Each time a Black Congress has convened, Imamu Baraka has played a prominent role—maneuvering with great skill to extend his influence within the diverse, often conflicting, currents that reflect the continuing search of the Black people in the U.S. for a liberation program.
However, while Baraka’s tactics have been altered, and are now more flexible, his strategy remains essentially the same: no matter how cleverly it is camouflaged, Baraka’s ideology would bring the Black liberation movement under the influence of a divisive, culturally nationalist, neo-Pan-Africanist skin strategy.
In this connection, for instance, Baraka calls for Blacks in the U.S. to:
. . . build and develop alternative social and economic institutions, locally and nationally and internationally, viewing each of these levels of activity as part of an organic process, each complementing the other. (Ideological Statement, delivered by Imamu Amiri Baraka at the Congress of African People, Atlanta, 1970. Emphasis added.)
This, continues Baraka, is a program to:
. . . provide all the basic necessities for sustenance and growth and survival of our people, i.e., food, shelter, clothing, etc., based on the principle of Ujamaa. (Ibid.)
Before the Congress in Atlanta, Baraka explained what he meant by a self sufficient “alternative” system. “’Ujamaa —collective or cooperative economics,” stated Baraka in his Black Value System, (p. 6), is the “traditional way of distributing wealth for the Black man.”
This is manipulative “word-magic,” as remote from the struggle against the realities of racism, massive unemployment, increasing poverty and discrimination in the U.S. as it is from the realities confronting the peoples of Africa. Baraka offers not a program of struggle, but one of submission to corporate monopoly in the U.S. and neo-colonialism in Africa.
Baraka uses “tradition,” “economics” and “distribution” in an abstract, unscientific fashion. To take the view that “economics,” “distribution” or “self-sufficiency” can be based on the “traditional” in the period of imperialism—the final stage of capitalism—and when another system, socialism, in alliance with working-class and national liberation forces, is the decisive factor in world relations, is to deny historical and dialectical materialism. And to deny this makes a scientific approach to strategy impossible.
Because of his unscientific approach, Baraka’s concept of “Ujamaa” based on tradition relates not to the present but to previous epochs of society. He does not talk about “Ujamaa” in the sense of relating “collective or economics” to the revolution in science and technology in an era of class and national revolutions leading toward socialism—the only way in which “Ujamaa” can be transformed from an abstraction into reality.
Denying the concrete perspectives for liberation—“Ujamaa” based on the liberating strategy of Marxism-Leninism—Baraka offers the fantasy of going back to the beginning, to “traditional,” communal forms of “Ujamaa”—in short, to primitive society.
While it is true that in some sections of the world (i.e., parts of Africa), certain vestiges of communal life, of a primitive economy, can still be found, these survivals have only a superficial resemblance to the past. In reality, they bear the marks of the different exploitative stages—slavery, feudalism, capitalism—that society has passed through since the time of primitive communal existence.
And if distorted vestiges of Baraka’s “traditional” communal economics can still be found here or there in Africa, they have survived only because the exploiting oppressor classes—both in the pre-capitalist and capitalist stages—found it profitable to retain the past as a brake on change which would bring a new class to power. Even when the interests of a succeeding exploitative class require change, the new class is fearful lest that change be too thorough. Thus, the new exploiters seek to retain elements of the past as a barrier against a future they fear.
For example, at a certain point in its development, the rising U.S. capitalist class required the destruction of the slave system to make way for the supremacy of capital. But in order to put a brake on the sharpening class the capitalists betrayed Reconstruction, re-enslaving the Blacks with a U.S. variant of serfdom. This laid the basis for perpetuating differentials in the status of Blacks as compared to whites, thus representing a double advantage for capital: it provided a source for vast super-profits, and also intensified racist ideology—postponing the day when a united Black and non-Black working class would emerge to challenge monopoly.
U.S. capitalism still seeks to use the past against the future, against the working class whose mission is not merely to change the form of oppression and exploitation—as in the past, with the rise to power of new exploiting classes—but to put an end to oppression and exploitation. This cannot be done on the basis of “traditional” economics. It can be done only through united class and national liberation moving toward the establishment of socialism.
But when Baraka talks about “the traditional way of distributing wealth for the Black man,” he is in effect asking Black people to accept a still greater “distribution” of poverty and oppression for the masses in the ghettos, while he offers a minority of U.S. Blacks the prospect of careers within a U.S. neo-colonialist “distribution” of still greater poverty and oppression in Africa.
While the essence of Baraka’s ideology has remained the same since the 1970 Congress in Atlanta, he has recently become bolder in his demagogy. Taking his cue from the reactionary bourgeois elite in certain African countries who conceal their support of capitalism and collaboration with neo-colonialism in the name of “African socialism,” Baraka has now introduced the word “socialism” into his ideological vocabulary: at the 1972 Congress in San Diego, he spoke of “Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Ujamaa—African socialism.”
Nkrumah, as we have noted, denounced the myth of “African socialism”— stating that there can be no socialism, anywhere, except scientific socialism, and that the term “African socialism” is used to rob socialism of its scientific content by implying a unique brand of socialism applicable only to Africa.
It served this purpose for Busia, who used “African socialism” as code words, a signal to the neo-colonialists and their Ghanaian accomplices that he was “untainted” by Communism, that he opposed real socialism for Ghana as well as Ghana’s unity with the Soviet Union and the entire world anti-imperialist struggle. In fact, Busia, with the support of U.S. and British imperialism, organized Nkrumah’s overthrow in the name of “African socialism.”
And in the light of his separatist neo-Pan-Africanism, it is clear that Baraka also uses “African socialism” as code words. He offers nothing concrete for dealing with the real situations either here or in Africa. He does not call for new, alternative forms of struggle against the racist ruling class in this country, nor for new forms of united anti-imperialist struggle against neo-colonialism in Africa.
Instead of a liberating strategy, Baraka calls for a separate, “self-Sufficient” economy for Blacks in this country. To propose this impossible “alternative” at this point in history—when state monopoly capital dominates every part of the country amounts to indifference to the overwhelming majority of Blacks, whose crucial needs demand immediate united mass struggle.
Neither the fantasy of “Black capitalism” nor that of “self-sufficient,” “Ujamaa . . . economics”—whether in the ghettos across the nation or in some state or larger area of the South—can establish an alternative economy in a country where 2% of the population directly controls 88% of the economy, with the other 12% of the economy totally dependent on the monopoly controlled 88%.
There is an alternative to hunger, racism and oppression in this country, but not in self-defeating neo-Pan-Africanist schemes. The only possible alternative for Blacks is within a program of Black unity that will not be dissipated by separatist detours, but will play an independent role in forging a great movement of Black and non-Black of all colors against the corporate 2% dominating 98% of the population.
Black liberation can never be realized by fantasies of an alternative economy, but only through an anti-monopoly movement leading toward an alternative to monopoly control of the existing economy. This is the only strategy that can result in meeting the needs of the people—jobs, education, health, housing—and open the way to putting an end to racism.
Baraka’s “alternative” would mean the continued genocidal denial of life and hope imposed by monopoly as the “traditional” way of life for Black people. And Baraka’s impossible detour into the past would continue to place the greatest burden on Black women, who were “traditionally,” under previous forms of oppression as they are at present, the most oppressed of the oppressed. but Black women, from Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman to Angela Davis, have always rejected non-struggle which is at the core of Baraka’s ideology.
And how does Baraka’s concept of “Ujamaa,” or “cooperative economics” relate to Africa? It is true that in Africa, unlike the United States, one can find several types of pre-capitalist economic survivals—vestiges of both communal land holdings and of feudalism, alongside varying levels of internal capitalist development. But these survivals have no independent existence. For centuries they have been locked into one or another form of colonial domination, undergoing changes only as these forms changed, internally and externally.
The absurdity of Baraka’s concept of “Ujamaa” in relation to communal survivals in Africa can be understood most clearly if one refers to Lenin’s great work, Data On the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture, written in 1914, a profound analysis of capitalism’s development in the U.S. after the abolition of slavery and in Russia after the abolition of serfdom. In this book, Lenin exposes the illusions of the Russian Narodniks who thought that the peasant communal land holdings could provide the basis for Russia to advance directly to some form of “socialism,” and of those in the United States, counterparts of the Narodniks, who closed their eyes to the re-enslavement of the Blacks and entertained ideas of “escaping” capitalism on “free” land in the west.
Lenin wrote that:
. . . economic survivals of slavery are not in any way distinguishable from those of feudalism, and in the former slave-owning south of the U.S. these survivals are still very powerful.
. . . Having freed the Negroes it (the U.S. ruling class) took good care, under free republican-democratic capitalism, to restore everything possible, and do everything possible and impossible for the most shameless and despicable oppression of the Negroes. (Collected Works, Volume 22, pp. 24-25. Emphasis in the original.)
Lenin continued:
America provides the most graphic confirmation of the truth emphasized by Marx in Capital, Volume III, that capitalism in agriculture does not depend on the form of land ownership or land tenure. Capital finds the most diverse types of medieval and patriarchal landed property—feudal, peasant allotments (i.e., the holdings of bonded peasants); clan, communal, state and other forms of land ownership. Capital takes hold of these, employing a variety of ways and methods. (Ibid., p. 22. Emphasis in last sentence added.)
In the following year Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, the great classic of marxism applied to the monopoly stage of capitalism, in which he demonstrated that in the U.S. capital had indeed taken hold of the entire economy!
Today for Africa, Baraka’s idea of going backward to the “traditional way of distributing wealth” is as illusory as the view that “free” land in the West offered an alternative to the takeover of big capital. Moreover, Baraka’s idea of the “traditional way of distributing wealth” is a romantic one; it never existed. “Ujamaa” under communalism—even in its earliest period, before the appearance of slavery, feudalism and then capitalism and imperialism—was a way of distributing poverty, not wealth, for the masses. At the level of development of the productive forces under primitive communalism, poverty for the masses was the only possibility—which holds equally true for its contemporary vestiges.
While African countries cannot move back to the primitive “cooperative economics” of communalism, they can avoid going through a stage of full-scale capitalist enslavement. This is an opportunity that did not exist for colonially oppressed peoples anywhere in the world before the October Socialist Revolution. And in the context of today’s world relations, it is possible for African countries to prevent capitalism, supported by neo-colonialism, from taking over the survivals of the past, as it did everywhere before the emergence of the socialist system.
But without the defeat of neo-colonialism, it is the “distribution” of poverty that will increase in Africa. This “distribution” will not take place in the “traditional” African communal manner, but will be a capitalist “distribution” of oppression and poverty, accompanied by the destruction of even the vestiges of traditional primitive “security” within the tribe and community.
And just as Baraka’s ideology is a diversion from the anti-monopoly struggle in the U.S., it simultaneously obscures the possibility countries now have of bypassing capitalism, of preventing capitalism and neo-colonialism from completely taking hold. This possibility can become a reality only when a non-capitalist path of development is chosen—based on the support of the countries and all the world anti-imperialist forces.
But Baraka’s policies mesh directly with neo-colonialist strategy, which would go to any lengths to prevent the African nations from taking the non-capitalist path. Such a path can be taken only within the framework of self-determination for each country—and Baraka’s position contradicts the right of self-determination for African countries.
Thus, in his address to the 1970 Congress of African People in Atlanta, he stated: “Garvey’s thought is best interpreted as a movement to re-create an African state . . .” Instead of calling for support for the right of self-determination for the different peoples of Africa, Baraka wants a “movement to re-create an African state”!
But there has never been a single African state. Many different peoples have made up the different African states in history. How then, can Baraka, a U.S. citizen, call for a single state for Africa? No responsible leader of any of the newly independent African countries would advance such an idea. Nor would any leader of the peoples waging armed struggle for liberation of their countries from colonial rule call for a single African state today. Both those who have won political independence and those fighting for it today demand the right of self-determination for the various peoples. The idea of a single, contemporary African state violates the struggle against neo-colonialism, which can be won only by establishing and consolidating independent states in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, etc.
Baraka should know that Africans resent Black Americans speaking of Africa as a single, undifferentiated entity. Africans are familiar with the racist colonial and neo-colonial pattern that ignores the rich diversity of nations and peoples of their continent. But when ideas that would deny the right of self-determination come from individuals who presume to speak in the name of Pan-Africanism, it is a cause of deep concern to those striving for self-determination, independence and sovereignty of their respective countries.
What is behind the neo-colonialist ideology—echoed by Baraka—which in essence denies the diversity of the African peoples, and therefore the right of self-determination for each of these peoples?
Imperialist ideology and strategy treat Africa’s multi-national population as one undifferentiated mass because the imperialists are not concerned with the fate of these peoples. Their concern is control of the vast diversity of wealth on the African continent.
In the past, the colonialists’ interest in the African population lay in slaves to the Americas. Today the neo-colonialists exploit Africans as semi-slaves to extract and transport the vast wealth of Africa for use in the main centers of imperialism, in the United States, Japan and Europe. They would like this process to proceed as in the past, unimpeded by struggles for self-determination and independence.
The revolution in science and technology has profoundly intensified the imperialists’ need for Africa’s mineral and agricultural wealth. These resources now occupy an infinitely larger, more indispensable place in imperialism’s economic strategy than ever before. The qualitatively new significance of Africa in the economics and politics of neo-colonialism is based on two new factors, both arising from the revolution in science and technology.
(1) The world supply of traditional minerals, oil and other raw materials is increasingly becoming depleted, while the demand continues insatiable. (2) There is now an increasing demand for many rare minerals for which there was little or no use before the nuclear and electronic revolution, and the African continent is the greatest known source for them.
No wonder the imperialists now more than ever fear the African struggles for self-determination and independence—struggles which have the potential of taking control of all the wealth of the respective countries and using it for social progress instead of neo-colonial super-profits. But these struggles are hampered today by neo-Pan-Africanist ideology, which so closely parallels the neo-colonialists’ open opposition to the right of self-determination for each African country.
Ironically, the neo-colonialists who chauvinistically treat the African peoples as an undifferentiated mass are most precise in identifying and cataloging each of the minerals and other raw materials of Africa, right down to showing the exact location of each on the map!
Even a partial list of the diversity of Africa’s resources is enough to account for neo-colonialism’s opposition to self-determination for the diverse peoples of Africa. Such a list appeared in the July/August, 1972 issue of African Progress, a conservative publication of African business men. The magazine reported:
Africa is the world’s principal producer of gold, manganese, radium, scandium, caesium, corrundum and graphite. It also dominates the market in certain strategic minerals such as cobalt, chrome, lithium, berryllium, tantalum and germanium. Iron ore, coal, nickel, vanadium, copper, zinc, lead, bauxite, silver, platinum, columbite, cadmium, phosphate, tin, uranium, etc., in varying quantities. As a matter of fact, no map changes so much as one showing Africa’s mineral resources; a deposit is exhausted and closed down at one place at the same time as a new deposit is discovered elsewhere.
And the U.S. Bureau of International Commerce, market indicator for Africa, reported in 1964 the following as Africa’s share of world commodity production:
Cassava 45%; chromium 31%; cobalt 92%; cocoa beans 78%; coffee 32%; copper ore 22%; gem diamonds 92%: industrial diamonds 90%; gold 67%; manganese ore 28%; millet and sorghum 23%; palm kernels 75%; palm oil 75%; peanuts 6%; phosphate rock 28%; sisal 62%; tin concentrates 11% ; uranium minerals 15%; vanadium 29%; wood 11%; zinc ore 7%.
The issue comes down to who will control this vast wealth—neo-colonialism or the countries of Africa fighting for liberation and self-determination.
While Africa has always had a vast diversity of peoples, the struggles for liberation on the African continent have now irrevocably placed the right of self-determination and the emergence of still more nations and nation-states on the agenda of history—and if cannot be removed either by the racist ideology of neo-colonialism nor the divisive ideology of neo-Pan-Africanism.
In 1920 Lenin wrote:
As long as national and state distinctions exist among peoples and countries—and these will continue to exist for a long time . . . the unity of the international tactics of the communist working-class movement in all countries demands, not the elimination of variety or the suppression of national distinctions (which is a pipe dream at the present), but the application of the fundamental principles of communism . . . (which will) correctly adapt and apply them to national and national-state distinctions. To seek out, investigate, predict, and grasp that which is nationally specific and nationally distinctive, in the concrete manner in which each country should tackle a single international task . . . (Collected Works, Volume 31, p. 92. Emphasis in the original.)
Today that “single international task,” from which neo-Pan-African ideology would divert the people, is the defeat of neo-colonialist opposition to the right of self-determination, of independence for the many emerging African nations.
There are still more contradictions in Imamu Baraka’s “word-magic.” Speaking of the United States, he says:
. . . as Nationalists and pan-Africanists, we must move to self-determination, self sufficiency . . . the South may be the great strategic ground of the African in America. (Ideological Statement, Congress of African People, Atlanta, 1970. Emphasis added.)
Thus, Baraka, who opposes self-determination in Africa—Where the objective basis and necessity for this Strategy is on today’s agenda—calls for “self-determination,” for a separate economy in the U.S., where objective reality calls for a different strategy to realize Black liberation.
It is true that the South is a decisive area in which Black self-organization and action must. serve as a base for winning majority representation at every level of local and state government where Blacks form a majority, and for equality of representation, right up to the national level, where Blacks are a minority. But a strategy for Black liberation must recognize that the shift of millions of Blacks out of the old plantation areas to form major segments of the population in Southern, Northern and Western cities represents something more significant than a shift from a rural population in the former area of Black majority to a predominantly urban one: the decisive core of Black strength has shifted from a Southern peasant base to a working-class base, especially in the mass production industries nationally.
As a region, the South remains the most decisive area for a liberation strategy. But Blacks in the South—along with Blacks in other great population centers from New York to Los Angeles—can move toward unified national power only by asserting their strength within a broad anti-monopoly movement uniting Black and non-Black against the common corporate enemy. To achieve this, the Black workers must become the main base of leadership in a Black liberation strategy that recognizes the decisive role of the South, but does not lose sight of the fact that the great strategic liberating battleground is national in scope and direction.
Baraka’s approach would actually cut down the South’s role as a decisive base within the national struggle for liberation. His approach not only limits the “great strategic battleground” to the South, but excludes the working class as the vital force for achieving Black independent action within a national anti-monopoly strategy.
Baraka substitutes a regional for a class basis for liberation. But in reality one cannot conceive of either effective regional or national action in the against oppression on the basis of a strategy that excludes the working class.
It is in such basic industries as steel, rubber and auto that the class unity of Black and non-Black workers can become the main strength and develop the main leadership for organizing the millions of unorganized Black and white Southern workers, and for a new national political combination strong enough to defeat reaction and the danger of fascism.
Baraka appears oblivious to the fact that Nixon’s “southern” strategy is actually a national one aimed at increasing poverty and reducing democracy throughout the country to even more critical levels than in the South, past or present.
And what can one make of Baraka’s talk of fighting neo-colonialism in Africa, when he rejects the role that the working class must play in steel, rubber, transportation, etc.? Without a struggle involving the great mass of workers against the corporate monopolists of these industries—who are at the center of reaction here and of neo-colonialism in Africa—it would be impossible to advance the fight for liberation in the U.S. or effectively support the African liberation struggle.
But Baraka sees neither the South nor the Black working class as part of the great national “strategic battle ground” in the fight against monopoly. In his view, the South is an area in itself—a concept that creates a massive diversion from present-day realities, because it bases itself on the past, when Blacks were a peasant majority in a still largely agrarian economy and territory. But we cannot limit our thinking to yesterday’s “strategic ground” without jeopardizing the offensive that must be mounted today. We can move forward to liberation only by challenging the enemy dominating the total national economy.
Because the “great strategic ground” for smashing the last survivals of slavery, for ending racism, poverty and inequality is national in scope, each regional struggle can be meaningful only to the degree that it is linked with a national strategy. Struggle in the South, or in any other part of the country, must be viewed not within the confines placed on it by Baraka’s limited outlook, as a separatist breakaway, but instead as a unified Black struggle, a mighty tide of independent Black action within a wider national challenge to monopoly’s control of the total U.S. economy.
It is ironic that Baraka projects the South as the “great strategic ground” at the very moment when Wall Street and Washington have expanded their traditional “Southern Strategy” into a national strategy of racist reaction and provocation—a pattern that can seen from Eastland’s Mississippi to Forest Hills, Canarsie, Detroit and Los Angeles.