“An articulated tribe may be best represented by one of a number of immigrant groups, e.g. the Korean Americans. In this instance, we have a group organized around cohesive families or kinship groups, land or communities, and confederations, with formal power organizations, extending beyond family ties. The articulate nature of these groups devolves from their high level of intergroup cooperativeness and self-sufficiency, economic assertiveness and monopolistic business practices, their concentrated populations with an informal leadership establishment generally composed of highly respected or regarded individuals whose authority rests on their power to persuade, influence, and organize their followers. Authority and leadership status is generally attained by personal achievements and abilities, and often as the result of leading important cultural institutions such as economic enterprises and/or religious establishments. The articulate tribal arrangement may yield relatively high levels of economic subsistence or surplus. In the United States, any group which achieves substantial economic surplus combined with cohesive economic-political organization and distinctive group consciousness and identity, can and does exert power and influence beyond their actual numbers in the general national population. An economically enriched, articulate tribe can use its leverage to significantly influence the actions and attitudes of the dominant White American nation and perhaps make deep inroads into its social, economic, and political infrastructure.”All due respect to Amos Wilson for his piece on Black Power, yet his synopsis lacks a critique of Imperialism. What is primary for African people in the US to improve our relationships to Africans everywhere, and in the Motherland in particular, so as to effect OBJECTIVE change in this country? Yet nobody can accurately and honestly discuss Black Power out of its contextual origins by comparing Korean middle class mobility to black economic stagnation in America. In no cogent way do the two groups compare, in our analysis of Black Power. Plus, Wilson’s point has nothing to do with Black Power and the class analysis which will help our people understand history and social relationships.
Amos Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power
Anyone who owns fewer degrees than a thermometer can see that capitalism is based upon the principle of concentrated economics. Wilson’s sociology essay does not speak about this. It approaches Black Power from outside the community in a language foreign to most people. It omits the question of capitalism, while comparing apples to oranges. For all of his educated logic, Wilson neglects to account for several simple factors.
First, the US is not at war with the Koreans it brings to this country; like Wilson, they kno no experience related to COINTELPRO, civil rights, SNCC and the Black Panthers. As a group they have no history in America which looks anything like our Black Power movement. Secondly, Black Power grows from the people and not from the pages of a book, nor the sleeve of a dashiki. It does not grow from the New Black Panther Party, either. Black Power cannot exist outside of a revolutionary context. Otherwise, it boils down to fighting capitalism with black capitalism.
So we have to combat the false consciousness which misled us to consider a capitalist model for change; which has proven to be a failure in our community yet led Wilson to pose the comparison in the first place. The mistaken belief that capitalism is a social system based upon the recognition of individual rights is like Mussolini innocuously asserting that ‘under fascism the State collaborates directly with business.’ Fascism inhumanly represses working people, which is why we define the US prisons system as neo-fascism. And fascism is a form of capitalism. In legitimizing capitalism thru the example of Korean success on the back of the ghetto, should the black middle class oppose foreign ownership of black slaves, but espouse slave ownership for themselves? Yet the enslaved worker opposes capitalism, slavery and fascism.
We have to deal with capitalism as the accumulation of wealth thru the process of concentration. Capital is wealth concentrated by converting real value into a paper product (money, stocks, bonds, etc.) with an abstract value attached to it. Sometimes that abstract value represents land or oil futures or anything that can be owned. Capital is wealth made liquid, compact, transferable and portable. But they don’t explain it to us like that.
Concentration, in a social context, can only occur if money gets drawn out of wide distribution and hoarded by a small class. For wealth to exist, it must be concentrated thru resources that have been taken out of distribution. By transforming wealth into abstract form, by making paper relate to real value, as if the picture and the image of the king were as real as the king himself, wealth becomes simple to accumulate by the minority ruling class. As long as people recognize the abstract value attached to worthless paper, they will continue playing by rules that benefit not them but their oppressors. Thus, power must logically flow out of this rigged system, because the people surrender power to it. The abstraction converted back into real value systemizes the basis for inequity and poverty in society today.
Thus, inequity and poverty continue only because of the implied consent of the masses thru a political tool known as democracy. The illusion of choosing our rulers imparts us with the idea that we want a dictatorship that works against our interests. Because Americans believe their standard of living derives from this political system, the delusion is compounded.
Since our modern world subsists as a vast interwoven social fabric, the gap between rich and poor has more to do with exploitation than with any other factor. The class divisions in society are due entirely to this gap. Class divides human beings between workers and bosses, masters and slaves, the colonizer and the colonized. Always remember, that in capitalism, the principle of concentration exists at all levels. Therefore, we have to look for concentration even in the class question. Whereas class divisions existed long before capitalism, today they have become agitated in a concentrated form, known as racism. Racism exists because of the colonial relationships which brought capitalism into existence and sustained it thru out history.
From the end of World War II to the present, the politics of class have become diluted. At the same time, concentration of wealth has accelerated. The dual character of this development is important to recognize. As the colonized world broke free from direct control, this caused a social revolution in the Imperialist world. Social revolution is not political revolution. The social revolution took place at a level where the masses of middle class and laboring peoples rejected the politics of nullification and interposition, to coin a famous phrase.
Plus, an added corollary to this is Bro Wilson offers us a blueprint for Black Power out of the history and context which shaped and defined the original concept. This is revisionist at the very least, and at worst it may fall into the category of reactionary opportunism. Because Black Power emerged as a concept at a very specific and well-documented point in time. To ignore the historical character of this theory is to deny the history of our struggle. That is tantamount to saying that black people have no history.
Subjectively speaking, the only people without history are those who have labored under racist oppression. And while they do, indeed, have a history, it is the denial of their history which operates hand-in-hand with the denial of their humanity to deepen their oppression. Racism, being concentrated class oppression, may convince Africans that we have no history and that we are African Americans whose fortunes and opportunities ascended only with our enslavement in America. Hence, the term “African American”. Yet our culture and identity and history began long prior to the US being founded as a republic, and to Europe existing as a place with cities and even settlements.
History is a developing process, and the struggle which birthed the movement known as Black Power does not begin with Amos Wilson offering blueprints for its emergence. It bears noting that I am not taking on this issue out of ego, but to set the record straight inasmuch as Wilson’s plan ignores the critical work which went into creating Black Power. Lives were lost, people were imprisoned. Hugo Pinell, for instance, was recently denied parole because he remains a staunch revolutionary who belonged to the Black Power trend. Where does he fit in Wilson’s Black Power paradigm?
On that note, we as organizers must take into account how SNCC field organizer Willie Mukasa Ricks’ Black Power slogan developed into a movement in 1966 with a working class thrust. Breaking with the petty bourgeois role that had it providing shock troops for the civil rights movement, SNCC disbanded two years later. Its leaders like Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and H Rap Brown (Jamil Al Amin) joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers promoted a revolutionary class analysis and was founded by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale. They became the embodiment of Black Power as they implemented free breakfast programs for children, and helped people kick drugs. The Panthers did other valuable work which created a significant distance between their base and the capitalist system which they opposed.
In opposing capitalism, they grew international links with Cuba, China, Vietnam, Algeria, Ghana and other revolutionary societies. They built solidarity with white sympathizers in the US, based on Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton’s axiom, “You don’t fight racism with racism, you fight it with Solidarity.” Which means cultivating the most principled forces from the non-black community to help our cause on a material (economic) basis. Fred Hampton was assassinated in his sleep by Chicago pigs and the FBI in a pre-dawn assault on December 4, 1969, which also took the life of Panther Mark Clark. Chairman Fred’s funeral was attended by 5,000 people, and he was eulogized by such black leaders as Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy. In his eulogy, Jesse noted that “when Fred was shot in Chicago, black people in particular, and decent people in general, bled everywhere.”
The Panthers grew Black Power from a slogan into a reality. They created dual and competing political power, that is, they did for our community all the things the US government had resources to do but refused to do. They did not criticize the masses, but helped them understand their conditions. For this, the FBI labeled them “the greatest internal threat to the national security of the United States.”
Concomitant with the nation-wide police State crackdown on the Panthers, this movement became watered down into black empowerment, with the slogan “Black Power” being contaminated first in 1968 by Floyd McKissick reinterpreting it to mean "green power, money." At this juncture the black middle class turned its back on democratic rights in our community in exchange for mobility within the white power structure. This was effected largely thru affirmative action and equal opportunity. This is the primary reason why our community has become bogged down in the politics of divisiveness, fragmentation and opportunism.
In summation, I don’t think Bro Amos Wilson offers a critique which articulates the genuine, revolutionary theory of Black Political Power. His view represents a continuation of middle class sociological and professional mores. No revolution has ever been waged thru sociology. None has ever been won except by those who have committed class suicide and joined their fate to that of the masses. We may never have a violent revolution in North America, however, to create qualitative change in the lives of the broad masses of black people we have to develop a clear class analysis and a scientific theory which will help them break the bonds of oppression. Peace.
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