Kali Akuno is a co-founder and director of Cooperation Jackson, which is an emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions. Cooperation Jackson is fighting to create economic democracy by creating a vibrant solidarity economy in Jackson, MS, that will help transform Missis-sippi and the South.
Kali served as the Director of Special Projects and External Funding in the Mayoral Administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus was supporting cooperative development, sustainability, human rights and international relations. He also served as the Executive Director of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) based in New Orleans, Louisi-ana after Hurricane Katrina and was a co-founder of the School of Social Justice and Community Development (SSJCD), a public school serving the academic needs of low-income African American and Latino communities in Oakland, California.
Kali is also the co-editor of Jackson Rising: the Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, MS, and the author of numerous articles and pamphlets including: The Jackson-Kush Plan: the Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy, Until We Win: Black Labor and Liberation in the Disposable Era, Operation Ghetto Storm: Every 28 Hours Report and Let Your Motto Be Resist-ance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Com-munities for Self-Defense.
Kali joined me for Part II of this interview September 7th, 2024.
Mat Callahan: In part one of this interview we discussed different aspects of the solidarity economy, the cooperative movement and the experience of many generations throughout the world fighting to break the chains of capitalist social relations, the capitalist market and the capitalist state. We only touched on some of the questions or conflicts that arise when contending viewpoints vie for leadership. In other words, the views you’ve articulated are not the only ones out there. The struggle is not only against defenders of capitalism or the United States government but it’s against other forces who claim to represent the best interests of the people or of that segment of society they claim as their constituency.
In particular, I’m thinking of those figures whom the late Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report labeled “Black misleaders.” There is a long history of such Black misleadership going back at least as far as the end of Reconstruction, I’m thinking of the debates between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. But it appears again in the case of Angelo Herndon, a Black communist coal miner who wrote explicitly about this in the late 1930s. And it appeared again in the 1960s when Black Power came to mean Black capitalism and when cultural nation-alism (the Black Panthers called it “pork chop nationalism”) replaced every attempt to organize resistance to the system as a system.
How is this phenomenon manifest today? How does appointment of Black leaders or the election of a Black President change the terms of struggle for organizations like Cooperation Jackson?
Kali Akuno: This is a constant struggle. Ultimately, it is a reflection of the class struggle within our own community that is a result, in the capitalist era, of chattel slavery and colonial subjectivity. Today, it plays out as to how much favor you can get from the capitalist class and white settler, colonial society in general. It’s necessary to under-stand the type of white supremacy that emerged in settler colonial states like the United States and Canada. This is rooted fundamentally in a class collaboration within the oppressor nation. I’m referring to that clear Leninist distinction between oppressor nations and nations that are colonized, oppressed but who resist. This distinction defines who is the oppressor and who are the oppressed. This whole issue of class collaboration we find in other dimensions, even in the working class movement. Some argue nowadays that there is no such thing as the labor aristocracy. I argue, there is. When you look at it on a global scale, there is no doubt that a labor aristocracy exists. But going back to the Black community in particular, there’s always a running struggle about what are the best ways by which we can get free. And then there’s an ongoing debate about what the hell does freedom mean? Does it mean living like the white man, like the planter elite or the bourgeois elite? Is that what it means? Having the privileges, joys and creature comforts that they have? If that’s what it means then somebody else is going to have to be exploited. Resources from somebody’s land are going to have to be massively extracted. Those people are going to have to be colonized and subjected in order for that to happen. So are you just trying to replicate a bourgeois settler worldview? Is that what the aim and objective is?
Sadly, I’d have to report that a lot of Black aspirations are these bourgeois aspirations. I’m going to be totally crass now. You can see it in the Black colleges and universities, which now have been at least a 150-year experiment wherein, for the most part, Christian mis-sionary or, bourgeois liberal elite, or the state, created an institution to try to educate a certain segment of the Black community to serve as a buffer class or a better servant class. Folks that do specialized labor or perform specialized tasks in the Black community. But if you look at the fraternities and sororities and social organizations, they mimic to a “t,” the height of bourgeois culture, in particular bour-geois French culture. They epitomize a certain European romance culture from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Everything from the balls to the elegant dress, to the names, to the pageantry. That’s still a standard measure to this day, even though most folks don’t even know where the hell such standards came from.
My generation knows this best from Malcolm X, but, Paul Robeson and many before made this point: the interplay between the house negro and the field negro. What that speaks to is both class position and ideology and politics. The house negro wanted to extend their pri-vileges and wanted to imitate their masters. They did everything they could to protect the system and to bring people along. As Malcolm would say, when the master got sick the house negro asked, “What’s wrong, boss? We sick?” Whereas the field negro was like, “I hope that motherfucker dies. I hope the house burns down and these crops don’t grow.” It’s a different orientation. It’s a different aim and objective. And that’s still playing itself out.
To make this real and make it current, you can see this playing out in the campaign to elect Kamala Harris. The way in which her cam-paign is being framed, the idioms upon which it is built, furthering and deepening the narrative built around Barack Obama that, “Hey, we have finally arrived.” We are finally being incorporated into the American empire. The aim of stopping Trump is to prevent any further obstruction to us being fully included in the Imperial project. But, we are fully committed to extending this project, which is why she’s committed to an ongoing program of genocide against the Palestinians. These dynamics haven’t gone away and they won’t go away until the fundamental issue of self-determination, class exploita-tion, patriarchy, and settler colonialism are dealt with. We’re going to be living with this struggle.
I’m just giving you an example of how this plays out in the Black community. But rest assured, this plays out in every community, every group of people, every ethnic group has some element of this struggle where they have to contend, first and foremost, with the material realities around how they were incorporated and subjected to being a part of the capitalist imperialist system. And then how they had to deal with the social dynamics of white supremacy. So all communities have to face this.
Callahan: Specifically in terms of Cooperation Jackson and other organizations working directly with working people and the lower half of society, the “field Negroes,” if you will, what do you confront? I know there was quite a bit of struggle on the Jackson City Council and the administrative political framework. What do you actually confront and how do you confront it?
Akuno: Let me say this unequivocally: our first and most immediate enemy is the Black petty-bourgeois in Jackson, Mississippi. We con-front them and they confront us on a number of different levels. We’re very explicit about trying to transform the economy. Most folks read us as being an entrepreneurial organization. This is where the immediate contact with the Black petty-bourgeois forces come into play. The Black petty-bourgeoisie is largely composed of pro-fessionals, not necessarily entrepreneurs. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, police officers. Lawyers may run their own law firm, doctors may run their own practices and to that extent, they are entrepreneurial. But they’re locked into a particular service, a particular sector, that has a particular way of relating towards the administrative, state apparatus. Licensing, authorization, and so on. So, by virtue of the pos-ition they occupy and the role they play they have access to credit, access to certain types of finance, opportunities and protections that were born out of the civil rights struggle. They can access resources from the federal and state government. Which, not surprisingly, is to ensure they play a particular role within the Black community.
They initially will approach us as one entrepreneur to another. But once we make it known that we’re about collective ownership, common ownership, social ownership around social control, we immediately run into a problem. For 90 percent of them, our position immediately threatens their own personal aspirations to accumulate some wealth.
At first they say: “you’re talking business, I want to talk business.” But the second we ask, “How about you cooperatize your law firm? How about you cooperatize your doctor’s practice?” it’s, “Whoa, wait a minute. Now I gotta share profits or I gotta give up some of the control. That’s contrary to why I went to school to get this position in the first place. It defeats the logic of the aspiration to privilege that I was aiming for, what I should aspire to have.”
So we run into a direct political, ideological and material conflict with them. Once it becomes apparent that we are about appropriating the total social wealth of society and utilizing that to radically trans-form society, to put everybody in society on an equal footing, then the fight begins. First and foremost there is a high level of propagandiz-ing against our organization and against our work. And that is often-times very openly political. You hear certain refrains, like: co-ops don’t work because you can’t have democracy in business, you have to have bosses in business. You have to adhere to bottom lines, have a division of labor, which necessitates a certain degree of exploitation, and so on; they repeat all of the capitalist lines using all the capitalist tropes. They go on the radio, then on social media and say this stuff.
We do outreach in the community and post fliers or put fliers in a number of different businesses and they’re like, “This is my own per-sonal business. I don’t want nobody coming here giving anybody any ideas about unionizing or turning this into a co-op.” So they’ll dump our stuff in the trash or take it down. They won’t allow us entry into certain places for fear of propagandizing them, trying to convert their workers with a different mentality. The few banks that will even open a door to us, which are mainly the credit unions, are somewhat Black-owned and controlled. They either try to put more onerous terms than normal or we’re just outright denied, oftentimes for even more crass reasons then your white-owned institutions. A good number of the white-owned institutions, they’ll just tell you, “No,” and give you an explanation. The Black ones will tell you “No” and then talk about your mama.
On the overall political level, our organization is actively attacked, even in the Black community, for being a communist organization, an undemocratic force that just takes over everybody’s stuff and appropri-ates it. This narrow view of communism, prevalent since the 19th century, remains the dominant narrative in the US, and is entangled with what democracy should ultimately be like. So we get we get all of that, and then some.
At the same time, it gets complicated in our community because of the nature of white supremacy in Mississippi; how blatant, how con-centrated, how forceful it is. Some of those same forces that will stab us in the back will also, to some extent, play ball with us. For example, when it comes to defending the collective interest of Black people: laws the state might want to impose that restrict Black econ-omic mobility or Black social and political status or rights. When the old-line ruling class pushes some law to add more police or try to take over the city’s school board or the city’s airport – I’m citing things that have actually happened – the Black petty-bourgeoisie will join with us in a kind of Black united front against those forces; we can unite on what we are against because there’s a common interest relative to our position as Black people.
Where we fracture is on what are we for. What are we fighting for reveals the class distinctions, and the political and ideological distinc-tions become much clearer. The Black petty-bourgeoisie’s role and the preservation of their interests comes to the fore relative to the interests of the Black working class and the lumpen, which comprise somewhere around 80 percent of Jackson’s population.
Callahan: This is very clear and it cuts to the heart of the question. But there is the other side, isn’t there? The working class and the lumpen or the unemployed, how do they respond to these questions? In other words, do they have their own spontaneous critique of the Black petty-bourgeoisie, are they at all critical of Barack Obama? Is there any skepticism that originates from their inherent class position?
Akuno: I’m glad you asked that question because there is indeed a view common among working class and lumpen people that is distinct from that of the Black petty-bourgeoisie. The general view is: “Fuck all y’all!” Including us to a degree. We have to be mindful of our own class position in this relationship. My parents and grandparents, on both sides, are solidly working class folks, two generations removed from sharecropping, literally. But as a result of some social gains that were accomplished in the latter half of the 20th century I was able to go to college and get higher education. That puts me in a petty-bourgeois position relative to the Black community, not in the overall macro-structure of capitalism on a global scale, but in the context of the Black community here in the US. I occupy a petty-bourgeois position. I’ve had experience starting small enterprises and I’ve had tons of experience working on the factory floor. So I can go in and out of the working class, depending on certain opportunities, because I have the education, because I have a few “receipts,” as I call them. The vast majority of our folks do not have that. So there’s a degree of distrust for folks like me. It takes the form of: “You talk the game, but are you really one of us? And if the opportunity to leave arises, would you stay here and stick it out. Would you stay for and in the community.” So I’m very clear about what this means.
Huey P. Newton once wrote about revolutionary suicide and – I like the framing from Amilcar Cabral much better – about class suicide, from which Amilcar Cabral spoke to folks in my position and I would say to most of the Cooperation Jackson staff. We are con-sciously and deliberately engaging in a program of class suicide, which means we have to make clear political choices at every step of the game. To be in solidarity and to be in practical engagement with the working class and its interests. That’s a conscious choice, and it’s a choice to make certain material decisions to put us in that constant relationship and practice. At the same time being mindful that it is a choice. And 90 percent of the community don’t have a choice. They don’t have a choice except to become part of the lumpen-proletariat and then live a preda-tory entrepreneurial life. Which is a choice that many make.
In Jackson, and since the 1980s, in probably every Black commu-nity in the United States, the ideological and political influence of the lumpen has grown tremendously. That reflects the overall number of folks who inhabit a lumpen existence in material terms. Jackson, Mis-sissippi is a city that’s shrinking. Ten years ago, Jackson had around two hundred thousand people, now it’s between 150 and 170 thousand. It’s declined, particularly since the pandemic, so that now there’s an active process of re-zoning the city, the different wards, because of how much is vacant. Most of this has been Black petty-bourgeois forces and a segment of Black working class forces just abandoning the city. Poor infrastructure, poor schools, poor services. So, folks are trying to make it someplace else.
Jackson’s real unemployment rate – not this fictitious figure that you get from the United States government – is close to 50 percent. (For the reading audience: the government calculates unemployment by counting those who actively file for unemployment and those seeking, or who say they’re seeking, work. That leaves out a large number of people.) And I’m not exaggerating. How do folks live? They are living through engagement with the underground economy, aka, the black market, in all of its complexity.
The black market in Jackson, like in most cities, ranges from drug dealing to sex work, to selling stolen goods. And just bartering, trade in commodities amongst family members, amongst neighbors for food, for lawn care, for child care, for transportation. This is the broad range of how people actually survive. Within that, folks sometimes gain tem-porary employment at a Walmart or McDonald’s. But oftentimes you can’t get to work. There’s no real public transportation in Jackson. So, 2 or 3 days missing that Walmart schedule, you get fired. Then you’re going to have to go find something else. You have to see if a family member or a friend or relative can get you transportation. And transportation is a luxury for many folks. So you’re in and out, not because you’re undisciplined, but because the infrastructure of this particular hub of capitalism is so inadequate. So folks resort to all types of creative means to make ends meet. And they do. But that has a political and ideological effect.
Part of what has emerged is a hustling mentality. Which is a petty-bourgeois/lumpen mentality. Those two ends form a circle where they go in and out of each other. There’s a political framework which sees hustling as legitimate, whether it’s legal or illegal. Amongst the lumpen or the unstable elements of the working class, that is the domi-nant ideology, bar none. To the degree that it gets political it’s just to secure its position of being left alone. Just leave us alone. “We don’t want the police around, surveillance around, just let us be and we will administer our own justice. We’ll set our own rules and stan-dards.” That is the dominant thought. It does not engage with the bour-geois political world of electoral politics. Folks just don’t believe electoral politics does anything other than protect the elite, privileged few. Now, material reality corresponds to that particular analysis. It really does. So it’s not like folks are wrong or stupid. In fact, their view is shared by roughly half the population! Almost any given elec-tion in the United States, roughly 50 percent of the people who are eli-gible to vote don’t vote. And in the Black community, there’s about 10 percent who can’t vote in almost every state because they’ve been barred due to having felonies.
Bringing it back to Cooperation Jackson, our program is about con-vincing the working class that their self-organization and their self-pro-ductive organizing activities will make a concrete impact, not only on their livelihoods, but that they then have to be involved politically to protect and to extend their interests. We say, politics is not just voting. The reason to engage in politics is to learn how to confront the bourgeois forces, how to protect yourself against them. But more importantly, we say, you need to be cognizant of what it entails to build dual power and, in the long term, to protect what it is that we build. We know from history and we know currently that it will be attacked by all these different forces, some of whom look like us, some of whom don’t. So we need our political consciousness to be in tune, to know why different forces oppose us and will try to block our program. Not only what they will do but what they’re entitled to do by law and what they will do outside of the legal framework when the situation requires. What do we need to do to get prepared? When confronting that dominant lumpen attitude we have to say: “Don’t accept crumbs because that’s in effect what you’re doing. Don’t think that your world is not controlled by the general laws and dynamics of capitalism. It is. We have to destroy that in order for you to be able to live a more fully humane, a more self-actualized life. Then comes the fundamental question that keeps many working class people on the sidelines: can we win? Not only is the goal worth fighting for, but can we win?
Callahan: In a recent book, If We Burn, author Vincent Bevins raises profound questions regarding social movements and their failure to achieve their goals. He writes: “From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other point in human history. Why has success been so elusive?” This appraisal is supported by two hundred interviews conducted with radical activists from all over the world. What emerges from these reports is a sharp critique of many cherished notions that have been popularized ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They include horizontalism, decision by consen-sus, no leaders or even organization. This combines with a tactical emphasis on mass protest, demonstrations and political theater. Orga-nizing workers, farmers or tenants to strike, boycott, occupy factories and physically confront the owners of capital and the state that protects them is abandoned. Instead, everything is geared toward protest. How do you view this history and these criticisms? How have you con-fronted the problems posed by this vision or this way of organizing?
Akuno: Well, let me be frank. The disavowing of organization is the crowning achievement of neoliberalism. It is the crowning achievement of the neoliberal era of capital-ism, from 1973 to the present. And why am I demarcating that? Because the first full-on experiment of neoliberalism, is when the Chicago School boys went down to Chile and through the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship were able to execute their program. What soon followed, in the heart of the empire, with Nixon ending Bretton Woods, was the inflation that came as a result of the Vietnam War, the OPEC oil embargo, and so on. I mention this so folks understand the long trajectory, the history of this struggle against settler colonialism and genocide in Palestine. These things don’t just pop out of nowhere.
Neoliberalism is a capitalist program. It’s not something other than capitalism. It’s a form of capitalist governance. Capitalist social organ-ization. But this particular form was designed to roll back all of the social gains of the social democratic era of capital accumulation. The height of that was from 1945 to the 1970s. Parts of Europe, parts of Latin America, still have some lingering elements with free healthcare, some union protection here and there.
But perhaps the greatest achievement of neoliberalism is that it did a one hell of a job of propagandizing folks around individualism and anti-communism. All over the globe. Hollywood, entertainment indus-try, music, advertising, TV, spread the ideologies that justified and defended neoliberal policy. This was marketed in a very targeted and systematic way for damn near 50 years!
I’m old enough to look back and say, “Now I have a clear under-standing of what the fuck happened to me!” Like, what the hell was Rambo about? Or what was Star Trek about? To boldly go where no one’s gone before. The starship Enterprise. How all these things get promoted and the particular narrative that they constructed, the por-trayal of the, the Soviet bloc, the framing around the Berlin Wall and perestroika and so on. Individualism, looking out for yourself as the highest aspiration of both democracy and human rights.
To a certain extent, anarchism molded itself around that, not in the sense of a practice, but in a sense of individual choice. So we move from the deep collective organizing practices of anarchism that you find in Spain and Italy – the best example is probably Barcelona – that hap-pened in the earlier part of the 20th century. That anarchism was about a collective consciousness and identity; organized work places, communities and so on. But that transformed into a lifestyle type of anarchism, which is deeply molded to the individual. “I can just do what I like without anybody having to tell me anything.” Or, it’s a total, “anything goes” framework. I’m not denigrating the practice and the ideology of anarchism, just the way in which it’s been grafted onto a neoliberal project. That has now dominated the social movements since the so-called anti-globalization protests.
Let’s go through a bit of history here. 1994 marks a new era when the Zapatistas emerge on the scene and they articulate an indigenous worldview which is anti-state and which hints at a broad collective identity premised on a kind of communal anarchism. A broad, collec-tive, horizontal social organization; very intentional, deliberative democracy. I picked up on that. I’m deeply influenced by that. But I think what gets lost is that it was collective. Its framework is an orga-nized worldview and in this case, an indigenous worldview that bor-rowed from Marx, from Bakunin and others, and took onboard some of the best ideas from throughout the world, then translated them back into principles that they had been practicing well before being colonized and subjugated. Rearticulating that as a goal and as an aspiration now winds up inspiring countless people, not just in Latin America, but throughout the world.
But what follows is that some of the worst pieces – a politics of indi-vidualism outside of a collective framework – winds up dominating the anti-globalization movement and the politics around how it was framed. I’m bringing this in is as an additive, not a criticism of If We Burn. To be clear, this was developing in the 90s, as folks were starting to target climate change. That emerged out of earlier struggles, particularly in the 80s, when they started to draw attention to environmental racism. All these toxins in our environment that were destroying indi-genous, Black, Chicano, Latino communities, reservations, etc. That came together to bring abut the Jiménez Principles, and the first del-egation going to the Rio Summit in 1992, to start protesting climate change and again, this is premised on going back to struggles in the 60s that culminated with Earth Day being created. And at that point, you have a 20-year history, a progression from a generation that was pushing those politics forward on a global level that wound up mani-festing in this way.
At this particular juncture the political parties that the Left once had, or the broad collective formations that anarchists had prior to this, start to give way to a world and a politics dominated by NGOs and nonprofits. There are also broad social forces who have no political home because they don’t want to work within these nonprofit struc-tures, or they work tangentially with them, participating in certain campaigns, but expressing their direct action politics through affinity groups and structures of that nature. But all in all, it’s a substitute for organization.
Nonprofits fully emerge in the 1990s, during the anti-globalization movement, which then matures in 2002 into the World Social Forum. The WSF was constructed to be a place where all these unaffiliated groups could talk to each other about the social movement. The social movement itself is fundamentally a collection of individuals who may share some ideas and views but who come in and out of association to work around sporadic campaigns or issues. 1998 to 2004 was an intense period of global protest –s from the WTO to the G7 or G8, to the emergence of the the World Social Forum, as a broad international phenomenon largely expressed in mass mobilization. But in the meantime, what is going on? You have professionalization through NGOs and nonprofits. Simultaneously you have the weakening of political formations including those that engaged in electoral politics. Then a structure winds up being created that excludes the participation of political parties or at least direct participation. This is somewhat ironic given that the World Social Forum is held in, and to a large extent, emerged from Brazil. So while they exclude political parties, WSF only existed because the PT, the Workers Party, controlled the state government and, at that time, could make spaces available at low cost for the movement to meet. Naturally, this leads indirectly to their own kind of domination of the space.
We have to remember that the Workers Party emerged through a struggle against the dictatorship in Brazil. It often had to work clandes-tinely through social movements to galvanize and organize itself. There’s a history that needs to be studied: how they came together, then replicated throughout the world. But again, similarly to the Zapa-tistas, certain things were adopted, others were jettisoned, because that history was not understood. At their best, they understood that you need a political formation to bring all these forces together, to give them a collective sense of both identity and organizing capacity. That piece got lost. Once this gets lost, all that’s left is the broad political mobilization. Look at these mobilizations that arise periodically to con-front Davos, the World Economic Forum (the big business confab to which the World Social Forum was the answer: the people are meeting over here to counter the bourgeoisie meeting over there) The difference is the bourgeoisie is organized. We’re not.
In spite of that obvious fact, there was this whole theory expressed in a book, The Multitude, that claimed there was going to be a broad wave of individual mobilization through sporadic campaigns that would then undermine the centralized and concentrated power of the bourgeoisie. This was totally idealistic. It abandoned any material analysis. It ignored what the bourgeoisie actually runs and controls, be it the state or the economy. And they do control the means of pro-duction and reproduction and how we eat, where we live, whether we have access to water or don’t. And those things have to be chal-lenged and contested in real time, not just ideologically. We have to have the power to contest that. An unorganized force is going to lose to an organized force 99 percent of the time. You’ve got to get very lucky to find the Kryptonite that would defeat an organized force, par-ticularly one with the ruthless brutality of the bourgeoisie, which will kill all of us in a heartbeat to protect its interests. We have to be seriously organized to confront that.
This has had a real impact on our organizing as Cooperation Jackson. Because everybody who walks through that door has to go through a political education. We’re about organization here. We’re about collective identity and power here. That means that my decisions and your decisions are subject to each other’s will, each other’s interpretation. I have to give a little. You have to give a little. But when we make collective decisions, we have to be bound by those col-lective decisions. We have to be accountable to those collective decisions, because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to contend with those who have more money, more access, more power, more privilege than us individually. Only by acting together can we have even a remote possibility of withstanding the pressure that they’re going to apply, let alone beat them. And the aim and objec-tive is to beat them. We’re not just here to say we did good things. We’re here to win.
Callahan: It seems, though, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. People are starting to pick up on this, that all this protesting and all these NGOs are a dead end. Referring again to If We Burn, do you see a lesson being learned now?
Akuno: Yes, but not a sufficient one. There are groups in the United States, folks more from my generation, but also folks from Bevins’ gen-eration, coming together to try to form political parties. But what I’m also seeing is that the there’s a tremendous gap in organizing method-ologies that is an obstacle to building cadre organizations, There’s a huge gap. What I see people picking up on is a reinvention of social democratic formations, not revolutionary ones.
Many folks from his generation went into DSA, for instance, and are now leaving it or jettisoning it, finding it totally unfulfilling. What I’m afraid of is that folks are just falling back into apathy or just organizing individually. I include myself in this because some of what we’re trying to do is lay the basis for a new party. But what I’ve run into with some younger folks is that they’re waiting for the perfect organization, which ain’t never going to exist. We just got to get in and start getting our hands dirty. So I see that emerging. I’m just not sure if it’s happening quick enough. Or, that the right foun-dations are being laid.
There were some good folks who argued that we should enter DSA and try to change it from within. I was staunchly opposed. I am not going to do that. I’m not going to be involved in that. Its DNA is such that it is as bad as the Democratic Party, in fact it fundamentally is the Democratic Party. I draw from Lenin who said that oftentimes clarity requires you being in the minority and being comfortable operating from that position. That does not mean being dogmatic. It means being very clear about what it’s going to take to accomplish certain tasks. That’s still as relevant today as it was 100 years ago. It means a scientific approach, not a dogmatic one, but scientific in the sense that you’re doing constant assessment, evaluation of the real dialectical process and material dynamics that are at work. I’m hoping that will be interjected. I do see some signs that that’s starting to emerge. But, to be real, the more dominant trend we have to contend with is still the life-style anarchist and horizontalist trend that’s out there – that ahistoric, shallow examination of the Communist tradition. I always tell the folks, look, we should be glad. We have a tradition that we can criticize. The point is to learn from things and openly declare what went right and what went wrong. Also, objectives will change over time. But if we want to contest the power of the state and weaken imperial-ism, the best tools we have come primarily from the Leninist tradition. Now, if we want to radically transform society, we’re going to have to be much more open. The Leninist tradition did not do well there, and we don’t have to shy away from saying that. We can say that direct command over the state and the economy is necessary, but at the same time we face the need to democratically transform it and not have the party be a substitute for the working class, which it is not and cannot be. These are the critical lessons that we have to learn. So we should be thankful that we have the Soviet Union and all these other examples to follow; we need to deepen our study of them. Just because they’re not around does not mean that they were abject fail-ures. This is exactly the same as you criticizing the Haitian Revolution for Haiti being in the condition it’s in now. If that’s what you’re doing, you’re reading the situation backwards because the mere fact that they pulled it off was remarkable.
That Haiti’s still somewhat independent is remarkable in the context of being surrounded by a world dominated by capitalist relations and imperialism. So you have to put the Soviet Union in its proper context. You have to put the current China in its proper context. Why did they make certain decisions? What do they see as the outcomes of the choices that they made to pursue a more capitalist mode of development? Are they still somewhat in control and command of their economy? I would have to answer yes. And then you have to say, well, why is that? And that’s where the party comes in.
Say what you will. I criticize them for being the most consolidated bourgeoisie in history, but it’s still an organized force. And that’s the part that I think people miss. What organization enables us to do and why it’s necessary now; how do we draw the correct lessons around organizing, to make it transformative and liberatory, that is something we’re going to have to figure out. But at least let’s not make the mistake in thinking that being unorganized is going to get us where we need to go.
Callahan: George Jackson once said we need leadership capable of dis-tinguishing the real from the apparent. Distinguishing appearance and reality is both an ancient philosophical problem and an urgent contem-porary concern. Public discourse has become increasingly imbecilic, producing spasms of emotion while obstructing serious inquiry and reasoned debate. The result is devastating to unified, collective effort aimed at mobilizing the great majorities needed for social transform-ation. Could you comment on both the sources of this dilemma and the methods you’ve employed to overcome it?
Akuno: The core corpus of bourgeois ideology is found in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith. Preceding that you have to look at John Locke, particularly around his framing of rights. There’s a deep conversation about rights, human rights, civil rights, which is a bedrock of bourgeois society. It also permeates much of the Left. Marx and Engels tried to
warn us by raising the question: “What is a right?” What is it con-structed by? What are its actual material foundations? What are the social relationships that structure these so-called rights? Without a serious interrogation of that question, we continually reinforce bour-geois bullshit, over and over again. It’ll crop up in disputes between workers in our co-ops. Folks who didn’t even finish high school will insist, “I have a right to do this or I have a right to that.” So the question becomes: “What do you mean by that? Where did that come from? Where did you learn this? Why is that assumed to be natural?”
I’m not trying to deny this question exists. I’m a product of the teachings of Malcolm X, the tradition which is framed around a par-ticular notion of human rights. So I understand it, but I gotta interro-gate that deeper because adopting that framework means that I have actually accepted the capitalist world for what it claims itself to be, rather than what it is. If I recognize it for what it is, then I very quickly realize there’s a whole bunch of rights that are no more than a figment of people’s imagination. Those rights are framed to protect those who own and control, which in turn defines your relationship to them in increments measured by constraints to their power or how to access it.
Now, I’m a big fan of this notion that many indigenous commu-nities are raising regarding the rights of Mother Nature. Because that exposes hypocrisy. One of the criticisms some indigenous folks make is that this whole notion of rights is a European construct. But it forces you to think. Can rights only be attained by those who have a right to speak and those who we perceive to be able to speak, to be able to articulate their feelings and their thoughts? From a concrete material basis I am more dependent upon the trees than they are on me. I don’t make oxygen, I make carbon dioxide, but I need oxygen to live. So I’m in a symbiotic relationship with this entity. Even though, in my limited consciousness, I can’t talk to this other being in direct words. Well, you have to do a deeper interrogation. Of what? Again, what is the real to be understood? I am dependent upon it, not the other way around.
But this type of dependent relationship is not one of the tree being over me. Not in any form or fashion. But I have to do some things rela-tive to a tree to allow it to serve its function in the ecosystem. It has to rely on me to do certain things such as not overusing it. So there’s a deeper way in which we have to totally eviscerate all the foundations of capitalism which have propped up bourgeois ideology and thinking. Often I think that we are just scratching the surface. These ideas of how the world should be organized remain dominant in our political dis-course and in the minds of billions of people. There’s some deep stuff that’s going to have to be unlearned.
Now I’m back to some of the earlier questions. We should be thankful for the resurgence of indigenous movements the last 20 years, because it’s only by trying to take on some of the aspects of the thinking that I was merely glossing over – about our interconnected relationships with all the different beings on Earth – that we’re going to actually overcome the extinction event that we are now living through. Capitalism is the cause of that. To be clear, I make a distinction between humanity and capitalism. Because humanity can solve the problem. Capitalism will only exacerbate it. So one of them has got to go. Now. We better make sure it’s capitalism. But in order for capitalism to die, humanity needs to dig deeper into many of these long-standing ancestral knowledge-bases and practices that we have.
These have to be put in the context of the concrete material reality that we’ve been able to gain from the science of Marxism-Leninism and from the overall scientific method. Those things have to be combined in a coherent political program if we’re going to defeat the bourgeoisie and overcome this program of pure destruction and extraction that they’ve created, that we think that we’re dependent upon. Actually we are not, but we’re going to have to undo a lot of how we think about the world and our relationship to it if we want future generations to be here.
So, there’s a process of both challenging, but learning at the same time, that we have to be deeply involved in and that’s not easy. But the nature of this particular crisis, where the forces of utter reaction are necessitated by the capitalist system, has to be grasped firmly. Fascism is rising as if it was just a question of ideology and not a ques-tion of how the system is required to reproduce itself. In an era of eco-logical collapse, this is what capitalism must do in order to extract and maximize profit. It has to resort to fascism. It really has no choice. This is the real that George Jackson was talking about.
What just happened in Germany over the past weekend (the weekend of Sept. 3, 2024) gives a snapshot of it. I saw an interview in which one woman was saying we can’t assume that all the folks who voted for the AfD are Nazis, because that doesn’t deal with the fact that nobody has come up with a program that deals with their lack of health care, their lack of resources, their lack of access to any decision-making power. It may be simplistic, but it’s a direct way of saying, “If I shut the door to immigrants, then there should be more resources for me and the people already here.” That’s not how the system works, but at least they are presenting an argument, which kind of makes sense to folks experiencing this collapse. And we have to go back to the real world if we’re going to defeat that and convince people that the system’s answers are not going to answer anything. Like Fred Hampton said, they got answers that don’t answer and con-clusions that don’t conclude. We have to be able to express the real, this is, how things actually function and work. And we need to do this to achieve this particular outcome. If we don’t do that, death is certain to be what follows for humanity and the mass extinction of most of the Earth’s species. So we got some clear choices, but we have to make these choices plain. That is what going back to the real means to me.
