{"id":3166,"date":"2017-10-22T13:23:08","date_gmt":"2017-10-22T17:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeinspice.com\/?p=3166"},"modified":"2017-10-31T03:25:31","modified_gmt":"2017-10-31T07:25:31","slug":"uhuru-takes-the-stage-out-of-the-blue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeinspice.com\/?p=3166","title":{"rendered":"Uhuru Takes the Stage \u2014 out of the blue."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"marxThe left implodes.\u00a0 Great hopes were stirred by the Bernie Sanders campaign.\u00a0 It was alleged to be a movement that would continue beyond the primaries, beyond November, promising a Political Revolution that would transform American politics.<\/p>\n

It ended badly.\u00a0 It ended in the arms of Hillary Clinton, in the swarms of the millions whose sole raison d\u2019etre was to overturn the Trump presidency.\u00a0 That ended badly.\u00a0 It ended in the anti-Russia hysteria that fuels the neocon drive for the American New World Order, from Syria to North Korea to Venezuela and all points North, South, East and West.\u00a0 This will end badly.<\/p>\n

Sanders refugees fled the Dems and joined the Green Party.\u00a0 But that influx was too much of a shock to the Green system of lethargy for the party\u2019s Old Guard to bear.\u00a0 Some of these new socialists were anathema to the small-business environmentalist Old Guard.\u00a0 These new socialists were former Democrats who, having grown up in the ready-made environment of a Democratic Party campaign, knew little about having to build their own party from the ground up.\u00a0 Cast into the current turmoil, they had a lot to learn, and learn fast.\u00a0 Too many didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

There are also veteran Green socialists with a class perspective, and a commitment to grassroots organization of the black and Latino communities.\u00a0 As party veterans such as Bruce Dixon (White Liberal Guilt, Black Opportunism and the Green Party<\/a>), Margaret Flowers<\/a> and Kevin Zeese (Green Party Growing Pains; Our Own Crisis of Democracy<\/a>) can attest, they are under assault by the conservative white Old Guard who use newly-coined token black leaders as a front for keeping the party on the path of business-as-usual, setting black against black.<\/p>\n

\"bernies-last-stand\"The Green Party is descending into polemical mayhem with charges of racist, infiltrator and Democratic Party sellout flying thick and fast.\u00a0 The left has forgotten the art of serious political discourse, as the name-calling tactics of the playground prevail.<\/p>\n

Yet if only the rest of the left would display such youthful energy.\u00a0 Most of the left forms the heart if not the soul of the legions of anti-Trump, former-Hillary Clinton minions who would catapult neocon Vice President Mike Pence into the Oval Office.\u00a0 They are led, but are incapable of leading in any radical direction.\u00a0 They cling to their respective identities.\u00a0 They all claim to support each other\u2019s agendas, when at best they cancel each other out.\u00a0 Their theoretical landscape is utterly bleak.\u00a0 As individuals they are often decent, serious people, experts at exposing and excoriating a collapsing system, but not so good at changing it.\u00a0 As a total institution, they have become less than the sum of their parts. Their prescription is Same Old Shit, and more of it.\u00a0 Still \u2026<\/p>\n

Jim Crow is now a liberal.<\/h2>\n

St. Petersburg, Florida holds the headquarters of the Uhuru movement.\u00a0 The \u201cSunshine City\u201d is the epitome of a liberal, Democratic Party controlled city that actively upholds a White Power, Jim Crow social system.<\/p>\n

Its school system, run by Pinellas County, is rated the worst in the United States.\u00a0 Its school system has explicitly re-introduced segregation, and its black schools are the worst of the worst, commonly known as \u201cfailure factories.\u201d\u00a0 Special programs are set up for white students to be bussed to, while black students are not even given a minimum education.\u00a0 Police patrol the halls, black students are suspended for even speaking out, Defiance\/insubordination is the most frequent cause of suspension, and students are routinely arrested for \u201cdisorderly conduct.\u201d\u00a0 The school-to-prison pipeline starts here.<\/p>\n

Years ago the Pinellas County sheriff\u2019s office was banned from the city, but those days are long gone.\u00a0 The department under Sheriff Bob Gualtieri now considers St. Petersburg \u2014 and its schools \u2014 its happy hunting ground, and the Tampa Bay Times howls about teenage car thieves being the number one menace to society as mere children are killed by police with impunity.<\/p>\n

The downtown gentrification juggernaut seeks to make the city \u201chomeless-free.\u201d\u00a0 The Tampa Bay skyline is obscured by burgeoning high-rises and corporate headquarters that the city\u2019s already failing infrastructure can\u2019t possibly accommodate.\u00a0 Entire city blocks are being bought up by out-of-state billionaires.\u00a0 The shops lining Central Avenue are marked for either total renovation \u2014 with stratospheric rent hikes \u2014 or utter destruction.\u00a0 Had the path of the recent Hurricane Irma not veered just a few miles east as it clawed its way up the spine of the Sunshine State, impoverished south St. Petersburg would now be uninhabitable.<\/p>\n

Out of the Blue \u2026<\/h2>\n
\"Eritha

Eritha Akile Cainion campaigns with Jess Nevel.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last Spring, We were holding a meeting of the Pinellas County Green Party.\u00a0 On the agenda were the Uhuru candidates Jesse Nevel and Eritha Akil\u00e9 Cainion (now Akil\u00e9 Anai), running for St. Petersburg Mayor and District 6 City Council, respectively.\u00a0 I had a lot of assumptions about the Uhurus (“Uhuru” is Swahili for “freedom”).\u00a0 Their platform looked good, but they had a certain reputation:<\/p>\n

Ultra-left;
\nBlack Separatist;
\nBlack Nationalist and therefore macho, sexist and homophobic;
\nAnti-white;
\nAll rhetoric;
\nCultural Nationalist;
\nPro-Reparations, a petit-bourgeois fancy based on exploiting white guilt.<\/p>\n

They sent us about a dozen members of their multi-racial \u201cA team\u201d:\u00a0 the candidates themselves, plus Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People\u2019s Socialist Party, and other heavies in the campaign.\u00a0 Surprise #1, Jesse Nevel, their mayoral candidate was white and Jewish.\u00a0 Interesting.\u00a0 Nevel and Akil\u00e9 spoke.\u00a0 They laid out a vision of Reparations that was completely different from my previous understanding.\u00a0 It went beyond payback for the slave trade.<\/p>\n

It focused on more recent attacks on St. Petersburg\u2019s own black community.\u00a0 Two major points stood out:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The city had bulldozed over 800 black families and 100 black-owned businesses from the land south of Central Avenue in order to build Tropicana Field (the \u201cDome\u201d) as a home for the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team, and<\/li>\n
  2. The city had recently dumped one billion gallons of raw sewage onto the South Side black community, and into Tampa Bay, leaving untreated feces covering the streets and floating in people\u2019s homes.\u00a0 The city had saved a few million dollars by closing the Alfred Whitted waste treatment plant.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Frankly, Reparations makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and not just on the public policy front.\u00a0 Even on the left, it challenges the notion that white people can make their own peaceful version of revolution, and do it at their own (actually the Democratic Party\u2019s) pace, rather than follow angry black leadership which insists that it must lead NOW!\u00a0 We whites especially don\u2019t like to see our own role as part of an actual white nation (Europe writ large) founded on colonial plunder and massacre and slavery, a white nation still kept running based on \u00a0that foundation laid centuries ago (see Part 2 for more on this).<\/p>\n

    \"hurricane

    Take back the Dome!<\/p><\/div>\n

    The Uhurus were demanding Reparations for those two atrocities, among others.\u00a0 But Reparations is a sticking point for many \u2014 where would the money come from?\u00a0 Were all white people supposed to write checks?\u00a0 And then give them where?\u00a0 To spend on what?<\/p>\n

    The battle cry.<\/h2>\n

    No, say Jesse and Akil\u00e9. \u00a0Checks are fine, but \u201cNobody benefits at the expense of anyone else!\u00a0 War against the Corporations!\u00a0 War against the System!\u00a0 Radical Times call for Radical Solutions!\u201d<\/p>\n

    \u201cNobody benefits at the expense of anyone else!\u201d was what set my head spinning.\u00a0 Theirs was indeed a multi-racial appeal.\u00a0 They presented solid, powerful demands for radical reforms, neither wild nor whimsical.\u00a0 Their nationalism was rooted in the political struggle against the colonial system, nothing like the \u201cdashiki cultural nationalism\u201d that was once fashionable.<\/p>\n

    We were also told we needed to commit \u201cnational suicide\u201d by directly joining with the struggle for Reparations and smashing colonialism, i.e., the specific form that capitalism has always taken to this day.<\/p>\n

    (I had an intriguing misunderstanding later when I started to write about this.\u00a0 I thought we had been told we needed to commit \u201cracial suicide,\u201d not \u201cnational suicide.\u201d\u00a0 Why that mistake?\u00a0 Easy to answer once asked directly.\u00a0 We in America are organized to see things in terms of race.\u00a0 We are heavily over-determined by the framework of racist ideology, whether we are pro-black or white supremacist, radical or conservative.\u00a0 But Uhuru does not see the fight against racism as central. \u00a0Racism is understood as the primary ideology that the ruling class uses to maintain its power among the masses, ideology being the stuff in our heads.\u00a0 But the real issue is power.\u00a0 Uhuru insists that the struggle is not to destroy the stuff that\u2019s in our heads, but to destroy the colonial system that is now, more blatantly than ever, kept in power through the barrel of a gun.\u00a0 That is of course a greater challenge, even dangerous in these dangerous times.\u00a0 It calls for action, not mental self-purification.\u00a0 But it is also liberating, as mental self-purification is impossible, but action is not.\u00a0 Or that\u2019s how I took it.)<\/em><\/p>\n

    Just as powerful was their personal presence.\u00a0 Their delegation was multi-racial, clearly a close-knit team.\u00a0 There was a sense of real human warmth.\u00a0 They really wanted the Green Party\u2019s support, without an aura of guilt-tripping or coercion.\u00a0 They were clearly competent and professional, things the Green Party has in short supply.\u00a0 They seemed to have a strong gay and lesbian presence.\u00a0 They wanted us.<\/p>\n

    Over the course of that evening, my assumptions were demolished line by line.<\/p>\n

    So what were we to do?\u00a0 I proposed that we endorse them on the spot.\u00a0 We did so unanimously.<\/p>\n

    \"omali\"

    Omali Yeshitela (at mike), Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party. Out of the blue.<\/p><\/div>\n

    Their whole operation seemed to me like it had come out of nowhere.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve studied revolutions and revolutionary movements, and one of their frequent features is that \u2014 to the eyes of governments and politicians and scholars \u2014 they do seem to \u201ccome out of nowhere,\u201d just like the Uhurus.\u00a0 But a closer study of past revolutions has consistently shown that these movements never come out of nowhere.\u00a0 They build for years, organizing, fighting, building a base.\u00a0 Only to the official eye had they been invisible until, for the rulers, it was too late.<\/p>\n

    \u2026 and Into the Black<\/h2>\n

    The Uhurus had announced that they were holding one of their weekly rallies that coming Sunday, at Uhuru House, their headquarters on 18th Avenue South.\u00a0 Rose and I went, and everything we had just seen was reaffirmed.<\/p>\n

    So I realized I needed to take a hard look at my own blindness, my own assumptions.\u00a0 How had I not seen?\u00a0 The meeting and the rally had cleared up a lot of stuff very quickly.\u00a0 But even that doesn\u2019t fully explain it.\u00a0 Nor does my own racism.\u00a0 The left also has particular political stereotypes just as much as do Academia, the Beltway and Fox News.\u00a0 What were my political assumptions as a 3rd International Marxist, influenced by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, and by Vygotsky?<\/p>\n

    I had a lot of learning to do here.<\/p>\n

    Obvious first step \u2014 read their material.\u00a0 For starters:<\/p>\n

    Political Report to the 6th Congress of the APSP<\/a> (link will download pdf)
    \n    Chairman Omali\u2019s 2017 Political Report: \u00a0Putting Revolution Back on the Agenda!<\/a><\/p>\n

    Much of the following is taken from the above two documents, plus their newspaper Burning Spear<\/a>, numerous conversations, and talks by and with Chairman Omali Yeshitela himself.\u00a0 Most importantly, Rose and I have been active participants with the Uhurus in action, rocking last summer\u2019s official debates and tackling the media that maligned them and tried to shut them out.\u00a0 I\u2019m no pushover for a smooth-talking party line, but as a long-time Marxist the reading was most challenging.<\/em><\/p>\n

    First some history.<\/h2>\n

    Omali Yeshitela emerged as a leader in the midst of the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles of the 60\u2019s.\u00a0 Moved by Martin Luther King AND Malcolm X, he was involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).\u00a0 SNCC had outraged the liberal left in 1966 when it asked its white members to leave, rebelling against the patronizing control that white liberals had exercised over the Civil Rights movement.\u00a0 Yeshitela had been in Los Angeles during the Watts uprising of 1965.<\/p>\n

    In 1966, he stormed into the St. Petersburg City Hall, tore down a painting that depicted black people as servants and savages, and marched with it down the street.\u00a0 Arrested and charged, Yeshitela ultimately spent two-and-a-half years in prison, but that fiery act made him a hero to the community.<\/p>\n

    \"pantherYeshitela was one of the \u201csurvivors\u201d of the destruction of the revolutionary movement of the 60\u2019s, the assassination of leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the massacre of so many Black Panther Party leaders and members by the police. \u00a0Yeshitela chose to follow in the footsteps of the Black Panthers:<\/p>\n

    \u201cThe Black Panther Party was the only revolutionary political party of consequence prior to the emergence of the African People\u2019s Socialist Party (APSP) and it bore the brunt of much of the counterinsurgent repression, leaving its remnants in a state of retreat.\u00a0 Most other remaining African political groupings preferred to shun designation as a party and avoided the internal dynamics necessary to shape and define the class character of a revolutionary organization.\u00a0 This resulted in ambiguity that most often allowed militant, nationalist petty bourgeois organizations to hide their class content behind radical sounding names.\u00a0 However, we were clear that we had to have a revolutionary party rooted in the African working class and committed to African liberation, unification and socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Predecessors to the APSP were JOMO (the Junta of Militant Organizations), the Burning Spear newspaper, and the Uhuru movement.\u00a0 The APSP was founded in 1972.\u00a0 A central thesis of the APSP, which they maintain to this day, is that …<\/p>\n

    \u201cultimately the struggle against racism, when it is given material form, boils down to a struggle for \u2018equality\u2019 with the exploited North American working class, that is to say equality within capitalism \u2026 [The APSP\u2019s] primary struggle is against colonialism, which is an imperialist form, therefore necessarily having class connotations.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Holding that the primary struggle is against colonialism, they insist that the African working class is the essential driving force.<\/p>\n

    As African internationalists, they worked closely with the Zimbabwe African National Union, which went on to govern in Zimbabwe.\u00a0 In the 1970\u2019s, the APSP achieved national prominence by leading the widely celebrated (and ultimately successful) struggle to free Dessie Woods, an African woman associated with the Nation of Islam, who had killed a white man with his own gun after the man tried to rape her and a friend at gunpoint.<\/p>\n

    Throughout the following decades, the APSP established itself as an independent force in sharp contrast with the \u201cestablishments\u201d of the white colonial power structure, the \u201cofficial\u201d black leadership, and the petit-bourgeois left.\u00a0 Per Yeshitela:<\/p>\n

    \u201cWe recognized that Reparations had to become the property of the masses if it was to be a significant political question. \u00a0On November 13 and 14, 1982 we held the historic first session of the World Tribunal on Reparations for African People in the U.S. in Brooklyn, New York. \u00a0The Tribunal found that the U.S. owed African people in the U.S. $4.1 trillion for stolen labor alone, the first empirical quantification of the value of capitalized African labor.<\/p>\n

    \u201cImmediately after the conclusion of this historical event we launched the African National Reparations Organization (ANRO), whose sole objective was to win the Reparations demand in the consciousness of African people. Following the Reparations tribunal I toured Europe with the Reparations message, going first to London and Ireland, and then to France and Germany, meeting with hundreds of Africans in different settings.\u201d<\/p>\n

    By 1976, amidst all the Bicentennial hoopla, the party had developed significant support among North Americans (aka white people), and this relationship was consolidated in St. Petersburg, Florida with the launching of the African People\u2019s Solidarity Committee (APSC), which worked directly under the leadership of the APSP for Reparations and against colonial oppression.\u00a0 This required protracted struggle to overturn the patronizing black\/white paradigm of \u201cof equal, parallel struggles, where solidarity work meant whites doing their \u2018own thing\u2019 to free white women or white homosexuals or white workers while Africans would kinda sorta handle the Africa question.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Then in 1991, APSP organized the International People\u2019s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), their revolutionary mass organization, to expand their struggle more deeply into the black community.<\/p>\n

    St. Petersburg 1996<\/h2>\n

    As reported in Yeshitela\u2019s Political Report to the 6th Congress of the APSP:<\/p>\n

    \"stpete96\"

    St. Petersburg 1996.<\/p><\/div>\n

    On October 24, 1996 in broad daylight, the St. Petersburg, Florida police department shot dead an 18-year-old African, TyRon Lewis, in front of scores of witnesses in the African community.<\/p>\n

    \u201cThat police murder, which took place three blocks from the Uhuru House, the National Office of the APSP, resulted in a fierce response from the African community. \u00a0Police cars and corporate news vehicles were torched by the rebelling masses.\u00a0 Liquor stores and other white-owned businesses notorious for their unfair extraction of capital from an impoverished community were also targeted.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The Uhurus were on the scene.\u00a0 The police and media seized on that to blame them for the uprising, and began harassing them at every turn, arresting them for selling Burning Spear on the street and for passing out leaflets and pamphlets.\u00a0 On November 13, 1996, three weeks after the murder, about 100 community members, some with children, met at an InPDUM meeting at Uhuru House headquarters to protest the coming Grand Jury\u2019s total exoneration of the killer cops.\u00a0 In response, the state and city mobilized hundreds of cops and paramilitary forces who surrounded the building.<\/p>\n

    Armored and armed to the teeth, this police army declared the gathering illegal and bombarded the community members trapped inside with literally every tear gas canister in the city, shooting incendiary canisters onto the roof in an attempt to set the building on fire.<\/p>\n

    The African community exploded, battling the police in defense of the building and the entrapped leaders.\u00a0 A police helicopter hovered overhead, reminiscent of the massacre of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia in 1985.\u00a0 The copter was brought down by a bullet hitting its pilot.\u00a0 The battle continued until dawn.<\/p>\n

    Bill Clinton sent a cabinet member to investigate and the city announced a massive program, called “Challenge 2001,” to dole out $100 million in federal grants and “build better community relationships.”\u00a0 The city appointed its first black police chief, Goliath Davis, who made sweeping changes in department policy.\u00a0 Yeshitela summarizes:<\/p>\n

    \u201cIn the process of this resistance the Party initiated a broad-based African American Leadership Coalition involving sectors of the African primitive petty bourgeoisie whose unity with our Party was influenced by their belief in the prospect of acquiring federal funds to appease the resistance.<\/p>\n

    \u201cThis was an important development because the coalition became a wall of petty bourgeois, national democratic, black \u2018respectability\u2019 surrounding our Party and movement that made it difficult for the State to effectively employ a military solution against us with impunity.<\/p>\n

    \u201cThe coalition also became a part of the method through which the Party locked the colonial State in political struggle.\u00a0 Through the coalition we defined this struggle as a contest between a pessimistic public policy of police containment of our people versus an optimistic public policy of economic development for a population suffering economic quarantine by the government and capitalist financial institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Yeshitela and the Uhurus became a real force in city politics.\u00a0 Yeshitela ran for mayor in 2001 in a field of nine candidates.\u00a0 Though he didn\u2019t make the runoff, he won all but one black and mixed-race precinct in the city\u2019s primary.\u00a0 But \u2026<\/p>\n

    \u201cSituations of dual power are never permanent.\u00a0 They are fleeting and temporary.\u00a0 We were not able to win all power to the people and consequently the State has been able to reassert its general authority over our colonized community with a vengeance.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Still, the APSP never stopped building, and they are now at the center of a growing constellation of organizations and community institutions.\u00a0 Under the leadership of the APSP are the following:<\/p>\n