November 23, 2011

Commentary on the Black Riders Liberation Party

By Lil Joe

The Bloods and Crips being politicised by the global economic crisis of capitalist commodity production, expressed in the collapsing of this capitalist mode of appropriation -commerce - is resulting in mass unemployment in South Central and Watts, workers in these communities having lost jobs and income and welfare reform of the 90s throwing single moms off public assistance, working people residing in these neighborhoods having their cars repossessed and home foreclosures tossing them to sleep in the cold in the streets. These experiences are shared by working class populations and communities all over the world, including all over the United States.

Critique by means of Commentary:

"The Black Riders Liberation Party was formed in 1996 by Bloods and Crips in the California Youth Authority college class. As their political understanding grew, especially being inside the belly of the beast, they were able to see up close how oppressive and dehumanizing the system of capitalism is. They recognized the need for a political party that was going to represent the needs and desires of Black people inside Amerikkka's neocolonies, the ghettoes."

Comment:

The Black Riders Liberation Party [BRLP] philosophically and ideologically bases its activities on and has advanced its ideologico-political perspective as 'African intercommunalism'.

Pan-Africanism, that is in the United States ideological Black racialism connecting African-Americanism and Black Africa, has its historical basis in the Black bourgeois, anti-communist movements represented by the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) represented by Marcus Garvey - based on the racial accomoditionist view point and activities of Booker T Washington - George Padmore's philosophy, articulated in the book "Pan-Africanism or Communism", Noble Drew Ali, Farad Muhamad and Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity - corresponding to Kwame Nkrumah's philosophy of Pan-Africanism and in Africa the actual Organization of African Unity which he founded. Intercommunalism is the advocacy of Huey P.Newton, during the last momemts of the Black Panther Party as a form of an ideology of working -class internationalism that takes racial 'community politics' to its irrational conclusion.

The ideology of 'race' and class are mutually exclusive. This is because the ideology of race and the practical political policies that it articulate are inventions of the bourgeois and its political lackeys and lickspittle ideologists designed to present in bourgeois cultural domination its class interests hidden as 'national' or 'racial' interests on one hand, and to separate the working classes and toiling masses into 'racial' or 'ethnic' groups, the supposed separate interests of which are presented as mutually exclusive.

In the United States, particularly in the Southern States, The U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions regarded of African slave as chattel, as property, thus not people or Persons with rights, but Things.

Because, not only the capitalists, but also the artisan petty bourgeoisie, free farmers and free laborers, had, for the most part, migrated from Europe, the slave-owners political and ideological apologists presented the interests of the capitalist ruling classes as the interests of "White people" and the slaves as "Black people". Thus, that the interests of " White people" and of "Black people" as ideologically separate and opposed.

Insomuch as the most powerful, economically dominant classes are in possession of the means of production and distribution, and are therfore the most politically powerful dominate classes, that predicated upon this power, the State is a coercive instrument of their class power, the class culture of these ruling classes dominate the culture of the nation itself. The classes in possession of the material means of production and distribution possess also at the same time the means of intellectual production and distribution - the publishing houses and the schools. The State and Church provide the schools, their agents write the books and hire the school teachers and college professors.

Also, the earliest anthropologists, not just in and from America but in and from European imperialist and colonial powers as well, whether by conscious deception or inadverdently, these 'scientists', traveling abroad to do their field work from the standpoints of imperialism and colonialism evolved dogmas of 'white supremacy'.

All previously written human history - including even the Bible itselve -was distorted to read as 'race history' - the early anthropologists and biologists 'interpreted' the immediate male descendents of Noah - Ham, Shem and Japheth to be the original 'races'. There are however no such race characterisations in the Book of Genesis, that Ham was a 'Black man' cursed to be slaves was a super-imposition and reinforced scotoma of generations for centuries.


These ideologies resulted in cultural and social institutions a false consciousness, that has by means of cultural and social processes of aculturation and socialisation became internalised by education and upbringing is passed by parents to offspring from one generation to the next.

The 19th century working class movement's social praxis in Europe and America evolved practical -critical thinking socialists, communists and abolitionists, that this is bourgeois- ideological false consciousness in the working class: it has been, and continues to be both religiously and scientifically challenged and refuted. It has been and continues to be exposed as neither Biblical nor anthropological, but class based bourgeois ideology! Racialism has never been, nor can it be made to be working class.


Black capitalists and elected officials manipulate gullible black workers by racial ideology of 'black unity', but they themselves have no illusions of racial solidarity. Black capitalists are capitalists, period! Black elected officials are Democrats - the so called 'Black Congressional Caucus' is nothing but a Democratic Party caucus masquerading as a racial bloc.

Black capitalists are Capitalists and the Democratic Party 'represents the needs and desires' of the capitalist ruling classes of the United States. Therefore the BRLP politico-ideological racialism is a reactionary bourgeois ideology in opposition to the U.S. working class coming together as a class regardless of race, creed or color and thus makes the BRLP, by promoting this ideology, servants and lickspittles of the Capitalist class and their political lackeys, the Democratic Party.

Pan-Africanism, including 'African intercommunalism', is not only a reactionary racialist bourgeois ideology, but is a mysticism that has no practical basis in material life.

The real function of pan-Africanism as in its institutional expression, the African Union, proves itself by its practice as not addressing the 'needs and desires of Black peple' - i.e. Africans, but as an institutional lackey of U.S. imperialism, as demonstrated by its obedience to US imperialist attacks on the ICU government in Somalia by using the Ethiopian army and arming Somali war lord mercenaries, which the AU endorsed, and more recently endorsing US and E.U. imperialist NATO bombing campaigns in Libya resulting in a Quisling government recognised by the AU!

Members of the American working class who are residing in South Central and the Jordan Downs in Watts, are not nations or neocolonies but in their economic life and interests are part and parcel of the U.S. working class. Just as the Tunisian and Egyptian working-class general strikes and political revolution on the east side of the Mediterranean are in common connections with the working class general strikes and revolutions in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, which began in France with political strikes against the government on the north side of the Mediterranean, so, the workers residing in South Central and Watts are in common interst and activities of American workers in rebellions in Wisconsin and Ohio, and more directly the Occupy Movement.

If they have not done so already, BRLP cadres should join and be part of the Occupy L.A. camp in downtown LA - not as 'special' Black people, but as workers. 99% of African Americans are working class and are thus included in the so-called 99%.

The 'system of capitalism' is an empirical economic process, a definite historical mode of production and appropriation with corresponding relations of production. In sociological and philosophical terms it is indeed 'oppressive and dehumanising'.

Yet, these terms ('oppressive and dehumanising') are not economic categories specific to capitalism. In political lingo, these terms are but demogogic rhetoric that can be and indeed that is used by any political grouping to demonise its opponents.

In demogogic rhetoric of U.S. imperialist political and ideological propaganda, this language has been used to manipulate gullible patriots who have internalised the cultural ideology of 'American exceptionalism' to embrace capitalist's international interests e.g. vis-a-vis Cuba &or China by calling the governments of those nations 'Communist dictatorships', that the 'communist system' 'oppressive and dehumanising'.

Socialists and Communists cannot simply appropriate these words and throw them back at capitalism and imperialism by calling the system of capitalism 'oppressive and dehumanising'.

Rather, by the presentation and explication of empirical economic categories that constitute the capitalist mode of appropriation of labor power and the corresponding relations of production, we must explain to workers of every ethnicity of both genders what capitalism is - capitalist commodity production on the basis of wage labor - how their labor power is appropriated by purchase and exploited through the labor process. The capitalist mode of production and appropriation, the so-called 'system of capitalism' is the objective economic conditions of production that makes it socially 'oppressive' and economically 'dehumanizing'.

The philosophical dialectical concepts of alienation and dehumanisation are expressive of economic facts: the selling of their labor power by workers to the capitalist class or to it's State is alienation of human labor capacity from the property of the workers to the property of capitalist appropriators. This economic process dehumanises the workers in that it forces workers to regard their labor power as a commodity - a Thing. The 'thing' is sold.

Capitalist commodity production by wage labor and the exploitation of labor in the labor process is an economic relation that also dehumanises the capitalists in that the capitalists cease to act as human beings, but become personifications of Things - i.e. personifications of Capital.


Alienation and dehumanisation resulting from the capitalist mode of appropriation that enable the capitalists to own the products of human labor must be explicated in terms of material relations of production - viz, the class that own the means of pproduction and distribution do not produce the wealth but own it by owning the labor power it purchased and therefore the material wealth that material labor has produced is alienated labor power and thus the class that produce the wealth do not own it.

Revolution is the result of the clash of social class against social class - the rising class against the ruling cllass. Political formations are the means by which classes are fighting to control and manage the State. The political representatives of the capitalist classes - the Democratic Party along with the Republican Party are the class parties that presently govern. At present the rising class- i.e. the working class - doesn't have a political party defending and promoting working class interests in government.

The complexion and morphological characteristics of members of the working class is the unessential: 'race' does not matter. The "Black Riders Liberation Party was formed in 1996 by Bloods and Crips in the California Youth Authority college class" and states that its membership is based in working class neighborhoods, by working class youth. Class is the essential. South central L.A., Watts and Compton are not neighborhoods situated in the 'belly' of an imaginary 'beast', they are working class neighborhoods in the United States.


The most powerful, economically dominate class is the dominate ideological force that saturates national culture. That melanin quantities determine the complexion of members of the working class - whether they be white, black or brown - is unessential. It is only because of the bourgeois ideological domination of American culture that this unessential is masqueraded as the essential.

In jail, because of his exercise of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S., for bearing his gun and in self-defense in response to armed agents of the State, Huey Newton wrote the pamphlet: "Prison, Where is Your Victory". This pamphlet was a polemic against the State's repression of the Civil Rights Movement. Huey wrote of his recognition of classes defined by their activity, discribed the hustling activities of lumpinproletarians as being of 'illigetimate capitalists'.

In the early moment of the formation of the Crips and then Piru - the Bloods - of Tookie Williams and others - were working class youth in inner-city working class neighborhoods. However, since Rickey Ross - "Freeway Rickey" - and others, Cocaine and the introduction by them of Rock Cocaine, the purchase and selling of this curse by gangs made gangs business, the business of making money, and it was then that gang rivalry became deadly inner-city turf-territoral warfare.


This was also true of destitute and desperate working class unemployed youth in gangs of New York, Boston, Chicago, etc., which were appropriated by bootleggers during the Great Depression. Charles Luciano, Ben Segal, Meyer Lansky, Joseph Kennedy, Al Capone, Dean O'Banion ...lifted themseves from poverty during the years of the collapse of capitalism by exploiting the Prohibition laws and participating in the booze black market. Most infamous 'gangsters' were of ghetto slums populated by Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants or their descendents.

"Bloods and Crips" - at any rate, those in the leadership - the same as Rickey, got into the Rock and Sell cocaine business. Whatever product be sold, the business of business, the buying and selling of commodities, is the category of Merchant Capital.

It does not matter that these merchant capitalists who buy and sell in legal markets or illegal black markets are Black. 'Gangsters' participating as capitalists in this black market, even by the mechanism of 'consignment' as petty-bourgeois, are of the same economic category as the legal local liquor store and local legal drug dealers, pharmacists.


The petty bourgeoisie is part of the bourgeois market economy, part and parcel of capitalist interests, and the Black Democrats are Democrats, a political party of capitalist class interests. Black 'nationalism' and identity politics is the ideology and politics of the 'black' petty bourgeoisie -'support your local black small businesses' -'buy Black', vote for Black Democrats. In other words, identify with the economic interests of your class enemy.

The Democratic Party, the same as the Republican Party, is the political representative of capitalist class interests, the same as the Media is owned by and representative of capitalist interests. Identity politics is Democratic Party politics, and General Electric MSNBC 'Black' hirelings speak on behalf of the Democratic Party, therefore represent class interests of capitalists in opposition to working class interests, as their demogoguery is to hoodwink working class Blacks to be in or in any case loyal to the Democratic Party.

In prison, Tookie Williams, awaiting execution by the State, had the 'opportunity' to read working class socialist and communist literature. He wrote books urging working class youth to not become gangsters, and dedicated books to George Jackson and Angela Davis.

In response to the international outcry against the execution style assassination of Tookie Williams, Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger openly declared the assassination would proceed because Williams had dedicated his books to those working class communists. Tookie Williams was assassinated by the capitalist's State by lethal injection, not because he was black, but because of his political views.

> In late 1996, Chairman Taco was released from prison. Immediately he began to recruit and organize, working especially in areas like South Central and the Jordan Downs in Watts. >

South Central and the Jordan Downs in Watts are sections of the working class community in Los Angeles, they are communities of workers. The police that patrol to control the workers in these communities are the same LAPD that patrol and control the rest of the millions of workers and their communities throughout LA. It is commonly understood by Los Angelenos that, as the kids say, the LAPD 'protect and serve the rich and beat and oppress the poor'!

It is necessary to understand, however, that while it is necessary to fight police brutality in this and every other city in the United States, that putting an end to police brutality is not in itself revolutionary. The police are but a local arm of the armed State, which are backed by the County Sheriff Department, state National Guard detachments, and the entire apparatus of the federal armed forces.

The State is the means by which the capitalist class parties govern. State Power is the use of force -violence and the threat of violence - to compel people to do what they are commanded to do. The State, the bureaucratic-military State machine must itself be smashed.


The myth of the 'revolutionary' significance of identity politics has been destroyed over the past weeks in dozens of cities and States as it is Black, Brown and Asian-American and Jewish mayors and chiefs of police of both genders and sexual orientation who have been sicing brutal cops on the Occupy Protestors camps, violently forcing those camps to close by scattering and jailing protesters. These city mayors in the majority of cases have in common their Party affiliation, they are Democrats.

Every class struggle is a political struggle, a national class based political struggle, by which the appropriating classes are politically dominate ruling classes and the rising class overthrows the ruling class to displace it as ruling class.

The American working class needs a national political formation of workers as workers, a Labor Party that is financially based on the labor unions and socially in the working class as a whole - based in every work place and in every working class neighborhood, including South Central, Watts and throughout all of Los Angeles and in every city in the country.


Police brutality is not accidental and not an 'abuse' of their authority. Violence is the essence of State power. The destruction of the capitalist dominated State cannot be accomplished by isolated neighborhood organizations, but by the working class at the federal level organised in a political party to take State power.

The working class in the United States, as in every advanced industrial democracy in Europe, must become self-organised as a political power. The objective of political power is to take state power by displacing the political parties of the capitalist classes. This is to be accomplished but by the working class organizing itself into a Labor Party that is financed by labor unions and socially based in the working class with the objective of winning the battle of Democracy.

Winning of the battle of democracy is electing workers parties into the majority in the House of Representatives, bringing the rank and file of the armed forces to back the legislation of a worker dominated House of Representatives to transfer the productive forces from the private possessions of the appropriating classes to the public property of the producing classes, the working classes.

> Because the Party recognizes that historically the ones with nothing to lose have been the ones to move first, we put emphasis on revolutionizing Bloods and Crips. Realistically, who's going to get up and fight first? The man who's comfortable and warm in his bed or that man that's uncomfortable and cold on the floor? >

This is not true. As is common in American discourse the BRLP makes bold bald assertions without providing documentation to prove it.

In actuality, Revolutions - e.g. the English Revolution of 1640 and the French Revolution were bourgeois republican revolutions. The English House of Commons that overthrew the House of Lords and Monarchy was comprised of a 'comfortable' bourgeois because their class interests conflicted with those of the landed aristocracy. Cromwell slept in a warm bed and not uncomfortable and cold on the floor. Similarly the French 3rd Estate, which in the French Revolution abolished the 1st and 2nd Estates and overthrew the Monarchy, was also comprised of the bourgeois. M Roland, Danton and Robespierre slept in a warm bed and not uncomfortable and cold on the floor.

Revolutions occur of historical necessity because the mode of appropriation which had corresponded to the productive forces and division of labor no longer correspond to this mode of production as advances in the productive forces change the mode of production. The feudal mode of appropriation upon which the landed aristocracy rested, was overthrown after the productive forces in possession of capitalists and its corresponding mode of appropriation, commerce, made the landed aristocracy reactionary and the bourgeoisie revolutionary.

Yet, although in republican revolutions the comfortable bourgeoisie that slept in warm beds were the ones to move first - were the ones 'to get up and fight first', it was indeed the working class 'rabble' in London and Paris, and the poor peasants of the country-side that had been directly exploited by the appropriating classes, the big bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy, that were the classes that fought the revolution and radicalised it -the Levellers and Diggers in London, the Sans Coluttes in Paris.

That the Black Riders Liberation Party 'put emphasis on revolutionizing Bloods and Crips' because they were already rebellious working class youth is possible not because they are Black people or that South Central and Watts are nations seperate and apart from the United States -at any rate not because these working class neighborhoods are neocolonies fighting to end colonialism by seperating these neighborhoods from the United States. Rather the opposite. Working class youth in South Central and the Jordan Downs in Watts, the rank and file foot soldiers of the Bloods and Crips can become revolutionaries in contradistinction to the gangster capitalist drug business.

The Bloods and Crips being politicised by the global economic crisis of capitalist commodity production, expressed in the collapsing of this capitalist mode of appropriation -commerce - is resulting in mass unemployment in South Central and Watts, workers in these communities having lost jobs and income and welfare reform of the 90s throwing single moms off public assistance, working people residing in these neighborhoods having their cars repossessed and home foreclosures tossing them to sleep in the cold in the streets. These experiences are shared by working class populations and communities all over the world, including all over the United States.

Black Riders Liberation Party's political activities bringing Bloods and Crips into politics is a positive process that need become conscious working class politics, bringing people of South Central and Watts into conscious working class politics.


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WORKERS WORLD PARTY CONFERENCE
'Black Riders show resistance is possible'
Revolutionary Greetings!

I'm Comrade Aryana, Minister of Public Relations for the Black Riders Liberation Party -- a revolutionary communist organization out of South Central L.A.

The Black Riders Liberation Party was formed in 1996 by Bloods and Crips in the California Youth Authority college class. As their political understanding grew, especially being inside the belly of the beast, they were able to see up close how oppressive and dehumanizing the system of capitalism is. They recognized the need for a political party that was going to represent the needs and desires of Black people inside Amerikkka's neocolonies, the ghettoes.

In late 1996, Chairman Taco was released from prison. Immediately he began to recruit and organize, working especially in areas like South Central and the Jordan Downs in Watts.

Because the Party recognizes that historically the ones with nothing to lose have been the ones to move first, we put emphasis on revolutionizing Bloods and Crips. Realistically, who's going to get up and fight first? The man who's comfortable and warm in his bed or that man that's uncomfortable and cold on the floor?

One thing we have to realize is that the gangs are already soldiers, and already have a war-like mentality from years of gang warfare. We just have to turn all that anger and rage at the real enemy, the oppressive state, instead of at each other!

On Saturday, Nov. 17, 1997, the police from the 108th Precinct were called into the Jordan Downs housing project to help save a man's life. Instead of helping to save his life, they helped to take his life.

He had been feeling suicidal by recent deaths in his family. They shot him over 11 times in the chest and legs because they said he lunged at them with a butter knife.

After the murder of Daryl "Chubby" Hood we initiated the Watch a Pig program, which is standing a legal distance from the pigs and making sure they don't brutalize the people.

The whole idea of the Watch a Pig program is to show the people that resistance is possible. Which is one of the many programs we do in the community. Because of the confrontational politics Black Riders practice, we experience extreme repression. Which we welcome. Because it lets us know we're doing our job.

Comrade George Jackson said concerning repression that "repression is indeed a part of revolution, a natural aspect of antithesis."

Can power be seriously challenged without a response? Will the robber baron, the tycoon, the fuehrer allow us to seize his privilege without resistance? Can we steal it away from the greatest bandit of all time with sleight of hand alone?

The Black revolutionaries are doomed men and women. We are the ones who've been criminalized and dehumanized. As Frantz Fanon would say, considered the wretched of the earth.

When the pigs see us they shoot first and ask questions later. Historically, Black revolutionaries have always received the most repression. They assassinated Malcolm X.

And in the 1960s and 1970s when the whole country was enthralled with the movement and there were revolutionary groups everywhere, it was the Black Panther Party who was labeled Amerikka's number one threat. And eventually, through fascist programs like COINTELPRO, it was smashed.

In 1971, they assassinated Comrade George Jackson and the list goes on and on.

We as revolutionaries, especially Black revolutionaries, are in a position where we are getting hit. We can't allow this oppressive capitalistic system to keep hitting us and not get hit back. We are not dealing with nice people who will throw down their guns and submit because we outnumber them from the vantage point of history and established power. They know one armed man can control a thousand.

People's war is not polite and is anything but proper.

What the Black Riders Liberation Party is asking of Workers World and the rest of the movement is to recognize that we are under direct fire in the ghettoes and to support the Black Riders, to not let the state isolate and alienate us like they have other Black revolutionaries in the past.

This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011 Email: ww@workers.orgdraft

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