You can read the Mandarin translation of this article here.
Introduction
Black August is a time to recommit ourselves to the struggle for Black/New Afrikan liberation, for the freedom of all political prisoners and prisoners of war, and to increase our level of discipline. To commemorate Black August, throughout this month Free Shaka Shakur will publish the entirety of Shaka Adiyia Shakur’s latest book, From the Republic of New Afrika to Palestine: National Liberation in Context, in both Mandarin and English.
There are two primary motivations behind this series. The first is our duty to honor George Jackson, who was assassinated by San Quentin prison guards on August 21, 1971, by not only highlighting but advancing a particularly important aspect of his legacy: building a global, united movement against national oppression, colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and all forms of bigotry and discrimination. This is, as the subtitle makes clear, the primary topic of Shaka’s latest publication.
To advance that legacy–and this a second reason for the series–we have to combat the imperialist propaganda barraging the u.s. people every day. From “both sides of the aisle” and any news outlet, we get the same propaganda that demonizes oppressed nations and peoples in the u.s. (the “Western Front,” in Shaka’s words), and across the world. Demonizing and caricaturing entire peoples, countries, governments, and individual figures is a key white supremacist tactic used to build a united front for imperialist war and plunder.
While the u.s. continues sending billions of tax dollars to fund israel’s genocide against Palestine, they haven’t stopped preparing for their primary target: the People’s Republic of China. While there is widespread support for Palestine in China–as there is for all peoples with a shared history of colonial subjugation and resistance–less is known about the particularities of the oppression of New Afrikans in the u.s.
This introduction identifies these two threads in George Jackson and articulates how Shaka and the New Afrikan Independence Movement continue weaving them together into something that will someday, maybe soon, resemble a world of peace and justice for all.
“It’ll Always be George”
When someone in the audience of a January 2024 event at the Indianapolis Liberation Center asked what revolutionary he took inspiration from, Shaka answered without a moment of hesitation. “George Jackson,” he said as he smiled and put his head back. “It’ll always be George,” he reiterated. He answered immediately because of his serious study of George Jackson’s work and life, a life that in many ways resonates with his own.
As George Jackson wrote, “ I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me” [1]. Shaka, too, came to political consciousness in prison, although it started with those who stood on George’s shoulders. Both became not only politically conscious but politically active as revolutionary organizers behind bars.
Recognizing the national character of the oppression of New Afrikan/Black people (and, hence, the need for national liberation), Shaka emphasizes necessity and difficulty of forging the unity that struggle requires. Perhaps more importantly, he identifies the seeds for that unity.
“Prisons were not institutionalized on such a massive scale by the people,” Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye. Throughout its various phases, the u.s. weaponized the prison system “to suppress any organized efforts to challenge its legitimacy–from its attempts to break up the early Working Men’s Benevolent Association to the banning of the Communist Party… to the attempts to destroy the Black Panther Party” [2].
Unity is not a thing, however, but a process: “Unitary conduct implies a ‘search‘ for those elements in our present situation,” Jackson writes, “which can become the basis for joint action” [3]. That search unearths the primary obstacle to building a multinational movement in the u.s.: white supremacy. As Shaka puts it, “We know that there are Euro-Amerikans and working-class people who are poor and impoverished, who are being screwed over by the ruling capitalist elites.” The question is: “What side of history will you stand on” [4]?
Black August: A Living, Breathing Tradition
Black August is a living, breathing tradition. Thus, it’s significant to articulate the political importance of Shaka’s awakening, which started with those who emerged in a different historical moment and had learned from the errors of their fallen comrades. They recognized the centrality of addressing patriarchy, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression and bigotry in the New Afrikan movement by grounding them in their historical and material roots [5].
As Shaka wrote to me in a July 28 email:
“While Comrade George Jackson, as well as Comrade Yaki Sayles had a very huge and significant impact on my early stages of theoretical development, I would be lacking or remiss not to acknowledge some of the patriarchal views or tendencies that Comrade George tended to express.”
Although Shaka recognizes George was a “man of his times,” he insists that is not grounds for dismissing the criticism. “We critique, study, and rise above it,” he wrote, before concluding:
“With that said;
Blood Remains, In My Eye!!”
Afro-Asian Solidarity Against Imperialism and Neo-Colonialism
It is significant how many of the conveners of the Republic of New Afrika in 1967 had direct ties to the People’s Republic of China. In fact, the first President of the Provisional Government of New Afrika, Robert F. Williams, was in exile in China when elected to the position.
Early on, George and Shaka learned about and internalized lessons from Chinese revolutionary experience. Despite the substantial changes in the Chinese path to socialism between in 1971, the 1980s of Shaka’s politicization, and the contemporary under Xi Jinping’s leadership, there are important continuities to note, especially relative to national liberation struggles inside and outside the u.s.
Across his letters from captivity, George Jackson repeatedly referred to the triumph of the Chinese Revolution and its contributions to the global liberation struggles taking place, especially in Africa. He praised Julius Nyerere’s leadership of Tanzania for turning to the East instead of the imperialist West for the needed capital to develop the standards of living of its people. “Does it seem stupid of
China to lend without interest, and build without taking over or capitalizing? Must be love,” as he put it one letter [6]. George was responding to the attempts to divide the oppressed against each other and, specifically, to dismantle the Afro-Asian solidarity actively built throughout the decades before and during the Revolution.
In some ways, today’s propaganda is more refined in this respect, although it often takes the form of ludicrous narratives against the targeted government and its people, from the disinformation campaign against China’s approach to the ethnic Uyghur population in Xinjiang to accusations of Chinese “colonialism” in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and even Africa [7]! It is telling who these accusations come from.
When people like John Bolton, Hillary Clinton, and even Steve Bannon, who said China’s “highly centred, hyper nationalistic society and at certain level it is quite racist. I think what they are doing in sub-Saharan Africa is predatory capitalism” [8]. Fortunately, increasing numbers of people, at least on the left, now see through these desperate attempts to provide a progressive justification for imperialist wars, especially when they have access to the facts at hand [9]. While it might not be “love,” there is certainly a shared history of colonialism and underdevelopment that makes any equation between u.s. imperialist plunder in Africa and elsewhere and China’s investment impossible.
This is another similarity between George’s time and our own. In a 1965 letter to his father, he warned of the danger of increasing u.s. aggression against China. “You know the U.S. power elite, the 7 percent who own and run this country and influence the politics of the rest of the European world,” he wrote, “want to attack and destroy China in the next four or five years” [10]. Although the u.s., having driven a wedge between China and the Soviet Union to weaken the global anti-colonial bloc, would instead turn its weapons toward the Soviet Union, the desire to overthrow the Chinese Revolution remained.
Having overthrown the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc socialist countries through counterrevolutions and other means, u.s. imperialism was unleashed across the globe in an unprecedented manner. The fact that it was the the Obama administration that announced the “Pivot to Asia” in 2011 in Australia) provides speaks to the relevance of neo-colonialism for understanding today’s national independence movements.
The imperialists can no longer tolerate China’s development, especially as it forges links of solidarity across the world, including Africa. They can no longer tolerate China’s “peaceful rise,” as it includes support for the Black Lives Matter and other progressive struggles here. They can no longer accept China using its platform on the world stage to denounce the u.s. human rights abuses, like when Chinese delegates and politicians “supported the African group in initiating an urgent debate on racism” at the United Nations Human Rights Council meeting” [11].
The Department of Defense is officially preparing for “Great Power Conflict,” or a war against China, building up its forces by the day. War is not inevitable, and the unity of oppressed peoples will be the decisive factor in preventing it. As Jackson wrote in another letter to his father, “They cannot attack China unless the [B]lacks here in the U.S. support their war effort” [12].
Conclusion
For these reasons and more, during Black August 2024, Free Shaka Shakur will publish the entirety of Shaka’s most recent book, From the Republic of New Afrika to Palestine in Mandarin and English. In collaboration with Shaka and Wednesday, each week we will release a new essay in both languages.
We are happy the next installment is a new essay to all readers, Shaka’s preface to the Mandarin translation of his works titled, “When the Dragon Comes…”
About the Author
Derek Ford is a teacher, writer, organizer, and one of the founders of the Indianapolis Liberation Center, where he volunteers as the Organizational Relations Director, serves as co-coordinator of Free Shaka Shakur, and leads a campaign to exonerate Vernon T. Bateman. He joined the movement when he was 14-years-old after the NYPD murdered Amadou Diallo.
Derek has organized with the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) since 2006 and been a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation since 2007. Throughout this time, he engaged in a variety of struggles in Syracuse, Philadelphia, D.C., and Baltimore, where he first got involved in the prison struggle as part of the team that eventually freed Marshall “Eddie” Conway.
As part of the international anti-imperialist movement, he led the last peace delegation to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and co-convened the Global Peace Forum on Korea. He is the Secretary of the Institute for 21st Century International Relations and on the editorial team of the Hampton Institute, International Manifesto Group, Friends of Socialist China, and Liberation School. In addition to his academic publications, his writing has been published in outlets like Black Agenda Report, International Magazine, Peace, Land, and Bread, Orinoco Tribune, and Tasmin News and translated into Farsi, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, and Türkçe.
References
[1] George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 16.
[2] George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Random House: New York, 1972), 106-107.
[3] Ibid., 105.
[4] Shaka A. Shakur, “Tactics, Strategies, and the Struggle for Independence: Questions and Reflections,” Free Shaka Shakur, 05 January 2024 (first published 06 July 2019). Available here.
[5] See, for example, James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings (Chicago and Montreal: Kersplebedeb and Spear and Shield Publications, 2010); and Sanyika Shakur, Stand Up Struggle Forward: A New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings on Nation, Class and Patriarchy (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2013).
[6] Jackson, Soledad Brother, 165.
[7] Perhaps the most absurd propaganda campaign is represented by Jon Sharman’s article, “China ‘Forcing Muslims to Eat Pork and Drink Alcohol’ for Lunar New Year Festival,” The Independent, 07 February 2019. Available here. The “source” was Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-controlled state media outlet.
[8] ARISE News, “Chinese Investment in Africa Predatory Capitalism, Says Trump’s Ex-chief Strategist,” This Day, 16 November 2018. Available here.
[9] For a comprehensive but short overview, see Nino Brown, “Five Imperialist Myths about China’s Role in Africa,” Liberation School, 14 May 2019. Available here.
[10] Jackson, Soledad Brother, 73.
[11] Joe Pateman, “Mao Zedong, China and Black Liberation,” International Critical Thought 11, no. 3 (2021): 371.
[12] Jackson, Soledad Brother, 73.
