Episodios

  • the political praxis of Jamil Abdullah al-Amin

    the political praxis of Jamil Abdullah al-Amin
    Jul 24 2024
    On August 31, 1967, several thousand delegates gathered at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago for the opening rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) convention. This event was an ambitious attempt to develop a broad coalition of over 200 different organizations, that included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Workers Party, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. According to Arun Kundnani [2023] in ‘The New Malcolm X’: Who was Jamil Al-Amin – The Forgotten Radical of the Civil Rights Movement?, “On the opening night, Dr. King outlined an anti-capitalist politics that had become essential to his worldview.” This, of course, has been erased from dominant discourses on Dr. King. For King: “Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both Black and white, both here and abroad.” The only solution: “a radical redistribution of political and economic power” (Kundnani, 2023). Another key point to highlight was that there was talk at the convention of running King as an independent candidate of the Left in the following year’s presidential elections.” Despite the prominent role of King and SCLC, the leading Black organization at the NCNP convention was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), chaired by Jamil al-Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jamil al-Amin worked with the civil rights movement in Alabama and Mississippi in the mid-1960s. He was only twenty-three years old when he was elected SNCC’s national chair, four months before the NCNP convention. As he traveled the US that summer, federal agents and informants constantly tailed him. In the month and a half before arriving in Chicago, he had been shot in the face with buckshot by a deputy sheriff and arrested twice, on incitement to arson and riot in Maryland (a state attorney later admitted to fabricating the charges) and on firearms charges in Louisiana (these were voided on appeal when it emerged that the judge had announced at the state’s Bar Association convention before the trial that “I’m going to get that ni**er”). A few days before the NCNP convention, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to all the bureau’s field offices, instructing them to establish new, secret “counter-intelligence endeavors,” to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings.” Arun Kundnani is a writer interested in race, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, and radicalism. Born in London, he moved to New York in 2010 and now lives in Philadelphia. Kundnani is the author of What is Antiracism? ([published by Verso Books, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso Books, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (published by Pluto Press, 2007), which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year. He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept to name a few outlets. Educated at Cambridge University, he holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University. He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a former editor of the Race & Class, the quarterly journal of the Institute of Race Relations in London. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.
    Más Menos
    1 h y 49 m
  • the sociopolitical thought of General Baker, DRUM & The League Of Revolutionary Black Workers

    the sociopolitical thought of General Baker, DRUM & The League Of Revolutionary Black Workers
    Jul 6 2024
    Today, we will listen to General Baker from a 2010 talk he gave at the U.S. Social Forum held in Detroit where he maps the history of struggle in Detroit, the formation of radical workers movements, and the legacies of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 6, 1941, right after his family had moved north from Augusta, Georgia. General Baker’s father worked for Midland Steel in the 1940s, and later in a job with Chrysler. The Baker family settled in a home in Southwest Detroit. Gen Baker grew up in a union household, and often attended union events with his father. Baker graduated early from the nominally integrated Southwestern High School in 1958. General Baker is one of the founding members of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in 1968 and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1969. Baker’s involvement in radical politics dates from the early 1960s. He had been a member of UHURU and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and later the Communist League. Following the Detroit riot of July 1967, an event known to some as the Great Rebellion, General Baker and his fellow radicals sensed an opportunity for new organizing efforts. In September 1967, Baker, John Watson, Mike Hamlin, and Luke Tripp started a newspaper called the Inner-City Voice. The paper focused on issues of concern to Detroit’s Black population, including working conditions, housing, health care, welfare programs, and schools, all from a Marxist perspective. In addition to publishing the Inner-City Voice, Baker, Hamlin, and other Inner City Voice staff members formed a study group to discuss how to implement revolutionary political change. On May 2, 1968, in response to a work speedup at the Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck, Baker led several thousand workers out of the plant in a wildcat strike. On May 5, the Chrysler Corporation dismissed Baker from his job for violating the no-strike clause of the collective bargaining agreement between Chrysler and the United Auto Workers (UAW). As a result of this strike, Baker and his fellow activists formed DRUM. DRUM saw both Chrysler and the UAW as enemies of workers of African descent, and from 1968 into the early 1970s, DRUM worked to gain more power for African American workers and to improve working conditions at Dodge Main. General Baker is and will continue to be one of our important sociopolitical and cultural theoreticians of the 20th century that provided essential perspectives for the 21st century. As part of the collective of revolutionary workers who sought to organize the Black working class in conjunction with addressing issues in the larger Black community, Gen Baker was a living example of theory and practice in context of Black liberation, globally. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.
    Más Menos
    1 h y 12 m
  • the time of the Black radical tradition

    the time of the Black radical tradition
    Jun 18 2024
    re/posting from our archive ... from 7+ years ago. a lot to grasp here!
    Más Menos
    57 m
  • the role of historical consciousness + global student movements w/ Mukasa Dada & Obi Egbuna Jr

    the role of historical consciousness + global student movements w/ Mukasa Dada & Obi Egbuna Jr
    Jun 6 2024
    This discussion features Mukasa Dada and Obi Egbuna Jr. We focus on contemporary struggles of youth and student movements, globally. With a focus on the ongoing fight for Black liberation and the need for solidarity across different oppressed groups. In order to accurately understand the potentialities of the moment, the development and maintenance of a historical consciousness alongside organizing efforts that challenge imperialism, neo-colonialism, and police brutality through direct action and community engagement are presented for discussion.
    Más Menos
    1 h y 26 m
  • race & revolution in Cuba: an Afro Cuban working class perspective w/ Pedro Pérez Sarduy

    race & revolution in Cuba: an Afro Cuban working class perspective w/ Pedro Pérez Sarduy
    Apr 19 2024
    Black working-class contributions to the Cuban revolution are immense, yet somehow often neglected in discourses around revolutionary Cuba. The long history of African resistance and cultural contributions to Cuban society, which has been intricately connected to global Black freedom movements has been in rhythmic continuity til present day. The continuities are clear and important on many levels – that is on the level of internal, as confronting internal contradictions specifically the necessity to fight the colonially structured vestiges of racism in Cuban society is an added terrain of struggle. As well as external, the constant assault on the Cuban peoples by U.S. and its ally’s imperial logic, captured in the current embargo and attendant sanctions. It is here, the dialectical process of liberation finds its most articulate expression, now that the process of decolonialization has been initiated it is the continued anticolonial struggle that takes precedence. The struggle to heighten the internal contradictions, which is a struggle, in its totality, a struggle against the coloniality of being. Where the vestiges of old forms of oppression are presented in new ways. In the case of Cuba, where the colonial structures of race/racism are used to try to undo the revolutionary processes. Today, we present a conversation from a few weeks ago with Pedro Sarduy where we engage in a discussion that is in its essence, a mapping of the anticolonial process through an exploration of Race and Revolution in Cuba: from an Afro Cuban Working Class Perspective. Pedro Pérez-Sarduy is a poet, writer, journalist, and broadcaster living in Puerto Rico, London and Havana. He is the author of Surrealidad (Havana 1967), Cumbite and Other Poems (Havana 1987 and New York 1990). He is also co-editor with Jean Stubbs of Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993) and co-author for the anthology No Longer Invisible/Afro-Latin Americans Today (1995). His Journal in Babylon is a series of chronicles on Britain. His first novel, Las Criadas de la Habana (The Maids of Havana), is based on his mother's life stories about pre-and post-revolutionary Havana. This is the first novel by a contemporary Afro Cuban writer on family life in Cuba. He has written numerous articles, some of which we present on this site. Together with Jean Stubbs, he wrote Afro-Cuban Voices on Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba (2000), a book based on interviews with Afro-Cubans (living in the Island), which has been published by the University Press of Florida. He also co-edited with historian Jean Stubbs Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993).[5] Sarduy has read his work internationally and lectured regularly on race, politics, and culture at academic institutions, globally. He was Writer in Residence at Columbia University, New York (1989), on the CUNY Caribbean Exchange Program at Hunter College (1990), a Visiting Scholar at the University of Florida, Gainesville 1993), in 1997 at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and on the Rockefeller Fellowship Caribbean 2000 Program. He has also been a Charles McGill Fellow & Visiting Lecturer at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (Fall 2004), and Associate Fellow of the Caribbean Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University. Awards he has received a number of awards for his poetry. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.
    Más Menos
    1 h y 27 m
  • thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. III

    thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. III
    Mar 12 2024
    Matthew Quest in CLR James and George Padmore: Hidden Disputes in The Black Radical Tradition, examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. Quest specifically explores James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James’ and Padmore’s different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveal hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition, disputes that promoted evolution in thought and practice that must be taken up today. CLR, the elder, was not always able to rigorously explain, save for the most attentive, where he came from politically. James began to recognize the fact that, for youth who wanted him to tell stories about the Black radical tradition, chronicles which included George Padmore, the distinctions of ideological and party affiliation among the Red and Black were irrelevant — it was all “communism” because the white racists and capitalists said so, and because conservatives appeared to be threatened by such ideas. The next generation did not understand that many of the Old Left had also come to this conclusion, to the qualitative detriment of how one viewed white workers, imperial nations, and national liberation in colonized nations. This conflict between workers’ self-management (increasingly seen as a “white” idea) in metropolitan centers and national liberation struggles tore apart the last manifestation of the Facing Reality group, James’s last small revolutionary organization in 1970 — this was expressed through internal uncertainty about where Mao Zedong and Kwame Ture [Stokely Carmichael] were going. Ironically, it was at this moment the direct democratic tendency of the Caribbean New Left (in Trinidad, Antigua, Guyana, Grenada, and Jamaica — many who met each other in Canada) and certain dissident currents in Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers began to see the merits of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for Black post-civil rights and post-colonial revolt. These are evidence of other hidden disputes in the radical tradition stimulated by CLR James. Today, we present Pt. III, the final installment of our three-part series where we unpack C.L.R James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation/management, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest. We intentionally explore CLR James as a frame of reference in the context of current labor struggles, the opportunities, and potential limitations of demands within labor movements [where we think through the limitations of labor demands being divorced from direct critique of imperialism and colonialisms]; and how does CLR James’ conceptualization of autonomy and direct democracy have an important part to play in conceptualization of labor movements today. Matthew Quest is an editor of Clash! a collective of writers who advocate for Caribbean unity from below. He has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities in the United States. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.
    Más Menos
    1 h y 19 m
  • thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. II

    thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. II
    Mar 12 2024
    According to Renault in Toward a Counter-Genealogy of Race: On CLR James, it is argued that James always stressed the fundamental importance of the notion of class struggle, and closely followed developments in revolutionary working-class struggles in Europe and the United States. “This did not prevent him, however, from analyzing and taking part in movements for decolonization: In 1938, he authored the famous history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins; in the 1940s, he was seen as a specialist on the “Negro Question” within North American Trotskyist movements; he also had ties to African independence leaders – Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and later, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania – and he became involved in “party politics” himself during the time leading up to Trinidadian independence. James strove to reposition Pan-Africanist struggles within a global revolutionary history, by interpreting them in light of Marxist theory and historiography; the latter, in turn, was reshaped through the lens of the experience of (de)colonization. He foregrounded and thematized the relations between class oppression and racial oppression as well as the connections between struggles for emancipation waged by subaltern groups with their own autonomous demands.” But does this necessarily mean that as a Marxist, James thinks of race in the same way he thinks class? Does a concept of race exist in his writings, one invested with a specific theoretical and/or political function, beyond the attention he pays to actual instances of racial domination? In Observing Properly Changing Forms of Spontaneity and Organization: Creative Conflicts in C. L. R. James' Hegelian Dialectics and Political Philosophy, Matthew Quest writes that C. L. R. James argued philosophy must become proletarian, not, importantly, that philosophy must be brought to the proletariat (James, Dunayevskaya and Lee, 1986, 128-132). James suggested he had no interest in teaching, and thought it not productive to teach, popular audiences’ pure epistemology [a theory of history … put other way, what makes up the ways we produce knowledge] or the function of categories of cognition. For James, one can think correctly without knowing dialectics (James, 1971a, 27). His Notes on Dialectics are instead grounded in political concerns. James asserted that we must be careful not to be stuck in our principles. Politics, or "the organic life of thought forms," must come "out" of contradictions or one's thought is "no good" (1971a, 20, 40). James tried to use his study of dialectics to figure out the relationship between the spontaneity of ordinary people's self-organization and the tasks of a political party or revolutionary organization whose intention was to "propagate” the destruction of bureaucracy" (1971a, 243). Opposed to further inculcating it or expanding it. we present Pt. II of the three-part series where we are unpacking CLR James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation/management, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest. Matthew Quest has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities including Georgia State University in Atlanta, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.
    Más Menos
    51 m
  • thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. I

    thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. I
    Mar 8 2024
    In an article for Insurgent Notes, Matthew Quest asks, What Type of Historian Was CLR James? CLR James, native of Trinidad, was a historian with a speculative philosophy of history. He brought these methods to his narrative of Haiti in The Black Jacobins (1938), and later in his Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977). James was influenced by historians of the French Revolution, while his approach was shaped by Leon Trotsky’s A History of the Russian Revolution, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and the Edwardian radicals GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both literary men who wrote polemical histories sympathetic to the social motion of commoners. James’s Notes on Dialectics explored the intersection of Hegel and Lenin as applied to the history of the international labor movement. But his original view of dialectics was just as much informed by how he understood the craft of writing history. For James, dialectic did not mean simply history moved by contradiction. Rather history was a series of ruptures with hierarchy and domination. At his best, he did not read history in a manner that placed the development of the nation-state as the primary unit of study. For James, the working classes, be their wages high or low, and the unemployed possessed a hidden depth, a latent understanding, and a creative genius. Ordinary people, not professional leaders of official society, were the chief actors of history. Humans faced institutionalized oppression, but also partial hindrances they placed in their own path as part of pursuing freedom. History did not move simply by materialist laws, but by romantic elemental drives where the dispossessed pushed from behind those who aspired to lead or rule. Highlighting another important contribution of CLR James to Black radicalism, Matthew Quest unpacks his political economic analysis. Quest writes that CLR James is recalled as a Pan-African and independent socialist. A colleague and critic of anti-colonial politicians and activists (Trinidad’s George Padmore, Eric Williams, and Stokely Carmichael, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Guyana’s Walter Rodney) James’s political economy was fundamentally different than his associates. While there are apparent moments of unity, especially around how the empire of capital underdeveloped Africa and the Caribbean through slavery and colonialism, or how federation might help enhance peripheral nation’s sovereignty, James was distinctive. He saw the state, party politics, democracy, and the working class in contrast to Pan-African and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Today, we will explore CLR James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest. This conversation will be presented as a three-part series where we specifically explore CLR James as a frame of reference in the context of current labor struggles, the opportunities and potential limitations of demands within labor movements [where we think through the limitations of labor demands being divorced from direct critique of imperialism and colonialisms]; and how does CLR James’ conceptualization of autonomy and direct democracy have an important part to play in conceptualization of labor movements today. To understand the depth and range of impact of CLR James’s work, I would describe him as your ‘rappers’ favorite rapper’. Your favorite theorist, revolutionary, radical, Pan Africanist had to or at some point must come to terms with CLR James’s work. His influences are both undeniable and misunderstood. Matthew Quest has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities including Georgia State University in Atlanta, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.
    Más Menos
    56 m