Revolution Not Reconstruction
Tyrell D. Moore
Martin Luther King's dream is not only unrealized but has been murdered, from Mississippi House Bill 1020 which would see the return of American apartheid to the blatantly racist “War on Drugs”, to an unrepentant white supremacist police state. New Africans ( the descendants of the African diaspora and the brutal European triangle trade) cannot successfully be integrated into the so-called United States, without just duplicating white supremacy in a newer form. We have seen that the progress our people have made within the United States has been met with vicious and targeted counter-revolution. These times of reconstruction or attempts to make America a multiracial democracy under capitalism have failed time and time again. If we truly want to be treated like equals, and not as colonized people, autonomy and National Liberation needs to be forefront in the Black revolutionary mind. Black people can no longer be satisfied with integration into the American white supremacist empire. Our labor and our lives have been spent maintaining this suppressive regime that has colonized our people for over 400 years.
We have fought their wars, we've built their cities and we have cultivated their land, but in return, we have received over-policing in our neighborhoods, racial discrimination, and bigotry in employment. As long as Black people live under a capitalist regime racism will be inevitable, the capitalist benefits from a divided workforce in which he pits members of the working class against one another over imagined racial differences. And any advancements made for national minorities under liberalism can and will be taken away at the slightest convenience, that is why as working-class black people, we must take our destiny into our own hands.
To put this conversation into context we must understand what reconstruction means, as noted by PENIEL E. JOSEPH in the perils and promise of the third reconstruction, “The First Reconstruction era, 1865 to 1898, was followed by decades of Jim Crow, with its mendacious principle of “separate but equal.” The Second Reconstruction spanned the heroic period of the civil rights era— from the 1954, Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 4, 1968, assassination.
In our time we have come to the Third Reconstruction, the period from the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, through the recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and all that they have entailed. The debates, conflicts, and divisions of the Third Reconstruction have been the most volatile yet.”
Joseph is right to celebrate the heroic actions the Black proletarian has taken in times of crisis, we have managed to eke out victories for our people and oppressed people more broadly. It was the Black Freedmen that first gave a democratic voice in the American South after the Civil War, it was the heroic Freedom Riders the championed the cause of the oppressed during the Civil Rights and who laid down their lives to fight segregation. But we have seen the emergence of a vicious pattern in which African Americans will fight for progress and reforms to the institutions that oppress us, and we are right to do so. But the analysis of our true enemy needs to go deeper, the origin of our oppression like so many of our comrades in the Global South, is that of capitalism and imperialism whose main conduit right now is the so-called United States. If our people fight just to become more integrated into the capitalist regime, we are not fighting for true liberation. There is nothing heroic or noble about an African American Soldier or an African American Capitalist, who will simply pick up his oppressor's tools to do his oppressor's work. And even from a tactical point of view, we are mistaken to think that reforms will satisfy the needs of our communities, any reforms that the capitalist and the imperials give us can and will be turned back as soon as it is practical for them. Capitalism in America cannot abide an autonomous and independent Black working class, for this country is built upon the notion of cheap Black and exploitable labor, And any assertion of our autonomy and personhood will shake America to its very foundations.
That is why we must call upon our revolutionary Black thinkers to reconsider National Liberation, we must no longer see Black politicians or black capitalists as the voice of our people. We are proud of the history of the Black proletarian struggle and will accept no alternative for our people, no phony independence, or Black capitalism. The Black proletarian must embrace its true destiny of liberating the Black Belt as noted by HANNAH FOSTER (The Black Belt Republic was a proposed black autonomous state in the American Deep South proposed by African American communists and for a time endorsed by the Soviet Union and the international communist community. The Black Belt itself is a crescent-shaped band of predominantly African American counties stretching from eastern Virginia to eastern Texas. )
We call for decolonization of the land that our ancestors have toiled and cultivated, but additionally, we must be in dialogue with our Indigenous comrades who had their right to the land stricken away from them by the european colonizer. Africans in this continent have had a proud tradition of standing with indigenous allies in our shared struggle against imperialism. We must revisit this tradition for the 21st century. That is why we must end reconstruction and call for a Black Revolution.
Tyrell D Moore
SOURCES
Blackest Big Cities.” CNN, Cable News Network, 27 Feb. 2023,
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-belt-republic-1928-1934/
https://www.
bloomsbury.com/us/wars-of-reconstruction-9781608195749/
Joseph, Peniel E. The third reconstruction: America's struggle for racial justice in the twenty-first century. Basic Books, 2022.
Tolan, Casey. “A Proposed 'Takeover' Has Sparked a Battle for Power in One of America's https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/27/us/jackson-mississippi-capitol-criminal-justice-invs/index.html
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/militant-black-belt.pdf