BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA – “Ian”, a white Marxist-Leninist who, to his credit, is out in the streets against the increasingly militarised police force in the US which is used to disproportionately attack the Black and Latino proletariats, informed our local correspondent in Louisiana that the red, black, and green flags were “false consciousness” and at the end of the day, the workers just need to unite.
“Just because they have a territory, a flag, a common and acknowledged history of struggle, a common language, a national anthem, a national bourgeoisie, and countless attempts at building national consciousness which were destroyed by state violence doesn’t make African Americans a nation,” he explained.
Asked about Lenin, Stalin, and Harry Haywood’s theoretical views on the matter, they were brushed aside as “errors which were rectified by Marxist-Leninists at the time,” meaning the Browderites.
“Besides, Harry Haywood was a revisionist. Maybe I can familiarise you with the works of Harpal Brar, who teaches us that even Scotland is not a nation.”
At press time, we were informed that English Canadians are a separate nation to the Yanks, on account of maple syrup and the maple leaf flag and maple maple maple maple.
But “Ian”s not a racist or anything, where would you get that idea?
Worker's Spatula 
As a white southerner, whose ancestors did own slaves, and as a Marxist-Leninist, I cannot understand those who deny the existence of the New Afrikan nation. Like everything else wrong with the American left, the blame for this incorrect line can be pinned on Browder and the Trots. Alliance Marxist-Leninist should read this, and in the light of current events open their eyes to reality (that is if they still exist).
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What a great comment.
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“Alliance Marxist-Leninist should read this, and in the light of current events open their eyes to reality (that is if they still exist).”
The surviving members will. I promise.
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Given that the question of Black liberation in the US is no longer bound up with, or even really related to, the question of an agrarian revolution, what are the slogans US comrades should be putting forward around Black self-determination? Is the black belt self-determination slogan still relevant in the same way? Are there new forms the slogans should take?
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Not sure what’s being asked here, to be honest. The slogan generally raised by anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists and nationally conscious Afro-Americans alike is “free the land”: https://mxgm.org/about/why-we-say-free-the-land/
The same slogan is raised by the NBUF and the RNA, and accepted by several revolutionary organisations in the US.
Is it still relevant? Well it depends. Are you an enemy of US imperialism? Does the demand for Afro-American national liberation not threaten US imperialism? Then it is relevant.
Do you acknowledge that the Afro-American proletariat (as refugees outside of their occupied homeland and in that same homeland) are pitted in “racial” conflict against the Yankee proletariat by the Yankee bourgeoisie, thus preventing principled unity of struggle for socialism? Then you should see the struggle for Afro-American national liberation as relevant.
I can say that the Browderites’ claim that Afro-American national liberation would cease to be a relevant avenue for struggle because US capitalism would merge the Afro-American and Yankee peoples has long since been revealed to be fantasy, and in that respect, the struggle for Afro-American national liberation is MORE obviously relevant than it was when it was first put forth as CPUSA policy.
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Personally, I think that the Black Panther Ten Point Program is also a good program to organize around, in juncunction with the “free the land” slogan.
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Since when are Trots interested in agrarian revolution which is just a capitalist fantasy that falls far, far short of permanent revolution? I smell a troll.
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The whole question was very oddly phrased, it’s true.
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So my current view is that African Americans are an imported caste used in slavery who have won certain reforms and that the confusion of there being an African American nation comes from national liberation struggles elsewhere being at the front lines of fighting colonialism and racism which they share in terms of enemies and origins. Also obviously because they share African ethnicity. But nonetheless Black Americans are as American as dalits are Indian/Nepalese. Do you know of anything I could read to change my view?
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Well, for starters, you could acknowledge that for the entirety of US history from the failure of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement, there could not help but be a separate African American bourgeoisie and proletariat, and that as they are indeed “American” (in that they are as native or more to the territory they inhabit than the dominant nation in the US), they have a home territory (“down home”), which they inhabited in spite of massive refugee outflow more much of that period. So the only real controversial question is what has happened since then (continuing failure of meaningful integration of a massive disenfranchised slave descendant population, the continued existence and popularity of effectively “separatist” political trends among “Black radicals”, increasing African American “return” from the north to the south, continuing disenfranchisement of African Americans in the south in particular, and massive disappointment of the Obama administration to provide answers, and indeed to bring the contradictions between the dominant Yankee nation and the African American nation into sharper focus, would be the points we would highlight).
Also, the fact that there is a caste ORIGIN would also not prevent Dalits from becoming a nation if various historical forces conspired to bring a general nation-like state of affairs into existence.
I hope this has been informative. We now return to your regularly scheduled irony.
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