Out of the many decades in which the Uhuru house has carried on the legacy of the Black Panther Party, why has the U.S. government only decided to raid it and indict its members during the last two years? Because it’s only recently that the class struggle has become advanced enough for the ruling elites to see suppressing dissent as highly urgent.
This isn’t just about the decline of U.S. hegemony, because on its own the transition to multipolarity isn’t capable of bringing proletarian victory. It’s also about how an element within radical U.S. organizing still exists that’s capable of taking advantage of these global developments. That’s genuinely focused on winning the broad masses of people, like the Panthers were. Uhuru represents this authentically revolutionary element, therefore it’s seen as the most important org to suppress.
This is how the Uhuru org’s web admin has described the true motive behind the government’s decisions to target their group in particular:
What I’ve been trying to expose for the longest period of time is the centrality of the African Revolution and the African People’s Socialist Party as the vehicle to make the African Revolution. We must recognize the centrality of African people and African internationalism as a philosophical guide for where it is that we want to go…This will help us understand that this is an entirely different place from 1969 with the Black Panther Party. This is entirely different from just trying to crush dissent in the United States. This is different from anti-war protests being crushed, or some assumption that the reason they attacked us is because of our understanding on Russia, the Ukraine war, something to that effect. It is much different. It’s much bigger because there are all kinds of people in the United States who are opposed to this war and some of them are in support of Russia, but the African People’s Socialist Party bore the brunt of this assault and I just tried to lay out what I believe is the political historical basis for that. This should inform how we move forward.
That the ruling class chose to begin its suppression of pro-Russian communists by targeting an org that’s not just in support of Russia, but also specifically pan-African, is no coincidence. As Uhuru’s Chairman Omali said this week in his interview with Tucker Carlson, part of it is that the government assumed the racial prejudice within our society would make the org less able to gain public support amid its persecution. The main reason, though, has to do with economics; with the foundational role that colonial labor and resources have within the imperial order. If the ability of the imperialists to extract from the colonies and neo-colonies is threatened, then the empire’s first priority is to try to ensure it maintains access to these crucial assets. Material interests are at the core of what drives any empire, and they’re directly related to why we’re now seeing Black nationalists get attacked In this way.
What the Ukraine proxy did was make the threat of colonial extractive cutoff more palpable than ever. Provoking Russia into challenging Washington was a gamble. One that had clear risks, even earlier than when it started to become apparent that Washington couldn’t win the war. Throughout the last decade of U.S. cold war provocations, insiders of the imperial apparatus have been coming to recognize that U.S. hegemony has a growing risk of being defeated. In 2017, a Pentagon report admitted that American power is waning, and recommended militarized “solutions” to this supposed problem. Said the report:
While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” the report laments. In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing…states and traditional political authority structures are under increasing pressure from endogenous and exogenous forces…The fracturing of the post-Cold War global system is accompanied by the internal fraying in the political, social, and economic fabric of practically all states…the post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can generate advantage and options across the broadest possible range of military demands. To U.S. political leadership, maintenance of military advantage preserves maximum freedom of action
Though the empire’s strategists of course believed that instigating a proxy war in Ukraine would be a beneficial maneuver, these growing sources of instability were at the same time bringing great anxiety to the ruling class. More anxiety than when they started the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, or the other countries Washington has brought destruction to in recent memory. Uhuru wasn’t put under siege during those moments, even though it was opposing such past war efforts as much as it’s opposing this one. So what’s changed?
What’s changed is that the system has entered into an unprecedented phase of crisis, prompting it to resort to old tactics. The last time the U.S. government was this intent on imprisoning anti-imperialists, and on imprisoning them explicitly for their opposition to a wars, Woodrow Wilson was president. We’re now seeing an equivalent of the repressive effort where they arrested Eugene Debs for making a speech against U.S. involvement in World War I.
The Department of Justice hasn’t invented murder charges against the Uhuru 3, like it did to justify incarcerating Mumia. All it’s essentially accused them of is making statements that hinder U.S. foreign policy, albeit while filling the indictment with many false accounts that make the story look more suspicious. As Omali also said in the Tucker interview, the DOJ’s case is too weak to pass constitutional scrutiny, even if it were true that Uhuru put forth “disinformation.” Which means these indictments are intended to create a precedent for expanding the repression to more antiwar groups, subverting the constitution so that freedom of speech is made to no longer exist how it used to. The outcome will be that anyone who does international anti-imperialist solidarity work—especially with major targets of the day, like Palestine—can be gone after as well.
The U.S. government has done this in the 2020s, instead of in the other recent decades where it’s launched imperialist wars, because this was the decade when the elites could no longer afford to let the Uhuru house exist in peace. Or, by extension, to let the other authentic sources of dissent exist above ground. Perhaps the other pro-Russian groups won’t start facing repression until after Uhuru’s trial this year, when the DOJ will likely convict the Uhuru 3 unless there’s great public backlash. Or maybe this next stage in the purge will begin earlier, and we’ll soon see Uhuru’s collaborators CPI and PCUSA get targeted too.
Should we within this alliance get driven underground, though, remember that it’s because we’ve come to represent a serious threat towards the state. That what we’ve done during the last couple years, wherein we’ve put together a coalition among numerous antiwar tendencies, has further accelerated the class struggle. And if we manage to sustain our operations amid whatever the state does to us next, we’ll be able to keep this positive trend going.
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