Dr. Jared Ball’s IMixWhatILike website and web program is an important and useful resource for ideological development that merits serious attention. His video discussion of Cedric J. Robinson and his notion of the Black Radical Tradition is particularly informative and important.
Robin D.G. Kelley writes “Robinson took Marxism to task for its inability to comprehend the racial character of capitalism or radical movements outside of the West. He essentially re-wrote the history of the rise of the West from Ancient times to the mid-20th century, scrutinizing the very idea that capitalism could impose universal categories of class on the entire world. Tracing the roots of black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people, he shows that the first waves of African New World revolts were not governed by a critique structured by Western conceptions of freedom but a total rejection of enslavement and racism as it was experienced. Revolts, Robinson emphasized, which were often led by women. However, with the advent of formal colonialism and the incorporation of black labor into a more fully governed social structure, emerges the native bourgeoisie, more intimate with European life and thought, assigned to help rule. Their contradictory role as victims of racial domination and tools of empire, compelled some of these men and women to revolt, thus producing the radical black intelligentsia. And it is that intelligentsia which occupies the last section of the book. He reveals how W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright, by confronting Black mass movements, revised their positions on Western Marxism or broke with it altogether. The way they came to the Black Radical Tradition was more of an act of recognition than invention; they did not create the theory of black radicalism as much as found it in the movements of ‘ordinary’ Black people.”
It was in this work that Robinson elaborated upon his theory of racial capitalism and the spirit of opposition within the Black working class as the engine of liberation from it. Using the Hegelian dialectical triad of Du Bois, James, and Wright, he formulates a proposed praxis that can transcend the shortcomings of socialist movements in the Global North.
While Robinson’s views and works are not specifically endorsed or promoted by the Green Party of the United States or the Green Party Power Project per se, there are individual Greens who have derived a great deal of wisdom and insight from these works. They offer a serious, mature, and accessible critique of white supremacy, firmly grounded in historical materialism, that can offer solutions and guidance for practical challenges in the creation of viable Green Party locals. In a period when we find racial politics and the opposition to racial capitalism at heightened levels of public awareness, books discussion groups and clubs using these texts could help your Green local build power.
The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.
Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for “tough on crime” politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.
ABOLITION
PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.
From where we are now, sometimes we can’t really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn’t just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It’s also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.
Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.
Building solidarity and connections between Green locals and grassroots organizations like
Critical Resistance constructs Green Party Power!
If you have an affiliate of Critical Resistance in your state or city, reach out to them and see what potential convergences exist between the respective memberships. See how and why your organizations can expand outreach and base building activities in a mutually-beneficial fashion.
The guns at Sumter [that began the American Civil War], the marching armies, the fugitive slaves, the fugitives as “contrabands,” spies, servants and laborers; the Negro as soldier, as citizen, as voter—these steps came from 1861 to 1868 with regular beat that was almost rhythmic. It was the price of the disaster of war, and it was a price that few Americans at first dreamed of paying or wanted to pay. The North was not Abolitionist. It was overwhelmingly in favor of Negro slavery, so long as this did not interfere with Northern moneymaking. But, on the other hand, there was a minority of the North who hated slavery with perfect hatred; who wanted no union with slaveholders; who fought for freedom and treated Negroes as men. As the Abolition-democracy gained in prestige and in power, they appeared as prophets, and led by statesmen, they began to guide the nation out of the morass into which it had fallen. They and their black friends and the new freedmen became gradually the leaders of a Reconstruction of Democracy in the United States, while marching millions sang the noblest war-song of the ages to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord/He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored/He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword/His Truth is marching on! -W.E.B. Du Bois
We…see the Negroes as foremost among those who will struggle against the crimes and barbarities of the capitalist system. The reason for this lies in the very nature of the Negro’s position in capitalist society. The most exploited, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, Negroes are the ones who experience most acutely and most unbearably the overwhelming burdens which capitalism places upon the masses in every country. Negroes haven’t to read in books about the fraud of capitalist democracy. Karl Marx and Lenin have little to teach them about the fact.This conception of the role of the Negro has hitherto been obscured by the racial prejudices instilled into the different sections of the working class by American capitalism. The revolutionary party therefore is faced with the tremendous difficulty of overcoming this division. Yet difficult as this task is, it is a difficulty of tactics and not of strategy. The important question is not so much that of winning the Negroes for the revolution, but of instilling the Negro masses with the conviction that they can place their trust and confidence in a revolutionary party composed largely of white workers, as is inevitable in American society. -C.L.R. James
Why We Need a Reader
In any moment of heightened political contradictions, it proves necessary to develop a firm set of ideological coordinates from which praxis can materialize. This is particularly true in the matter of trying to build a mass-membership organization that goes outside the confines of the petit bourgeoisie and into the grassroots where the working class is to be found simultaneous with the growing alarmism around reborn fascist politics.
Table of Contents
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
The Communalist Project by Murray Bookchin
Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement by Murray Bookchin
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience by Peter Staudenmaier and Janet Biehl
We currently are seeing in the mainstream and even psuedo-progressive left media a large-scale meta-narrative that promotes a definite and clear political agenda. With these contradictions creating such serious and confusing times, it is important for Greens to move outside the realm of petty electoralism and into the street. The Green Party can become a mass-membership movement that opposes imperialism, settler-colonist white supremacy, misogyny (including when it appears as corporate neoliberal feminism), and austerity while defending the commons.
These readings are not programmatic or agenda-based.
Such times require something much bolder.
We open this reader with an analysis of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex by Angela Davis. This is the human rights issue of our epoch and It must be understood as a central location of struggle. It is impossible to subsume the matter under the heading of simplistic ecology or relegate it to a lower position on a roster of priorities. Rather, it is the true liberation politics of genuine socialism that can inform the struggle for livable ecology.
Murray Bookchin’s The Communalist Project is a vision of a Green future that goes well beyond Keynesian welfare state politics and into the realm of actual political democracy. He writes:
Communalism seeks to recapture the meaning of politics in its broadest, most emancipatory sense, indeed, to fulfill the historic potential of the municipality as the developmental arena of mind and discourse. It conceptualizes the municipality, potentially at least, as a transformative development beyond organic evolution into the domain of social evolution.
The city is the domain where the archaic blood-tie that was once limited to the unification of families and tribes, to the exclusion of outsiders, was – juridically, at least – dissolved. It became the domain where hierarchies based on parochial and sociobiological attributes of kinship, gender, and age could be eliminated and replaced by a free society based on a shared common humanity.
Potentially, it remains the domain where the once-feared stranger can be fully absorbed into the community – initially as a protected resident of a common territory and eventually as a citizen, engaged in making policy decisions in the public arena. It is above all the domain where institutions and values have their roots not in zoology but in civil human activity.
This is how Greens can show that another world is possible, one where every cook can govern.
From here, we include two further writings on the topic of fascism. For too long, Greens have been rebuked, sometimes rightfully so, for refusing to acknowledge their privilege and role within white supremacy. Many suburban Greens have awful politics on race, gender, sexuality, and the role of the welfare state in the lives of the working class. Participation in the Green Party is seen as a petit bourgeois hobby that fails to acknowledge the needs and wants of the working class, a kind of meek protest politics for white people who wish to ‘Green Keynes’ and little more.
However, it is from within the earliest writings of American Greens like Janet Biehl, Peter Staudenmaier, and Bookchin that we find a tradition of ecological anti-fascism that can provide useful praxis moving forward. These writings go beyond the realm of spontaneity and demonstrations to provide an ideological rebuke to a fascist current Americans can expect to see more and more of in the coming years. While Donald Trump may be a passing political actor, the politics he has tapped into will be with us for a long time and will require action that goes well beyond the consensus of even a retro New Dealer like Bernie Sanders.
It is our hope that this strand of the Green tradition, a socialist praxis rooted in values of liberté, égalité, fraternité and harkening back to the emancipatory ideals of the Haitian Revolution, might take root in our wider American Green Party and help build our base into a viable force for taking power.
