exploited peoples throughout the world. They claim that the path of liberation is one that people with black skins must travel alone, separate from the masses of oppressed and exploited who are not black-skinned—and without the powerful support of the many races and nationalities making up the socialist countries.
These current ideologists of false Pan-Africanism advance a suicidal skin strategy. According to them, liberation in the United States and Africa will come not from the solidarity of the many peoples in Africa with the Blacks in the United States, both of whom are fighting for freedom with strategies based on differing conditions in their own countries, on the specific situations and on the level and variety of forces that can be mobilized in particular countries at particular times. But for these neo-Pan-Africanisists, the color black in Africa and the color black in the United States call for one and the same strategy on both continents.
The absurdity of an ideology that says liberation will come about from a purely skin strategy can seen by comparing just one example of African diversity with the condition of Blacks in the United States:
In the Republic of South Africa, the only country of Black Africa with a substantial white population, Blacks are the overwhelming majority. Led by the African National Congress and the Communist Party of South Africa, armed struggle has become one of the forms for realizing the goal of the majority: liberation and self-determination by defeating the white imperialist oligarchy, supported by Japanese as well as U.S., British and West German monopoly capital. Even though Blacks are the majority, their aim is not continued separation from the white working class minority. They are uniting with those white South African revolutionists to separate the white workers from the poison of racism so that there can be unity between them and the Black majority against the imperialist oppressor and exploiter.
In the Republic of South Africa, the Black majority is locked into a territory where the non-Black population is a tiny minority. In the United States, Blacks are a minority, but at the same time they constitute a vital segment of the majority facing a common enemy—monopoly.
Differences in skin color are used by monopoly capital to create and perpetuate division between the white majority and the Black minority in the United States, a division that originated not in differences of skin color, but from a different system—slavery—which was grafted on to the rising capitalist system.
This different system was the basis for developing the differential in the nature, intensity and character of the special oppression and exploitation of Black people as compared to the white masses.
But today the Black minority and the white majority are no longer separated by different economic systems. Now only the power of monopoly-fostered racism maintains disunity between Blacks and whites, and perpetuates discrimination against and super-exploitation of the Black minority.
Obviously, the go-it-alone neo-Pan-Africanist skin strategy is but the reverse side of the white ruling class strategy in this country. The neo-Pan-Africanist strategy objectively reinforces that of the monopolists, helps them retain power through manipulation of their twin weapons of racism and anti-Communism. While the ruling class promotes racist separatism for whites, the black skin strategists are busy working the other side of the street by advocating separatism for Black people.
World imperialism is the main enemy, with its strongest base in Washington and Wall Street. But the imperialist enemy, its allies and collaborators come in many colors. Imperialism is head-quartered in Tokyo as well as in Washington, London, Bonn, Paris, Lisbon and Praetoria. The betrayers of the people—whether in the Sudan, the Congo, Ghana, Vietnam, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Pakistan, the Philippines, or Guyana, come in all colors.
The oppressors themselves are never divided by color. They compete and make war against each other—with the lives of the people—for the "right" to dominate and exploit. Among themselves, U.S., British, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Belgian, Dutch and South African imperialists are color-blind. They are likewise color-blind when it comes to bribing and manipulating the people’s betrayers in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
These color-blind monopolists exploit color differences to blind the oppressed to their common class interests, which imperatively calls for unity against imperialism.
At the beginning of this century, the young Du Bois stated that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” And today’s advocates of a skin strategy often quote this to justify linking Garveyism with Pan-Africanism. In this they take their cue from George Padmore, ignoring Du Bois’ record of uncompromising against Garveyism in all its forms, and misinterpreting Du Bois’ meaning when he spoke of the “color line.” Du Bois was reiterating what Frederick Douglass had said in 1858, that “The relations subsisting between the white and black people of this country is the central question of the age.”
Even though, as he says in his autobiography, he was not yet a Marxist, the young Du Bois was correct in stating that the “color line” is indeed “the problem of the twentieth century.” In the same year that Du Bois advanced this concept, the young Lenin was applying the liberating ideas of Marx and Engels to the imperialist stage of capitalism, concluding that the workers and peoples within the Czarist Empire, as elsewhere throughout the imperialist world, could defeat their common oppressors only by overcoming disunity at the point of differences in color and nationality.
Lenin’s lifelong work demonstrates that he understood what Du Bois was driving at. Du Bois declared that the “color line” was the “problem” of the 20th Century—he did not say it was the solution. As Lenin demonstrated, the solution lies in a strategy to overcome the disunity of the oppressed and exploited at the line of differences in color or nationality.
Because Lenin led in building the first political party dedicated to a solution of the “color line” as “the problem of the 20th Century,” the October socialist revolution was able to put an end, for the first time in history, to class, national and racial oppression.
This is why the Marxist-Leninist principles of the October Revolution to this day form the ideological basis for the solution to the problems of the 20th Century in Africa and in every other continent.
On the other hand, the neo-Pan-Africanists have turned Du Bois’ famous statement into the opposite of its real meaning. Their black skin color strategy aggravates the problem rather than offers a solution to the problem of the 20th Century.
In 1922, Marcus Garvey wrote:
The attitude of Negroes should be not to fight it (the Klan), not to aggravate it, but to think of what it means and say and do nothing. It will not help us to fight it or its program. The Negro numerical disadvantage is too great . . . the only way it (the problem of Black people) can be solved is for the Negro to create a government of his own in Africa. (New York Age)
And in 1971 Stokely Carmichael wrote:
It seems to me any clear black ideology that talks about revolution, understanding the necessity of a land base, must be toward Africa, especially since we’ve decided that we’re African people and Africa belongs to all African peoples (Stokely Speaks, Vantage, New York, 1971, p. 203.)
The same question that the Honorable Marcus Garvey asked in 1922 is still relevant today: Where is the Black man’s government? Where is the government that is going to speak for our protection? . . . We’re dealing with relationship of power, and I say we must make Africa our priority . . . If we are honest with ourselves, we know that there is no future in Babylon, U.S.A. (Ibid., p. 205.)
It is quite clear that Carmichael’s views, like those of Garvey in the 20’s are an updated counterpart of the back-to-Africa separatists who earlier rejected participation in the anti-Slavery movement. Carmichael states:
Pan-Africanism is the highest expression of black power. It means one country, one government, one leader, one army, and this government will protect Africans all over the world whenever they face racial discrimination and economic exploitation. (New York Times, February 6, 1971.)
That the “back-to-Africa” ideology is for Carmichael, as it was for Garvey, a stratagem never actually intended as a practical alternative for the mass of the Black people is confirmed in Stokely Speaks (which was published less than two months after his previously quoted statement in The New York Times):
What should we do? Should we all go back to Africa? . . .
No, I am not saying we should all go back to Africa at this point. (p. 206.)
Although Carmichael demagogically adds “We all have to go back there sooner or later,” to this statement, he nevertheless confirms that his concept of Pan-Africanism is directed against the interests and the struggles of Africans and the Black people in the U.S. In essence Carmichael is saying that even though the mass of Black Americans have no other place to go, they might as well give up the struggle against racism and poverty in the United States since there is “no future in Babylon.”
When Carmichael states, “I am not saying we should all go back to Africa at this point,” he clearly implies that some should go there now—that is, a small minority of Black students, professionals and business people. And he does not mean that they should go there to join the struggles of the African peoples, but as agents of U.S. monopoly, getting a “piece of the action” from the neo-colonialists’ aims in Africa.
Carmichael is trying to influence this section of Black Americans to abandon their own people, to separate themselves not just from their white allies, but from the overwhelming mass of Black oppressed and the Black liberation struggle itself. Objectively, he is attempting to enlist them in the new stage of U.S. imperialism’s neo-colonialist penetration of Africa.
When Carmichael tells Black Americans that they must have “one country, one government, one army” in Africa, it becomes clear that his Pan-Africanism is a part of the neo-colonialist African strategy of U.S. imperialism. This concept of Black liberation is not an anti-imperialist one; it is a surrender to racist monopoly in the United States and to enemies of self-determination for the peoples of the African continent.
Carmichael should know that the African continent is composed of many nations—Guinea, Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal and others which have already won their political independence, and consists, also, of the peoples waging armed struggle against Portuguese and South African imperialism as well.
Africans know that only colonialists speak of Africa as “one country.” And when Carmichael talks of “one government, one army and one leader” for all of Africa, this can logically be interpreted as applying to U.S. imperialism—surely, more than any other of the big the “one leader” of all the forces arrayed against the anti-imperialist struggles for self-determination on the African continent.
Since Carmichael’s variety of Pan-Africanism, like Garvey’s, is based on anti-Communism, it clearly follows that the African land base he is primarily concerned with is Guinea and those other countries which have chosen the non-capitalist path of development.
The Pan-Africanist Carmichael has proclaimed himself a disciple of Nkrumah. But it is notorious that Nkrumah was overthrown by CIA-backed forces who, like Carmichael, speak of anti-Communist “African Socialism,” or, like Baraka, of “Ujama,” a hodge-podge of so-called traditional “communalist” economics.
The more closely one examines the implications of Carmichael’s Pan-Africanism, the clearer it becomes that it has nothing in common with Du Bois’ anti-imperialist pan-Africanism: solidarity in the struggle to oust imperialism from every part of Africa, rejection of anti-Communism and capitalism in favor of the non-capitalist path of development for each newly independent country.
Let us now examine the Pan-Africanism of the director of the Congress Of Racial Equality, Roy Innis, who, unlike Carmichael, has given up even the pretense of his former “militant” stance. Innis, now an open advocate of Nixon’s “Black Capitalism” policies in the United States and neo-colonialism in Africa, has called for the following:
This program reveals that Innis’ Pan-Africanism is similar in direction to Carmichael’s seemingly more “militant” version. Like Carmichael’s and other variants of currently fashionable Pan-African concepts, this program combines neo-tokenism at home with partnership in the neo-colonialist strategy for Africa, which today is four-pronged in structure.
Zionism simultaneously serves as the northern flank against the African liberation movements, and as a base against Soviet support to these struggles. Second, the United States has assigned South African imperialism, supported by London, Tokyo, Bonn and the other NATO partners of the US., the role of holding, and economically and militarily expanding the southern flank against the liberation movements of Zimbabwe and Portuguese-dominated Africa.
The third prong of the U.S. African strategy is its direct support, in and out of the United Nations, to the blocking of sanctions against Rhodesia, and direct as well as NATO assistance to Portuguese colonialist genocide against the liberation struggles in the territories it dominates.
Finally, U.S. imperialism has assigned neo-Pan-Africanism the task of enlisting a minority of Black Americans as the ideological vanguard of its all-Africa strategy. The ideological thrust of today’s Pan-Africanism sows confusion and disunity in the Black liberation movement at home, and encourages a small segment of the Black professionals and bourgeoisie to abandon their people at home in the name of helping African liberation. In other words, the role of Pan-Africanism within U.S. African strategy is to aid in penetrating African countries as they gain political independence, and to influence them to reject policies and leadership internally—and support externally from the socialist countries—that would help them choose and begin to advance along the non-capitalist path of development.
In connection with the role assigned the neo-Pan-Africanists, it should be noted that one of the points in the Innis program simultaneously draws its inspiration from George Padmore’s admiration for Israel and Zionism’s role in entrenching itself on Africa’s northern flank.
Innis’ call for dual citizenship for U.S. Blacks in Africa is akin to the existing practice of dual citizenship for U.S. Zionists in relation to Israel. This proposal is a flagrant example of the contempt of Innis’ racist imperialist supporters for the sovereignty of the African countries.
There is also a kinship between Innis’ call for “investing Black American money in Africa”, and his support of “Black Capitalism” at home. In the U.S. this policy would at best mean token aid for a few at the expense of the great majority of Blacks. For Africa, “investing Black American money” would mean a change in form and color but not in content for the old colonial policy. Formerly, the British, French, German and Portuguese sent nationals with white skins to administer African possessions directly or to operate through “native” administrators. Now the United States aims at penetrating African countries by using U.S. Black nationals as the administrators and ideological vanguard of its economic and political expansion.
Innis calls for vast U.S. financial “aid” to African countries, equaling “the scale of the aid that helped rehabilitate European countries following World War II.” But the sole purpose of this “aid” was to prevent the working classes from coming to power and establishing socialism in most of the countries of Europe, and to heat up the cold war—building up the greatest military power in history, with the U.S. as global organizer of counter-revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America, all in the name of preventing the spread of Communism.
Now, with the new level of liberation struggles in Africa and elsewhere, including the United States, Africa’s role within U.S. imperialist strategy looms larger than ever.
In this connection, neo-Pan-Africanism facilitates U.S. economic and military penetration at a time when fear of socialism—which determined U.S. economic, military, and political policy in post-World War II Europe, as it does today—appears in another form, playing a decisive role in shaping neo-colonialist policy in Africa as well as Asia and Latin America.
Formerly, the colonial empires were concerned with ensuring the necessary condition for colonial plunder including direct political rule. But today most former colonies have won political independence and, striving for economic independence, are confronted with the question of which road to take—capitalist or non-capitalist. The U.S. neo-colonialist program aims at using U.S. power to direct these countries along capitalist lines, keeping them within the orbit of imperialism. This would, of course, as the history of this century demonstrates, greatly restrict their economic and social development. With this in view, U.S. imperialism is prepared to make concessions, hoping to save as much of its positions as possible now and regaining more later.
U.S. neo-colonialist policy is expressed in a constant search for an optimal strategy for consolidating and expanding the sphere of influence and domination of capitalism. At times, this search borders on experimentation as, for example, in the case of the bankrupt Alliance for Progress or the Peace Corps.
More recently, U.S. imperialism has sought ways to expand its domination in Africa while diminishing the visibility of this policy. The neo-Pan-Africanists help to further imperialism’s “invisibility” within this area of U.S. neo-colonialist strategy.
Neo-Pan-Africanism, whether in its “international” form with its main focus on Africa, or its domestic form, emphasizing Black separatism, is always based on a purely skin analysis. This can be seen, for example, in the case of the “radical” James Foreman, even though on the surface he sometimes appears to reject a strategy based on color separatism. For instance, Foreman has stated that:
A purely skin analysis of the cause and continuing responsibility for our condition is not only theoretically incorrect, but because it is theoretically incorrect, it will lead to some serious mistakes in programming.” (The Political Thought of James Foreman. Black Star Publishing, Detroit, 1970, p. 24.)
Yet, paradoxically, the title of the chapter in which he makes this observation is “Liberation Will Come From A Black Thing”!
Foreman’s anti-Marxist concept of the Black condition in the U.S. as that of a colony leads him into the fantasy of “programming” the struggle of the Black minority as though it were the counterpart of the struggle in an African country where the oppressed are a decisive majority, seeking self-determination on a common territory in which a viable economy can be built.
Offering his domestic version of neo-Pan-African skin strategy, Foreman writes:
(Black people should) think in terms of total control of the U.S. Prepare ourselves to seize state power. Do not hedge, for time is short and all around the world the forces of liberation are directing their attacks against the U.S. That power is not greater than that of Black people. We work the chief industries in this country and we could cripple the economy while the brothers fought guerrilla warfare in the streets.” (Ibid., p. 62. Emphasis added.)
Foreman’s super-revolutionary “programming” is provocative, adventurist and suicidal. This “programming” would actually mean tokenism in struggle because the Black people, a minority—no matter how powerful its potential—cannot separately challenge the state power of monopoly capital. A go-it-alone skin strategy is the opposite of an anti-imperialist policy. Falsely advanced by Foreman in the name of Marxism, this separatist strategy would be disruptive to the building of anti-monopoly unity against racism and oppression.
No segment of the population can defeat the control of government by corporate monopoly via a go-it-alone skin strategy. This holds for the white working-class majority, as well as for the Black minority, now a vital part of the mass production industries of the country. The first requisite for bringing an anti-monopoly liberating strategy is building joint action—the unity of Black and white labor.
No force in the country could match the power and strategic position of a united working Class—white, Black, Brown, Red, Yellow. But even the power of a united working class could not bring about basic change if this unity were limited to pure-and-simple trade unionism—if it remained separate from a great anti-monopoly political struggle involving the Black people as a whole, and the mass of people of all colors and of every origin. In this light, Foreman’s “militant” rhetoric can be seen even more clearly as the self-defeating tokenist strategy it in fact is.
Personally, (writes Foreman) while I believe that ultimately the fight is for world socialism, I am not opposed to short-term objectives. For instance, the issue of Pan-Africanism is going to hit the stage inside the United States. This will be an advancement over many concepts, but it will not be enough if it does not speak to the economic framework of that Pan-Africanism. For inside Africa today there are many bourgeois nationalists running African governments and exploiting the people in the name of Pan-Africanism. We have the right to at least demand that people not regress from Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois who in his later years was pleading for Pan-African socialism. I am for Pan-African socialism if it means taking the wealth of Africa away from imperialists and using it for disposition of all oppressed people. (Ibid. p. 187.)
If one could take this statement out of context, it would be difficult to fault Foreman. However, considering that Foreman’s overall positions run counter to the anti-imperialist unity of the socialist countries, and the world-wide forces of class and national liberation, it is necessary to take a closer look at these remarks.
It is sheer rhetoric to say that Africa’s wealth must be put in the hands of its people without acknowledging that this goal can be attained only on the basis of a program against neo-colonialism. Moreover, Foreman’s skin strategy is in direct conflict with an anti-imperialist strategy.
Foreman is certainly correct in saying that “the issue of Pan-Africanism is going to hit the stage inside the United States.” But his own views merge with those very neo-Pan-Africanists he appears to criticize. His differences with them lie only in his predilection for “militant” rhetoric; in substance he accepts the current versions of Pan-Africanism that “regress from W. E. B. DuBois.”
It is not enough to demand that they “speak to the economic framework of that Pan-Africanism.” It is exactly in such general terms that “many nationalists running African governments and exploiting the people in the name of Pan-Africanism” speak—while readily accommodating their policies to fit within the framework of the imperialists’ neo-colonial penetration of African countries.
Foreman’s “militant” concepts are regressive even in comparison with those of many bourgeois leaders of African governments. Most of the conservative government members of the Organization of African Unity, despite vacillations and inconsistencies, show a greater appreciation of the need for a common front against neo-colonialism than does “The Thought of James Foreman.”
Foreman, as well as the other neo-Pan-Africanists, falls within the scope of U.S. imperialist strategy and the ideology of the bourgeois nationalist betrayers of the African peoples. The views of these neo-Pan-Africanists reflect the indifference to the national aspirations and the right of self-determination of the African countries—and they bypass the economic and social realities within each of these nations. At a time when the newly won independence of most African nations is threatened, when their very national existence depends on the political and economic policies they choose—whether accommodation to neo-colonialism or taking a non-capitalist, anti-imperialist direction—Foreman and others confuse the issue by advocating policies based on a spurious Pan-Africanism.
The protective canopy of such neo-Pan-Africanist generalities assists U.S. neo-colonialism in pursuing its economic, and military goals in each specific country, whether in the Sudan, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Mali, Guinea, Senegal, Tanzania, Mozambique, etc. To retain independence where it has been won and to win it where it has not been, requires policies within each African country that will lead to end of dependence on neo-colonialism, will move in the direction of non-capitalist development within the framework of the world revolutionary process—solidarity with the countries of socialism headed by the Soviet Union and wilh the world forces of class and national liberation.
Foreman states that “ultimately the fight is for world socialism.” He then proceeds to confuse the issue by giving the impression that socialism on the African continent is an immediate “short term” objective, rather than the ultimate result of a long process.
Although Foreman claims that Du Bois saw socialism as the immediate goal for Africa, this assertion contradicts Du Bois’ conception of Pan-Africanism and the goal of socialism for the African continent. Du Bois saw that the immediate issues were self-determination and the choice between steps leading either to capitalism and submission to neo-colonialism or steps in the direction of socialism, away from capitalism. He became a member of the Communist Party, convinced that its Marxist-Leninist principles showed how socialism on a continent-wide basis, as on a world basis, must be national in form and socialist in content.
Du Bois’ Pan-Africanism can only be realized when policy in each African country is determined by the principles of scientific socialism of the working class, as opposed to the so-called “African Socialism” of the national bourgeoisie. The goal of true Pan-Africanism can only be realized when the independent countries take an anti-imperialist direction, internally and internationally.
The future of Africa’s continental unity, of Pan-Africanism and socialism as envisioned by Du Bois, will depend on the outcome of the struggle against those seeking to impose capitalism within each African country.
These specific struggles, developing unevenly in each country, are on the African agenda today. This is where the so-called “short term” struggle is at right now. Genuine Pan-Africanism can only emerge from expanding internationalist solidarity—winning and consolidating self-determination by defeating Capitalism and neo-colonialism inside each African country.
Each new country where a non-capitalist path is taken speeds the day when Pan-African unity and socialism on a continent-wide basis will become a reality. This is the meaning of Du Bois’ Pan-Africanism, which will evolve from a voluntary association of diverse African nations. In such a context, the aspirations and culture of each nation will unfold, with each making its own distinct contribution to ultimate Pan-Africanism—an all-African amalgamation taking its place as part of a world system of socialism on every continent.
It is clear that we should ask of James Foreman what he has demanded of others—that he “not regress from Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois.”
James Boggs’ views, like those of Foreman, Carmichael, Baraka and others, fall within George Padmore’s anti-Communist, Pan-African conceptions, not those of W. E. B. Du Bois. Along with Foreman, Boggs especially directs his efforts toward expanding the influence of neo-Pan-Africanism and anti-Communism among Black workers, using the rhetoric of “Marxism” to project a skin strategy instead of a class strategy for Black liberation. He writes:
The three forms of struggle in which modern man has engaged are the struggle between nations, the struggle between classes, and the struggle between races. Of these three struggles, the struggle of the colored races against the white race is the one which includes the progressive aspects of the first two and at the same time penetrates most deeply into the essence of the human race or world mankind. (Racism and the Class Struggle. Monthly Review press, New York, 1970, p. 49.)
To support his separatist concept, Boggs echoes the arguments of the white racist monopolists, stating that “white workers have been gaining at the expense of the Negroes for so long that for them to unite with the Negroes would be like cutting their own throats.” (Ibid., p. 10.) The fact is that white workers will stop cutting their own throats only when they overcome their racism and unite with Black workers in defense of their common class interests.
There is no separatist way out for white workers, just as there is no separatist narrow bourgeois-nationalist way out for Black workers. Boggs confuses the fact of race with the ideology of racism. But the fact of the multi-racial composition of the working class is not the source of racist discrimination and super-exploitation of Black workers, Racism is not a biological characteristic. It is a social phenomenon with a class origin and role. Racism has its source in a ruling class that, in modern times, has added the twin weapon of anti-Communism to the working class in the U.S. from waging a united class struggle against its monopolist enemy.
There is no way out for white workers without recognizing that their common class interests with Black workers demand that they themselves take the initiative in the fight to oust racism from the class struggle. And Black workers must also understand that they cannot put an end to their triple oppression by going it alone.
There are no substitutes for the class unity of the working class as a whole. This requires the equality of joint Black and white leadership of the working class, of Black workers in the leadership of the Black liberation movement, and all components of the working class leading all the oppressed and exploited against corporate monopoly.
Boggs continues:
Theoretically, it has always been assumed that it was the power structure of a society which promoted counter-revolution. But in the United States it is not so much what the structure does that is encouraging the counter-revolution as what the white workers themselves are doing. (Ibid., p. 14.)
Here we see how narrow nationalism, as an expression of neo-Pan-Africanism, becomes an open apology for U.S. monopoly, taking the racist ruling class off the hook. Certainly, Boggs should be aware of what oppressed workers and peoples of every race in Africa, Asia and Latin America have come to know from bitter experience—that the U.S. neo-colonialists are the source of counter-revolution in Africa and everywhere else, and that racism is and always has been used by them to maintain their power.
Unlike Boggs and the other neo-Pan-African fellow travelers of U.S. monopolist policies, the African opponents of neo-colonialism consider that the way Blacks in the U .S. can help defeat counter-revolution in Africa is with a strategy that unites oppressed Blacks in the U.S. and at the same time adds their strength toward building a wider, anti-monopoly of all the oppressed and exploited against U.S. imperialism, the common enemy of all the peoples and races inside and outside the United States.
Narrow racial nationalism, including its current Pan-Africanist counterpart, leads to abandonment of the struggle against racism and counter-revolution, domestically and in Africa. That is why the anti-Communist monopolist enemies of Black liberation use their mass media and publishing houses to promote neo-Pan-Africanist ideology in every possible area of culture and politics—aiming to divert Blacks from a strategy that meets the needs of Black liberation today.
Currently, the neo-Pan-Africanist flight from reality frequently finds expression in the novel, poetry and drama. For instance, in the latest novel by John A. Williams, a well-known Black writer, the following thoughts are expressed by the main character:
We insisted that we belonged, that we were Americans. Oh, yeah, we ran that down for a long time, without once realizing what the enemy always knew: the most basic instrument of warfare was possession of terrain from which to either launch an attack or to fight a defensive action. We don’t have any. American terrain wasn’t ours; it was in our possession only as a figment of our imagination . . .
What then? Guerrilla warfare; cadres would strike the cities and vanish into the black communities; acts of critical sabotage would bring Chuck to his knees. Oh, that rappin; oh, them empty phrases; oh, them sacrificial lambs. Let’s go to P’eng: ‘The people are the water and the guerrillas the fish, and without water the fish will die.’
A great concept simply put. A concept based on like colors. . . . A Black guerrilla in the United States would be just about as inconspicuous as a white guerrilla in the Nam. . . .
Where, where in the United States could large groups of Black people assemble to learn the art of war? Where could they escape the agents and electronic devices on the ground and in the air? Which blacks among us could we trust? Nowhere. None.
Africa, yes, where sky surveillance was almost non-existent . . .
Now, we just moved our people over there, not as soldiers in the strict sense, and became twenty-five interlocking colonies . . . I don’t think the Premiers or Presidents have ever wished to throw their people into direct competition with Afro-Americans. I hope that’s changed a little since World War II. (Captain Blackman, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y„ 1972, pp. 327-328. Emphasis in the original.)
Williams’ hero then goes on to outline how Black Americans, with the help of Africans would use Africa as a base for launching the struggle to liberate Blacks in the United States. But surely this is a case where fantasy in fiction mirrors fantasy in politics. Williams’ novel accurately expresses the implications of Pan-Africanism in the United States—right down to Roy Innis’ call for dual citizenship, utterly disregarding the sovereignty of African nations.
Whether one says that Black people must survive only to find salvation in Africa, or if one varies this by stating that Africa should be used as a base from which an elite force of Black American heroes would launch the great day of freedom for which almost 30 million Black folk would be waiting, it all adds up to the same thing—abandonment of struggle against monopoly and accommodation to the policies of U.S. imperialism at home and in Africa.
And it is interesting to note how Williams’ books keep pace with the ever-changing fashions in detours to struggle. In 1972, Williams ridicules the idea that Black guerrillas in U.S. cities could “bring Chuck to his knees.” However, in 1970 the same writer produced a book on Dr. Martin Luther King which distorted King’s role and even includes F.B.I. slanders of him—that views adventurist “guerrilla” rhetoric as the proper alternative to King’s direction!
In 1970, Williams sneered at the movement that fought to overcome the heritage resulting from the betrayal of Reconstruction as a new starting point for Black liberation:
In other words, the Negroes asked for what they had been getting all along . . . The stupidity and short-sightedness of the Montgomery city officials forced the MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association) to take its case to higher courts, and on November 13th, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the U.S. District Court that Alabama’s state and local laws which embodied racial segregation throughout public accommodations were unconstitutional.
So, ironically, the segregationists helped create Martin King, the public man. Had they given in to the limited, mild requests of the MIA there might not have been this black Christian who for the next thirteen years cried for racial justice. . . .
The press at large and its national readership seemed much taken with the sight of numerous nonviolent black people bent in prayer—a reassuring picture indeed whose effects can be measured against those of armed black students coming out of a university building they have occupied or Black Panthers in a running gun battle with the Oakland, New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles police. (The King God Didn’t Save, Coward-McCann, New York, 1970, pp. 30-31.)
Williams reveals that his conception of the Civil Rights period was as mistaken as his endorsement of “picking up the gun.” He does not recognize, as King did, that this great struggle was but the starting point of a grand strategy, one which needed to be broadened to bring Black workers and the working class as a whole into the center of a great movement, a movement that would reject the separatist and adventurist tendencies that only drained away both Black and white from an anti-monopoly struggle which imperatively needs both.
It took Williams two years to reject the fantasy of “picking up the gun.” How long will it take him to reject neo-Pan-Africanism, the latest alternative to struggle against the common oppressor?
The works of John A. Williams and Imamu Amiri Baraka are examples of the interconnection between cultural nationalism in the novel, poetry, drama and politics. Cultural nationalism, the ideology of separatism in all its forms—including neo-Pan-Africanism—recognizes only the color aspect of Black oppression, translating this into a disregard of the monopoly class basis of the racist oppression of Black people.
Cultural nationalists, including neo-Pan-Africanists, fail to distinguish between the capitalist and the working class, fail to see that the working class is the only revolutionary class. In essence, they not only reject unity between Black and white workers; they also reject the leadership role of Black workers in the liberation movement for that of the Black nationalist bourgeoisie.
The study of the historical development of Afro-Americans as a distinct people and their economic, cultural and political contributions to the development of this country is of great importance. Interlinked with and illuminating the experience of the Black people in the United States is the study of their African background.
However, Black culture and history should not be viewed simply as a succession of events separate from the framework of class relations and class struggles in the development of the nation as a whole. And with this in mind, when one considers cultural nationalism, it is necessary to ask: does it express revolutionary or reactionary nationalism?
I am for the fullest development of the culture of every people, as for example, the right for the maximum development of the diverse national cultures of the peoples of Africa—but in a way that expresses the struggle for national and social progress.
In this connection can we, for example, be satisfied with the cultural nationalism of Imamu Baraka, who is quite skillful in the art of manipulating pride in the African past and the symbols of that past? Pride in the past should be expressed as pride in the history of resistance to slavery and the slave trade and of rejection of reactionary elements of the past, as of the present. Those, like Baraka, who speak of cultural nationalism out of context with the objective and subjective requisites for defeating imperialism are simply throwing dust in the eyes of the masses.
Pride must also be rooted and nourished in the realities of today’s struggles. Self-respect calls for rejecting ideologies inconsistent with today’s struggle for liberation and social advance. Black people will reject Baraka’s separatist fantasies, refusing to exchange a distorted pride in the past for a real pride in the present.
Pride in the past can only be transmitted to the struggle today by saying no to all cultural and political concepts that either directly or indirectly work to assist U.S. racist monopolies to weaken the fight for liberation here and in Africa. This is why pride and self-respect cannot be based on the current concepts of Pan-Africanism—concepts that rob it of its anti-imperialist content, translating pan-Africanism into its opposite—accommodation to U.S. monopolist aims at home and in Africa.
Progressive Black culture expresses the struggle for liberation. It counters the white supremacist ideology of corporate monopoly. However, as Lenin pointed out, there are two cultures within every nation or people. The proletarian internationalist current of Black American culture rejects not only racism but the entire ideology of state monopoly capitalism.
It also rejects all forms of bourgeois nationalism—which means every type of separatism, whether it appears as Black cultural nationalism, Black capitalism, or the anti-Communist skin strategy of neo-Pan-Africanism. Every expression of nationalism, whether cultural or political, that is not also internationalist in content leads to one or another form of accommodation to U.S. imperialism, nationally or internationally.
The cultural nationalism espoused by Williams, Baraka and other neo-Pan-Africanists in general counterposes the entire culture of Blacks against the entire culture of whites. This falsifies reality, past and present, and strengthens racism.
On the one hand, it would have us accept as Black culture everything created by Blacks, without regard to its content. This would mean accepting, for instance, such works as the novels of Frank Yerby and Les Cenelles , an anthology of poetry published in 1845. Frank Yerby’s novels, although set in the locale of the South during slavery, are devoid in their Content of any semblance of struggle by Blacks. Recently, during a stay in fascist Spain where he was enjoying the fruits of royalties from his work, Yerby wrote contemptuously of the struggle of Blacks, asserting that of the 100 to 125 slave revolts in the U.S. over a span of 300 years, every one except Nat Turner’s was betrayed by Blacks, and that 70 percent of all Blacks who became slaves were sold by other Blacks. (Speak Now, by Frank Yerby, Dial Press, N.Y., 1969, page 98.)
Les Cenelles contained verse by a dozen young French-speaking Blacks of New Orleans. These were sons of free Blacks who had gained wealth. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, in the Preface to their The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, wrote that “the members of this group had not been taught to link themselves personally with the condition of the slaves, and their poetry scarcely touched racial feeling.” Yet, their poems were written at a time when the country was on the eve of Civil War, and when the emancipatory struggles of the Black slaves, as Karl Marx noted in his letters to Engels, were “endangering” the power of the slaveowners.
Both Yerby’s works and Les Cenelles exemplify escapist, accommodationist and conformist tendencies of the Black bourgeoisie and bourgeois intellectuals. Yet, the cultural nationalists’ logic would have their works included alongside those representing the currents of defiance and militant struggle against racism which motivated the Black working masses throughout slavery and today.
This latter tendency and its cultural manifestations would be ignored or disparaged by the cultural nationalists, just as it has been ignored or cheapened by commercialism of the super-rich patrons of the arts and their pseudo-historians and critics. Yet, as pointed out by John Howard Lawson in his The Hidden Heritage (Citadel Press, New York, 1950, pp. 205-219), “The Negro, in chains and in rebellion, laboring in the fields and fighting guerrilla battles in the mountains, is the heroic and creative figure, the defender of moral values, in the complex of Caribbean social relationships. . . . The essential characteristic of the first decades of slavery is the intensity of struggle initiated by the Negroes. . . . The violence of the initial clash, and the very considerable success achieved by the Negroes, gave the system its historical direction. . . . The marked ability which the Negroes exhibited as artisans whenever there was an opportunity to test their skill may be attributed to the emphasis on craft industry in the societies of West Africa. . . .” And Margaret Just Butcher, in her The Negro in American Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., N.Y., 1956, pp. 35-46) speaks of the Negro folklore, folk music, spirituals and blues, dance, humor and satire that have contributed to patterning all art forms in the United States—derived in the main from the experience of Blacks in the struggle for freedom.
The neo-Pan-Africanists, by speaking of Black culture in general in the context of a society dominated by the exploiting class and its values, contribute to the suppression and disparagement of the cultural creations of Black working folk in their struggles for freedom. By the same token, by counterposing Black culture to white culture they help to deprive Blacks of an important asset in their struggle for equality—the knowledge that throughout the Black experience in the United States there have been white allies. Owing to the dominant role which whites, poisoned by racism, have held in U.S. cultural life, the history of whites involved in the struggle against racism, just as the history of working class militance, has been distorted or suppressed. By rejecting white culture in general, the neo-Pan-Africanist cultural nationalists further this distortion and suppression.
Thus, they help to obscure the contribution to Black liberation of the whites who were executed, imprisoned or driven out of the slave states because of their complicity or suspected complicity in slave rebellions; of the whites who manned stations of the Underground Railroad and went into the slave states to distribute Abolitionist literature and to help the slaves escape or revolt; of the whites in the Abolition Movement, such as John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James Otis, the Pennsylvania Quakers, Henry Ward Beecher, Elijah Lovejoy, Joshua R. Giddings, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton; of the white workers and their organizations, such as the New England Workingmen’s Association which in January, 1846 at Lynn, Massachusetts, voted support for slave and demanded government action against slavery; of the southern “poor whites” Who, as Karl Marx Wrote to Engels, were everywhere opposed to the slaveowners’ secessionist movement and had to intimidated, harassed and otherwise forced to it; of the contributions to the freedom fight of whites such as William Cullen Bryant and Walt Whitman, of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner.
By contributing to the distortion and suppression of the contributions of such whites in the struggle against racism, the neo-Pan-Africanists leave the sphere of culture to the John C. Calhouns, Henry Gradys, Thomas Dixons and Margaret Mitchells, and to other equally notorious exponents of white supremacy and class oppression of both Black and white workers. Moreover, they lay the basis for rejecting the cultural manifestations of the struggles of white workers, and not only the cultural manifestations, but the opportunities for alliance with white workers in joint struggles against the common exploiter.
There are other consequences of cultural nationalism equally detrimental to the Black struggle for equality. Throughout the 110 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Afro-Americans have struggled against segregation, recognizing it as a means of setting them apart from the rest of the population, isolating them from the mainstream of developments, and subjecting them to special forms of Super-exploitation and oppression. But the cultural nationalists actually advocate segregation, self-segregation they call it, as a means toward Black solidarity. This is nonsense. The effect of segregation is to strengthen racist exploitation and oppression of Blacks by both the white and Black bourgeoisie. It strengthens the Black bourgeoisie at the expense of the Black workers, who are separated from their white working-class allies by the institutions and practices of apartheid generated and forced upon them by the white racist bourgeoisie. The Black bourgeoisie in this most important sense suffers no such limitations, for capital, as we know, is international. A commentary on this advocacy of self-segregation was reported in the New York Amsterdam News of Oct. 23, 1971 by Solomon Goodrich, Chief of Staff of the Congress of Racial Equality headed by Roy Innis. Goodrich reported that when he arrived in Dar es Salaam during a tour of Africa, he was greeted by Tanzania’s Chief of Protocol with the words: “Are you the group trying to introduce apartheid into the United States?”
The cultural nationalists, to support their position, are obliged to interpret the developing course of the Afro-American people as one towards nationhood, although objective factors show otherwise. Consequently, they strive to establish separate institutions and organizations, to emphasize separateness from whites purportedly to establish the fact that Blacks in the United States are a nation. Actually, such institutions and organizations, by excluding whites, merely accelerate the processes of isolation. They go against, rather than with the dominant historical tendencies and objective forces. Certainly they contribute nothing to developing a coalition of forces, Black and white to fight the racism of state monopoly capitalism.
Next: PADMORE, THE “FATHER” OF NEO-PAN-AFRICANISM