A Revolutionary Resolution of Time and Space: the Challenge

A REVOLUTIONARY RESOLUTION OF TIME AND SPACE: THE CHALLENGE

TO REVIVE AND REVISE BLACK POWER

SKY EUTON KENNEN WILSON

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Program of American Studies

DECEMBER 2014

To the Faculty of Washington State University:

The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of

SKY EUTON KENNEN WILSON find it satisfactory and recommend that it be

accepted.

______Victor Villanueva, Ph.D., (Co)Chair

______John Streamas, Ph.D. (Co)Chair

______Thabiti Lewis, Ph.D.

______Azfar Hussain, Ph.D

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would first like to thank my committee. This has been a protracted struggle and I

never would have made it to this point without you. Your patience, brilliance

creativity and unwavering commitment to justice gives me hope in the possibility of

reconciling one’s academic work with the world. You have all challenged me

intellectually, mentored me academically, and supported me personally. The

examples you set, I hope to emulate wherever I end up. I also need to thank my

family who has been with me along this whole trip, and who has had to sacrifice

financially and hustle with me through the challenges of graduate school. Oziah,

your tiger concentration is an inspiration. Alma, the love and energy that saturates

your works reminds me to stay focused on the work that is relevant to my heart.

Etta, your intense compassion keeps me hopeful that we can make a better

tomorrow. Laura, your belief in me, the family, and yourself pulls us all together and

allows us all to reach for our potential. You have put in at least as much of the day-

to-day work that was necessary for me to accomplish this goal, and while doing so,

you’ve continued to grow stronger, and even more beautiful. Thank you to my

Father and sister Nneka, we’ve been through so much in the time that I’ve been in

graduate school, but I could always depend on your love and support.

iii

A REVOLUTIONARY RESOLUTION OF TIME AND SPACE: THE CHALLENGE

TO REVIVE AND REVISE BLACK POWER

Abstract

by Sky Euton Kennen Wilson, Ph.D. Washington State University December 2014

Co-Chairs: Victor Villanueva and John Streamas

In A Revolutionary Resolution of Time and Space: The Challenge to Revive and

Revise Black Power I use an interdisciplinary approach to consider the capitalist production of time and space, and how this historical process, through colonization, slavery, and the globalization of capitalism, racializes our world in the service of profit. I argue that black power, as part of the long black liberation struggle, offers an alternative spatiotemporal paradigm that has the potential to create a future that prioritizes the people’s needs over profit. Whereas the political economic system of our contemporary historic bloc creates an inverse relationship between people and power, black power is based upon the assumption that people equal power. This project is necessarily broad in scope. To ground this work I use the production of

Angola and Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary, from the Portuguese colonization of southern Africa, to Isaac Franklin’s slave plantation, Angola, to Angola Louisiana

State Penitentiary—as a historical example that creates a specific space and accounting of time.

While black power means many things to different people, I contend that the radical politics and praxis of the Black Panther Party, in the tradition of the long black liberation movement, is especially significant to contemporary community organizing as we respond to a seemingly ever expanding private sphere that effaces public space and the people’s time. This is especially true concerning the Panther’s survival programs, anti-capitalist and anti-U.S. imperialist politics, and the Party’s ability to forge revolutionary alliances among communities of color in the United

States, and throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. In our time, we face new, or historically specific, challenges including man-made environmental catastrophe, and the exponential monopolization of the world’s resources; our capacity to revive and revise black power in this context, holds our potential to meet and overcome these obstacles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii ABSTRACT ...... iv-v CHAPTER

1. THE MAKING OF ANGOLA AND THE CONTINUITY OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE ... 1 2. MARKET—MARK IT ...... 24 3. BREAK TIME: TOWARD THE PRODUCTION OF A NEW PUBLIC TIME AND SPACE ...... 57 4. BLACK PANTHERS RELOADED ...... 83 5. CONCLUSION ...... 106

WORKS CITED ...... 117

Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my Mother, you are the one who taught me how to

see the world, how to question authority, challenge injustice, and to see power in

(the) people. Your indomitable spirit is miraculous and we hold you in our hearts

forever.

vii

CHAPTER ONE

THE MAKING OF ANGOLA AND THE CONTINUITY OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

I begin with a quote from the former warden of that all-American institution,

Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary, a former slave plantation that is now the largest prison in the Nation of Prisons. When asked about the prison’s policy of automatically segregating inmates who identify (or whom prison employees identify) as transgender or gay, Warden Blackburn responds, “Segregation? That’s the system” (qtd. in Rideau and Wikberg 103). So honest. And it may be that it is easier for the Warden to be so explicit about the racism and sexual violence that saturates the institution because they are effects not only of the prison, but of the political economic system that creates, demands and supports the prison structure.

My interest in the significance of Angola to this project began to take shape as a result of my relationship with two pillars of black lyricism. Indeed, both Gil Scott-

Heron and the Jamaican dub-poet/poet-philosopher Mutabaruka helped shape my understanding of the significance of art, music and the word to the world.1 Their registers and ranges, rhythms and rhymes resonate in profoundly dynamic and revolutionary ways to create a soundclash. A soundclash is a musical and lyrical

1 Paulo Freire frames my understanding of “the word” here. Freire writes, “Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed—even in part—the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world” (87). 1 event that draws its roots from Kingston Jamaica in the 1950s. In these public events DJs or selectors, engineers, toasters or MCs bring their sound systems together to confront each other in battle. (Later, the soundclash becomes a foundational element in the production of Hip Hop in the United States.) But while many interpret, or at least see the pivotal point of the soundclash as the battle between sound systems, each reflecting the dissonance and describing the volatility of the slums with bass heavy beats, the significance of the soundclash is much more than its reflective or descriptive properties; the soundclash is also generative. A clash is an event and, by definition, marks a meeting at a specific point in space and instant of time. And while, intuitively, a clash may seem like a localized event, it is not, in fact, isolated in space and time; a clash implies both a confluence of trajectories and effect. Similarly, when sounds clash, the sound waves are not smashed into oblivion; they create a new effect.

In this way, Gil Scott Heron and Mutabaruka’s songs “Angola Louisiana” and

“Angola Invasion” reveal a dialectic between the historiography of colonial Angola and Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary. These songs, in fact, by the nature of their form, make the history of this dialectic material. In this particular soundclash, Gil

Scott-Heron and Mutabaruka do something that no myopic history of Angola or

Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary can do; they bring into focus a universe that is marked by the production of a specific spatiotemporality, a space and time that sets the stage, and allows, for the circulation of capital and that transforms black bodies into capital while simultaneously denying black (and all colonized) people’s subjectivity.

Marx’s often cited passage is pertinent here: “Theory will become a material force as soon as it seizes the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses as soon as its proofs are ad hominem and its proofs are ad hominem as soon as it is radical.

To be radical is to grasp the matter by the root” (Selected Writings 77). From this foundation, we might consider theory as a critical and radical reading of history. But of course any “reading of history,” by itself, is incomplete; theory must be applied to become a material force, and the practical purpose of any theory is dependent upon its capacity to reveal relationships among people, or between the people and time.

I’d like to make two assertions here about the relationship between this interpretation of theory and the nineteenth-century production of History and the social sciences; one, the process of disciplining history has created a time-sense that separates the past from all other dimensions of timespace. I do not mean to suggest here that all historians rip the past out of its time context, but the methodology of the field of History, that focuses on primary texts and narrowly defined geographical regions, does just that. From this perspective, which only focuses in one direction along a perceived timeline, history seems to take shape out of the æther. Two, the social sciences’ adoption of a nomothetic epistemology often leads to an “eternal

TimeSpace” presumption, or, to put it more plainly, the assumption that human nature guides human action (Wallerstein, World-Systems 6). This type of position effaces the radical roots of history.

This project is, in part, my attempt to respond to these disciplinary trends that often sap radical politics out of the production of knowledge and our recounting of history. It is in this context that my reading of and on-going encounter with Gil

Scott-Heron and Mutabaruka helps frame my reading of Angola and Angola

Louisiana State Penitentiary. And this, no doubt, is informative to my approach. I came to this work responding to the dialectic between Gil Scott Heron’s “Angola

Louisiana” and Mutabaruka’s “Angola Invasion.” Whereas a historian, anthropologist or sociologist typically approaches his subject to describe his subject, often within very narrow parameters, my approach is substantially different. My agenda here is not just about describing people or events, but about revealing the continuity of the racism that in many ways defines our historic bloc, to inform strategies of creating alternative spatial projects and an anticapitalist accounting of time. The historical narrative I attempt to put to work here spans well over 400 years, crosses the

Atlantic Ocean, and half a continent. Of course many traditionally trained historians may balk at this type of project arguing that my brush is too broad. But, as I hope to demonstrate, this broader look at the relationships between the political economic system and social institutions makes visible the spatiotemporal projects of capitalism that not only do not serve the people’s interest, but that if allowed to continue will rob all of us of the possibility of a future.

My point here is to create an alternative and revolutionary reading of the historiography and geography of Angola. History is more than just a process of recollection—re-collecting what was; history is or should be a reckoning of the dynamic dependence between what created us, and what we create. So I map this history not as an exercise to recall what was, but to recast a history with revolutionary intentions to exorcise the false conception of politically neutral time and space. Angola, and Angolans did not just come to be. And how we experience

4 time and space, or the degree to which we have access to time and space depends on the space we construct and how we reckon with time. Analyzing the production and reproduction of Angola and Angolas shows how the manufacturing of the slave plantation and prison industrial complex draws meaning and form from the colonization of Africa.

Mutabaruka and Scott-Heron focus on different sites, but the historical context of each song, their rhetorical arraignments, and the tropes that each artist employs clash to highlight a radical history of the production of Angola and Angola

Louisiana State Penitentiary. It is through this soundclash, this radical reading of the production of Angola and Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary, that Mutabaruka and

Scott-Heron reveal the systemic links in the production of these two Angolas. In this way we might read the production of Angola and Angola Louisiana State

Penitentiary as a prototype of the contemporary “historic bloc,” to use Gramsci’s phrase.

Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary

I ain't never been nowhere near Angola, Louisiana. It's down in St. Charles Parrish where the sun won't go alone. But injustice is not confined to Angola, Louisiana. It can walk right up in your livin' room as long as it surrounds your home. And I send love to brother Tyler, but after all is said and done; Angola, Louisiana, you're the one.

I’m doing fine I could’ve been doing time. Well, I’m doin fine, thank you

but I could’ve been pullin time. I know a brother man doin time and he didn’t commit no crime. So, thank you, I’m doing fine cause I could’ve been pulling time. —Gil Scott-Heron

In 1978, the year Gil Scott-Heron released his song “Angola Louisiana,” Gary

Tyler turned twenty years old and had already been a prisoner in Angola, Louisiana

State Penitentiary for three years. In the lines above, Scott-Heron uses the imprisonment and containment of Gary Tyler to show not only how white- supremacist segregation marks the American landscape, shaping U.S. space according to race, but also how racist institutions regulate time, according to race. In the lyric above, Scott-Heron characterizes the spatial dynamics of U.S. racism. Yes, this injustice is occurring in St. Charles Parrish, but it can, and does, walk up in your home. Then, in the chorus, Scott-Heron identifies how time, for black people in the

United States, is always only conditional upon the state’s right to take your time. In these respects, Tyler becomes a significant measure of black expectations for U.S. justice.

Some twenty years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Destrehan

High School and the Destrehan community continue to reckon with the federally mandated integration of public schools. 1974 was hot, and on October 7th, white anxieties fueled white terrorism. On that day, an increasingly hostile white mob forced black students, including Gary Tyler, to leave the school early. Tyler and his classmates were evacuated and placed on a school bus to escape. Hundreds of whites surrounded and attacked the school bus, some throwing rocks and bottles. It

6 is in this scene that a 13-year-old white student who was standing outside the bus near his mother was shot, and later died at the hospital. That shot, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes, “set in motion a tale of appalling injustice that has lasted to the present day.” 40 years later, Tyler remains in Angola Louisiana State

Penitentiary, the largest prison in the Nation of Prisons.

Gil Scott-Heron repeats over and again that he is, at least at the moment,

“doing fine,” for in this moment, a time in which an innumerable number of black men—and an increasing number of black women—remain locked up and locked out of U.S. political structures, he is not doing or pulling time. In the song Scott-Heron characterizes the Jim Crow setting—for Jim Crow surely sets both social space and pace—that translates into the always present possibility of attack, arrest or incarceration for Gary Tyler, Gil Scott-Heron, or anyone racialized black.

At 17 years old, an all-white jury convicted Tyler of murder with no physical evidence linking Gary Tyler to the crime. The prosecutor based the case against

Tyler on the testimony of four key witnesses all of whom have since recanted their testimony and claimed that they only testified against Tyler because authorities had pressured or scared them into giving false witness accounts (Herbert). As a result of his sentencing, Tyler became the youngest person in the United States to sit on death row. The murder for which Tyler was arrested, charged and convicted and imprisoned for, was a result of segregation and white mob violence.

Gary Tyler’s experience—and his mother’s reckoning of her child’s experience—becomes the impetus for “Angola Louisiana.” And through this song, Gil

Scot-Heron tells an intricate tale that is grounded in the production of Angola. While

Gary Tyler’s time is the background for or the context in which black time is measured, Gil Scot-Heron uses Tyler’s experience as an event to frame the production of Angola as a space as well. In fact Angolan geography is not only contained within the institution but in its historical trajectory as well.

Gary Tyler’s incarceration is not unique. His case, one that excises Tyler’s right to life, marks one moment at this historical and geographic juncture that is replicated over and over again. And while this tale of injustice plays out in this specific iteration of this site, Angola Louisiana, 1974, it is the conditions of the production of Angola that continue to set the stage for mass incarceration. In his song “Angola Louisiana” Gil Scott Heron highlights Tyler’s story as a way of commenting on the state of justice in the United States. Scott-Heron identifies

Tyler’s story and Angola not as an aberration but as characteristic of the black experience; Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary becomes the barometer by which he measures justice in the United States. Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary is also though, a contemporary site that reveals the direct historic link between colonialism, slavery and mass incarceration in the United States.

In order to unpack the historical intricacies and trajectory that lead(s) to the creation of Angola, Louisiana State Penitentiary and Tyler’s imprisonment in one of the largest prisons in the United States, one named after a South African nation, we must take a radical look at that history. In his song “Angola Invasion,” Mutabaruka, the Jamaican sage, dub poet/poet philosopher and intellectual, roots the history of the production of Angola in the colonization of Angola. While Scott-Heron shows how a travesty of justice locks up Tyler and how the instance of Gary Tyler’s

8 imprisonment is a symptom of a corrupt environment that can never realize justice, or spaces of justice, Mutabaruka shows the connective tissues between our current condition and the colonization of Africa.

Angola Invasion

Dem invade Angola again mi fren invade Angola again And thousands a go die and mi ask miself why nations still a buy de diamond and de gold de rubies and a coal dem a uphold apartheid system Jes when wi check ‘ see America we fren dem invade Angola again An wen de sun set dem say de day done but beware beware another day come an de table a go turn jes when we check see oppression a go end dem invade Angola again. —Mutabaruka

In “Angola Invasion,” Mutabaruka marks the four-hundred-year history of the colonization of Angola. Mutabaruka does not only identify the formal colonization of Angola as the oppressive force constructing Angola however. He continues to unpack how the then current conditions that continued to mark Angola, not as an independent modern nation but a territory in which global politics play out is based on the financial interests of the former-formal imperialist powers. He also positions U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis the ongoing oppression of Angola. In this

9 way, Mutabaruka’s “Angola Invasion” is, in one sense, a history of colonialism in

Angola, but from another perspective, the song is a warning of the unsustainability of the current system, and call to action to create “another day.”

Mutabaruka does what Immanuel Wallerstein seems to suggest humanities and social sciences are, at least in their current form, incapable of doing as a result of their modern construction: assume a “structural TimeSpace” perspective (“Time of Space” 73). According to Wallerstein a structural TimeSpace analysis seeks historical explanations that “are much more long term, and are in fact definitions of the kind of historical system in which we live as well as its boundaries in time and space” (73). Even more significantly though, Mutabaruka does in verse through his entire catalogue what Wallerstein only seems to dance around. Mutabaruka emphasizes people pushing back struggling against colonialism and ultimately claiming self-determination as the engine of history.

In the second verse Mutabaruka twists the hook, changing the chorus from

“Jes wen we think de oppression a go end, Dem invade Angola again,” to “Jes wen we check see America we fren, dem invade Angola again.” What we see here through this song is a vocalization of a broad-based politic focused on forging alliances of the colonized against multiple forms of colonialism/imperialism as they directly affect the global oppressed. Angola becomes the site that Mutabaruka uses synecdochically to represent global political imperialist alliances. Yes, the U.S. financial and political support for colonial forces and then pro-apartheid forces in

Angola frames “Angola Invasion.” But the song also uses this example of injustice to call on Africans and black people to create an anti-colonial consciousness or

10 decolonial time-sense. “An wen the sun set,” (as it does on all empires) “dey say de day done, but beware beware, another day come, an de table a go tun.” What this new day looks like is not clear, but Mutabaruka is very clear that the fuel that powers the transition to the future is people’s anticolonial movement.

From a Prison of Nations to the Nation of Prisons: Colonialism to Incarceration

The historical arc of today’s Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary begins some

500 years earlier with the Portuguese colonial project or adventures into Southern

Africa. We quite literally do not have Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary without the colonization of Angola. For the construction of Angola began as the construction of Isaac Franklin’s slave plantation, a plantation cleared by slave labor, slaves whose geographic roots were supposedly tied to Angola. And despite the slavery apologist’s attempts to homogenize all slavery, conflating the existence of slavery in a society with a slave-based profit-driven economy, the transatlantic slave trade depends upon Europe’s colonization and underdeveloping of Africa. The design and worldview that drove the stealing of 50 million to 100 million or more, Africans had grander intentions than any motivation for any previous instance of slavery—profit.

And the political economy birthed by slavery continues to define our time. The

Warden’s right, while segregation is the social institution that marks the place,

Angola (also how people do time in Angola) the prison materializes from an historic bloc that is defined by a system of criminal-justice. For capitalism, a political economic system with deep roots in colonialism and based upon the endless

11 accumulation of profits at any human cost, creates the conditions for a very peculiar interpretation of justice.

In The Portuguese Conquest of Angola, David Birmingham cites an oral history of Angola that highlights the real-world effects of the Portuguese colonial project that creates Angola. In this retelling of the first contact with Europeans, the historical narrative concludes, “From that time, until our day, the Whites brought us nothing but wars and miseries” (8).

Angola was the first African territory to be colonized, and one of the last

African nations to win independence. So note the twist: One, the modern nation state is a colonial effect. This is as true for imperialist nations as it is for former colonies. For the so-called first world doesn’t become an empire, the first world, developed, the core, modern et cetera without extracting resources from the formerly formally colonized world. Two, this process is one that creates a historically specific timespace. These ways of mapping the world, core/periphery, first/second/third world, developed/un(der)developed, north/south, are frameworks that we use to characterize the political-economic effects of colonialism, but these frameworks also inform how we envision the modern world spatially. Portugal’s colonization of Angola marks the world and constructs a specific, and by no means neutral, time and space.

The power to name and the power to construct borders are intimately related, because both are processes of definition. To name is to define and to carve a border is to define space. It’s not that borders are inherently oppressive (restrictive is not necessarily repressive); one must ask though, “for what purpose is a border

12 constructed?” Portuguese adventures in southern Africa were always about claiming: first land, then silver, then slaves.

The name “Angola” itself represents a western mis(s)accounting of the name

Ngola, a former king whose name became the title for the rulers who followed. So the Portuguese definition of the space sits on top of and attempts to efface a pre- colonial memory—a memory that links a people’s relationship with each other and connection to the land. (This is not to romanticize some pre-colonial existence. Nor is it a call to return to what was. History doesn’t work like that. But in order to create alternative and revolutionary spaces we must see clearly how history and the production of space informs our contemporary condition.) So while the Portuguese prospects of huge silver deposits never panned out, slavery and slave trading became the order of the day and ultimately marshaled in one of the largest heists in history. Angola became one of the primary sites of the extraction of African people en route to the Americas and thus provided much of the labor-power that was necessary to initiate the circulation of capital and accumulate it for profit.

The Mbundu people, from whom the kings of Kongo captured so many of their slaves, lived along the southern border of Kongo, between the Dande and

Kwanza rivers. In the sixteenth century the Mbundu people appear to have been the most numerous in the region. Originally, they had been organized into autonomous clans of pastoralists and agriculturalists, but according to the relevant oral tradition, a hunter called Ngola invaded the territory from the east and imposed upon the

Mbundu a monarchical system of government (Birmingham). Thus, by the time the

Portuguese arrived in what they named Angola, a small Mbundu kingdom was

13 emerging. It was called Ndongo and its king was known as Ngola, from which name the Portuguese came to call the whole region south of Kongo ‘Angola’” (Birmingham

7-8). So European intervention, and Portuguese expansion into South Africa specifically, had already shaped the geography and political economy of the region that primed the site’s naming.

No doubt, the wars and miseries recalled in the Angolan oral history extend beyond the Angolan borders, or rather these wars and miseries are replicated in other sites at other times to satisfy the requisite conditions for capitalism. As it turns out, nearly half of the Africans stolen from Africa for chattel slavery in the

Americas left from what is now the Angolan coast. Most of these slaves ended up in

Brazil, but a large portion of first-generation slaves in the United States were also originally from Angola.

One of, if not the most prolific slave traders in north America, Isaac Franklin, became one of the richest men of the so-called new world in the 19th century. His business: transporting and selling slaves across the United States between

Tennessee and New Orleans. As he got older and sought a more domestic subsistence he bought what became five slave plantations in Louisiana. One of these plantations he named Angola after the supposed geographic roots of his slaves who worked the land.

The slaves who worked Angola cleared the land and operated a lumber mill to process the timber from Franklin’s other plantations. The land was literally marked, processed and defined by slave labor to fit a specific design. One might say to set a stage. A stage created as a venue for the next act in an epic with roots in

Portugal’s colonization of Angola. It’s not just the name; the historical emergence of a plantation slave economy in America doesn’t exist without the colonization of

Africa.

During the era of formal plantation slavery the vast majority of convicts and inmates were white men. Of course the institution of slavery had other ways of punishing and imprisoning slaves. As Mark T. Carleton notes, following the Civil War nearly “overnight in Louisiana and the other Southern prisons, the prison population became predominantly black (in even greater percentages in several states, including Louisiana, than it is today.” Carleton continues, “In Louisiana and in the other states that established large prison faring operations, ‘convict,’ ‘slave,’

‘Negro,’ and ‘farm work’ became synonymous terms in the public and political mind.”

In the late 19th century Major Samuel James bought the Franklin plantations and created the post-bellum Angola by leasing convicts from the state for labor. This model becomes the origin of modern Louisiana so-called corrections. Now, the largest prison in the nation of mass incarceration, Angola (Louisiana State

Penitentiary) occupies 18,000 acres in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. The institution contains 5,100 inmates of which over three-fourths are black. In Angola the inmates’ sentences are so long, according to Warden Burl Cain, that 95% of the convicts will never go home; they will spend the rest of their lives, and die in or on

Angola. In Angola because, no doubt, Angola is an institution of containment and detention. On Angola because it is not only a twenty-first century prison, it is a plantation; a plantation forged into its current shape by slave labor.

In the early days of the prison (the early 20th Century) inmates were actually housed in the former slave quarters. Reflecting on the development of the Prison the

Warden notes, “The prison is in better shape each year. It’s a beautiful prison…who’d ever think you’d say a beautiful prison?” “It’s like a big plantation in days gone by. We hate to call it that in a way, but it kinda is because we have, you know, the inmates—it’s a prison”(Farm). Warden Cain nearly touches on his contradictory characterization of the prison. But he too is clearly contradicted as he wavers between a metaphorical and literal comparison of the prison and plantation.

And it is, in fact difficult to determine scientifically which level of comparison is more appropriate. But Cain’s confliction seems based in a nostalgia for what was—a big “beautiful” plantation.

Black Boys Fly

A historiography of the colonial, turned master’s, narrative develops thus and becomes a defining mantra for our current historic bloc: This is Angola; Angolans are black; blacks are slaves; blacks are prisoners.

Angola…Angolan…black…slave…prisoner; Angola…Angolan…black…slave…prisoner.

As such, the assumption of white supremacy based on the presumption of white superiority creates Angolas and becomes the primer for global capitalism. Surely there were other historical potentialities, other avenues by which we may have reached our time, but this is the moment we find ourselves in now. Along this line,

16 historiography, and our connection to history—to our time—not only creates a certain time sense, but also marks the laws that govern the production of space. And just as world-systems theory challenged the geography of History by confronting states’ agendas of using the nation-state as the unit of analysis to produce national histories, an analysis that confronts the production, and reproduction, of Angolas confronts the white supremacist base upon which the hegemonic Angola narrative lays. In the end, the linear logic of this argument of definitions creates a historical narrative that has its precedence in white supremacy. We can not let this historical and geographical mantra that is premised upon a belief in white supremacy become an unquestioned tautology that defines our—our community’s, our society’s, our world’s—historical position.

In the light of this history it is not at all hard to imagine one family line that includes multiple generations of Angolans—Portuguese (colonial) subject-Angolan, plantation Angolan and Angolan inmate for instance. While we carry this history with us, we are not completely circumscribed by it, because we make history as well.

James Baldwin makes this point beautifully.

White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not

merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even

principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history

comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously

controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that

we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe

our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. It is

probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a

questionable matter. On the other hand, people who imagine that

history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are

impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become

incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. (47)

Disciplined history, with its narrow backward focus, often misses this point. As

Baldwin notes here, this methodology of history is not at all politically neutral. This methodology, in fact, shapes not only historiography, but our geography and our historical methodology—what we do in time and how we make or (as I will suggest in chapter three) break time. Frantz Fanon writes,“The black is a black man; that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated” (Fanon 8). As I attempt to apply Fanon’s argument here to the historical composition of Angola and Angola Louisiana State

Penitentiary, it is necessary to note that the duplication of specific spatiotemporal features across these sites creates a universe with certain rules that impact how people act and interact with these features. It’s not that colonial Angola is simply replicated in Louisiana, but that we have a certain architecture, time sense and physics that eventually informs the features of Angola State Penitentiary. (Gramsci’s historic bloc is informative. Indeed it may be useful to think of a historic bloc, the combination of the political economic base and social institutions, as a universe.)

And so it remains necessary to respond, in meaningful ways, to how the prison industrial complex is an effect of colonization. Just as the colonization of the

Americas—including the labor of the colonized—does not make sense without

18 transatlantic slave trade, neither does the prison industrial complex make sense without the colonization of Africa.

If, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate here, the current historic bloc is marked by the production of historically specific geography—the geography of Angolas for instance—then our historical burden is to continually recreate these connective tissues and through this process recreate the spaces that we occupy. It is in this light that I emphasize the importance of black power politics. Black power confronts— and when realized destroys— both this historical narrative and the geography that pushes this narrative.

To accept the agency of social institutions in the production of time and space is a necessary step for this project. Of course social institutions are not created or maintained by, of, or for themselves, rather people work institutions in a dialectical relationship to the political economic system. It is this relationship that marks the current historic bloc. And in this context our spatial and temporal understanding of ourselves in the world and with each other influence and are influenced by social, political and economic institutions.

I offer this historical survey to highlight the time sense and space that is created and replicated over and again through this historic bloc. It creates a universe in which the rules of space and time function to create an inverse relationship between people and power. From the colonization of what became

Angola (and indeed the fact that the historiography of sub-Saharan Africa really marks a beginning of sub-Saharan history) through the use of Apartheid forces to influence “post”-colonial Angola, through the principle of plantation slavery and

19 now plantation prison, each of these sites is based in the few garnering control over the many.

It is not easy to see or reveal the systemic links between historic blocs in part because of progressive interpretations of history, interpretations that identify technological advances as the push or engine of history. New technologies, technophiles claim, naturally improve the lot of human existence in a political vacuum. The telling of this type of history emphasizes technological advancement over the application of technology. A medical history from this perspective for example, thus emphasizes advances in medicine through time. But within a situation that restricts access to healthcare, technological advancements are meaningless to those to whom access is denied. And while history, the discipline of history and how we view history informs our understanding of time, there is no doubt a geography of history as well, or how we think history is informed by our geographical framework.

Here I focus on the Angolas or the construction and multiplication of Angola to clarify certain systemic processes that become obfuscated by myopic periodic or regional snapshots of history.

The American social and geographic landscape is thus shaped by the colonization of Africa. How we imagine and create sustainable alternative spatial projects and accountings of time depends on our ability to do this locally but with strategies that are generalizable. This is the beauty of black power. Local organizing that resonated across regions and with seemingly distant communities because of its radical application of history.

In Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, he takes up the modern production of what he terms the market society, or the spatiotemporal condition of the circulation of capital. He notes that his text is not “a historical work [in the traditional sense]; what we are searching for is not a convincing sequence of outstanding events, but an explanation of their trend in terms of human institutions.

We shall feel free to dwell on scenes of the past with the sole object of throwing light on matters of the present; we shall make detailed analyses of critical periods and almost completely disregard the connecting stretches of time; we shall encroach upon the field of several disciplines in the pursuit of a single aim” (4). Here, in this project, I attempt to take up and extend Polanyi’s work in this respect. With the aim to reveal our historical challenge and burden to revive and revise black power.2

In chapter two, I consider the ways that neoliberal fantasies of the self- regulating market inform a materially unrealistic conception of time and space.

Based on this ahistorical belief in neutral time and space, this worldview seems to dominate many political and economic projects and discussions in the West, especially in the United States. But based on this position, even well meaning empowerment projects, programs, or organizations reinforce a structure that keeps a majority of black communities in the United States and in the world locked out and locked up. In order to consider the potential in black power in the twenty-first century I must first consider our contemporary context, how global capitalism shapes our world and defines our time.

2 I draw the phrase, “historical challenge and burden” and its significance from István Mészáros’s title, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century. 21

In chapter three I move from my analysis of the spatiotemporal assumptions of capitalism to the effects that these assumptions have on our world, defined as it is, by race or more precisely, racism. Here, I consider the relationship between private property and the public sphere—or the people’s access to space and time. I argue that black power, especially as that banner has been employed by the Black

Panther Party, developed a revolutionary praxis that changed people’s relationship to their time and thus created revolutionary spaces.

Building off of Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek’s application of Lenin in their recent work, in “The Black Panthers Reloaded” I take up the contemporary need to not only “reconsider” the Black Panther Party, but to pick up the Panther banner.

Our current trajectory along the path paved by global capitalism and U.S. imperialism is not sustainable. While the affluent may be able to work and carve out private spaces to insulate themselves from social and environmental disasters in the short run, the majority of the world’s population continue to suffer and struggle to survive. Reloading the Panthers is my way of shifting how we see history and our place in history.

Finally, I conclude by taking up current examples of peoples’ struggles and organizing efforts from Ferguson, Missouri to Gaza, Oakland, California to

Chiapas,that reveal my hope in the potential of black power to create our future in the twenty-first century.

Before I move on, I would like to make a note concerning my terminology referencing time and space. Through this project, I argue that there is a constant dialectic of time and space. I will, at times, use the terms space time or time space to

22 highlight different points within that dialectic. By spacetime, I am referring to time in space, or the spatial production of a specific time sense. Likewise, by timespace I am referring to space in time, or the temporal production of a specific space. For instance, privatizing a prison, or transforming a prison into a for profit space, shifts the timesense of the prisoners. Whereas previously they had been doing time, now their time serves for another’s profit—spacetime. Or consider a nomothetic time sense in which time ticks and progress is independent of people’s actions. This type of timesense creates spaces that alienate people from each other and their environment. Both terms are connected in the dialectic.

CHAPTER TWO

MARKET—MARK IT!

Space—here global space—is about contemporaneity (rather than

temporal convening), it is about openness (rather than inevitability) and

it is also about relations, fractures, discontinuities, practices of

engagement. And this intrinsic relationality of the spatial is not just a

matter of lines on a map; it is a cartography of power.

—Doreen Massey

The whip and the watch, both literally and figuratively, were, after all,

closely related.

—Mark M. Smith

At work in the preceding epigraphs are two distinct, and contentious, perspectives on shifts in social space or time through processes of institutional transformation. In the chapter from which I draw the first passage, Massey critiques superficial generalizations of globalization and emphasizes the neoliberal push to simultaneously deconstruct barriers to so-called “free trade,” while at the same time reconstructing the barriers and borders that limit people’s access to free space (81-

89). Thus, Massey argues, institutions and governments enact globalizing projects that produce segregated layers of space. While, in the passage above, Massey identifies a mapping of power, her characterization of the complexity of this spatial

24 layering becomes more important than analyzing how exploitative relations of production are produced and reproduced through this process. Furthermore,

Massey’s assertion of the contemporaneous and open nature of (global) space also seems to underestimate how technologies of space and time—at least as they are produced within capitalist relations of production and for capitalist accumulation— are put to work to exacerbate inequality and monopolize power.

Mark Smith, on the other hand, is focused on another, though not unrelated, institutional transition—the transition from slave to wage labor. In the lines above,

Smith focuses his analysis of this transition not on the unique nature of the technology of the accounting of time, but rather on how this technology supported the shift in—or the reformation of—the relations of production. By foregrounding the continuity of the application of these technologies (whip and watch), Smith reveals the purpose behind the imperative to move from an economy based in slave labor to a mixed slave/wage labor economy. This level of analysis resonates with the position taken up by world-systems analysts who, in shifting their focus from narrow geographic regions and epochs in time, to political economic links across geographic regions and epochs, consider how “different forms of labor control within a capitalist system” contribute to the accumulation of capital (Wallerstein

20).

I point to these two perspectives to highlight the need to emphasize the purpose of the production of any specific time and space and the purpose of production in any specific time and space. While Massey’s insightful characterization of the complexity of the production of global space is important, this complexity is

25 itself a result of the internal contradictions of capitalism. And to get to the root of the problem here requires that we not only see complexity, but that we push to reveal the purpose of that complexity. Why, for instance, does the globalization of capital simultaneously demand the construction of borders and the elimination of national barriers to corporate accumulation? While Smith focuses on time rather than space, this passage (and his use of metonymy) opens up an analysis of purpose.

Smith frames the American South’s adoption of a clock consciousness, not as a fundamental break from slave labor but as the application of a new technology to maintain old structures of privilege and oppression. As the relations of production and class antagonisms are reformed, they re-form.

Characterizing the historic shift from feudalism to capitalism through the lens of class conflict, Marx identifies a type of class compression, or the

“simplification of class antagonisms.” He begins The Communist Manifesto, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This history,

Marx continues, defines his contemporary epoch in which society is split into “two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (3). So through history people’s struggles to confront class antagonisms have created revolutionary shifts that both simplify class structures and intensify class conflict. This reading of history sheds special light on David Harvey’s concept of time—space compression.

Harvey explains that by time—space compression he means the “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (240).

The point here isn’t to conflate class and timespace, but to foreground how relations

26 of production and class antagonism define both our epoch and how people experience timespace. Surely Harvey considers how developments in technology shape perspective and vice versa, but Harvey also emphasizes that these developments can’t be separated from the methods by which, or the conditions in which they were produced. So long as the Portuguese objective in Africa was colonial control and resource removal, for instance, their adventures and so-called advancements in cartography intensified, and continue to intensify, class conflict on a global scale.

Contextualizing the West’s colonial expansion around the world in relation to the development of capitalism, Marx notes how this global expansion increased the means of exchange,

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh

ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese

markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the

increase in the means of exchange and the commodities generally,

gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before

known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering

feudal society, a rapid development. (3-4)

But the transition to capitalism did more than increase the means of exchange by opening markets of exchange. Europe’s colonial projects not only increased the means, but also the forces of production. The opening of these global markets in East and South Asia and through the Americas was always dependent upon the redefinition of labor power and slavery. Howard Winant makes this point explicit:

Slavery did not only crate racism; it also created capitalism. Not from

scratch, of course, because early forms of capitalism had [already]

existed…but the world-bestriding system that has dominated the past

half millennium could scarcely have come into being without the

massive infusions of resources plundered from around the Atlantic

basin. (86)

These “resources,” of course, included African slaves as labor, as an element in the circulation of capital. The seeminly never ending cycle of capital that Marx illustrates as M—C—M’ plays out on a large scale, and quite literally through the triangular-Atlantic slave trade. The West steals labor from Africa and Africans to fuel the massive accumulation of resources in centers of capital. And each circuit around the Atlantic produces more profit to be reinvested in more slaves to extract, and work, more (raw) materials.

While this cycle of capital and the general contours that it takes in the trans-

Atlantic slave trade may seem elementary, it is a—surely not the only—constitutive element of contemporary global capitalism, and this is Winant’s point. It also though reveals a necessary consideration about Marx’s much considered phrase from The

Grundrisse, “the annihilation of space by time.” As a number of scholars including

Massey and Mitchell are quick to point out that, “space cannot be annihilated by time,” they do so by generalizing Marx’s original position. Massey writes,

It is certainly the case that “time” (for which read an increase in the

speed of transport and communications) reduces, and indeed on

occasions even annihilates, some of the effects of distance. This is

what Marx was getting at. It is worth noting the irony that what is

actually being reduced here is time, and what is being expanded (in

the sense of the formation of social relations/interactions, including

those of transport and communication) is space (as distance). This is

one curiosity of the formulation. But more importantly, space is not in

anyway reducible to distance. Distance is a condition of multiplicity.

(91)

Massey continues, “So long as there is multiplicity there will be space” (91). But in these lines Massey reads Marx’s statement outside of the specific context in which

Marx deploys it. While Massey does make the necessary distinction between space and distance, Marx’s formulation uses space not only to comment on distance, but the cost involved in the circulation of capital. He explains, “capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange—the means of communication and transport—the annihilation of space by time—becomes an extraordinary necessity for it” (Grundrisse 520). Marx’s phrase, which happens to be a subordinate clause, isn’t commenting on abstract space, but the spatial barriers that affect commodity markets, and this is an important distinction. Marx is not arguing that capitalism makes distance between people smaller, making communication or cultural exchange easier. He is arguing that capitalists tear down, or use technology to overcome, barriers to the circulation

29 of capital in the service of profit (a position that Massey herself takes). Yes, the trans-Atlantic slave trade brought commodities to markets around the world to people who were unfamiliar with them. But labor? Space became a magnificent barriers to both workers of the West with the eradication of public space, and enslaved Africans and black people.

Significance of Theorizing Time and Space

I spend a significant amount of time here historicizing the production of the time and space of capitalism for two reasons. One, in order to make change it is necessary to see the object as changeable. While there are numerous activists, intellectuals and theorists whose work in and on time and space emphasize this point (e.g. Howard Zinn, Angela Davis, István Mészáros, Karl Polanyi, Zapatista Army of National Liberation) there remains, especially within the United States a popular common sense that time and space, as it is defined by capitalism, is natural, and now ahistorical. Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” out lives his commitment to it.

Secondly, to consider the possibilities and effectiveness of strategies and tactics to overcome the anti-people production of private space and capitalist time sense, it is necessary that I continue the effort to reveal the nature of these obstacles. As a labor organizer who worked on a year-and-a-half campaign to

30 unionize workers at a state university, I participated in weekly organizing meetings.

In our campaign, we needed to respond to anti-labor arguments from the university and some graduate students. Many of these arguments were premised on the belief that workers in the academy are somehow separate from other “real” workers. We began each meeting by listing all of the obstacles to, or “restrictive factors,” in our effort. We did this to see our challenges clearly and to be able to employ our resources and “contributing factors” to effectively improve our working conditions and reclaim our time. Similarly, in order to consider the potential of a contemporary black power movement, it is first necessary to see clearly the factors that deny black power.

As I take up in more depth in chapters three and four, the process of defining, claiming or revolutionizing time and space activates the dialectic of praxis.

Theorizing or imagining alternative utopic spaces or accountings of time proves to be insufficient. Consider the banner, “Whose streets? Our streets!” Relegated to text, the phrase has little effect on the people’s access to public space. But as a banner for peoples taking to the streets, such as during the city-wide general strike organized by Occupy Oakland in 2012, the people’s actions make the concept material. In action, how we think about time and space informs how people interact with each other. David Harvey notes, “How we represent space and time in theory matter because it affects how we and others interpret and then act with respect to the world” (205). And if we allow capital’s privileging of private space and immediate time sense to dominate our spatiotemporal position, we lose our collective capacity

31 to make a world that prioritizes people over profits.

The logic of capitalism, or the perception that profit functions as the engine of progress—the motive of historical agents and motivation of history—identifies innovation and technology as factors that improve the world, life and peoples’ lives.

But actually existing capitalism, with its emphasis on enclosing and privatizing space necessarily alienates the people from spacetime. Henri Lefebvre’s underlying thesis is revealing here: social exchanges and interactions (including relations of production) both shape and are shaped by social space (Space). In a political economic system that is based on the exploitation of labor, this process continually exacerbates the polarization of society. So the material relations created between people in the process of production set the stage for inequality, the exponential accumulation of resources and power over the forces of production.

In The Survival of Capitalism, Henri Lefebvre writes, “Capitalism has found itself able to attenuate (if not resolve) its internal contradictions…We cannot calculate at what price, but we do know the means: by occupying space, by producing a space” (21). The difference between “occupying” and ”producing” space here is key. And in a way this passage highlights the significance of the much-debated hyphen in world system or world-systems analysis. The hyphen for Immanuel

Wallerstein signifies that world-systems analysis “underlines that we are talking not about systems, economies, empires of the (whole) world, but about systems, economies, empires that are a world” (Wallerstein, An Introduction 16-17; “A

Critique” 292). Andre Gunder Frank on the other hand engages an analysis that

32 attempts to interrogate the (whole-) world system. For Frank starts from his contemporary world, one in which the current political economic system saturates and affects the entire world (and even beyond) and moves to its prerequisites or causes (Frank, Accumulation 16; Frank and Gills xvii). Through this process, Frank tracks the history of what he interprets as the one world system back five thousand years. So if one conceptualizes capital accumulation in the modern political economic system as the thousands of years old world system, then the only way for capitalism to reconcile its internal contradictions is, in Lefebvre’s terms, to occupy space. Whereas, if one takes Wallerstein’s approach, there is the possibility of capitalism producing a historically specific space.

There’s value in both of these approaches. And the making of Angola and

Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary is a perfect example of how space is both occupied and produced within our current historic bloc. Frank’s method of historical analysis provides a useful perspective on contextualizing our contemporary world. But in looking back to find the precedence to the present there’s a possible danger in reading the present as the only possible outcome. Time and space doesn’t work like that. There are any number of moments in time that inform the next, and how (or if) one is positioned in our present timespace.

Returning to Lefebvre, it is key to recognize that the production of space requires resources and while we may not be able to calculate the price, we can see that the price is, to a large extent, time-based. Capitalism’s push to occupy space, to produce space, can only occur by stealing time. Unable to be sustained locally, capital’s geographic expansion leads to massive destruction and the effacement of

33 populations, from the colonization of the “new world,” to the African holocaust, to the continuing war of poverty waged on the Third World in Asia, Africa, Latin

America and the Middle East. Furthermore, as Lefebvre notes, “there is nothing in history or society which does not need to be produced” (68). And the production of surplus value is a matter of taking people’s, and whole populations’ time.

Lefebvre argues though that we’ve reached a point in the dialectical process at which that dialectical process is no longer temporal (“Survival of Capitalism” 17).

But just as capitalism creates crises of space, so does it contain its contradictions of time that result in temporal crises, or points in time whereby time itself, our time, is at stake. The dialectical process has not stalled however. To suggest that it has, assumes that anticapitalist, Maoist, or socialist struggles and projects, from India to

Bolivia, Philippines to Venezuela, have no effect on history. What is specific about our current condition is that the bourgeois perception that “the present is all that is” dominates our historic bloc including global institutions of capital and finance

(Harvey 240). Sustainable in the colonial/capitalist world-view isn’t only not valued, it is despised. The value of private space—connected as it is to the immediate/antihistorical logic of capitalism—lay in its potential as means of production. (Its potential revealed after the period of primitive accumulation, and dependent upon the capitalist’s ability to buy time below its value.)

To recognize how capitalism creates private space—which is driven by its inherent contradiction—reveals an immediate temporality. A temporality disconnected from the past or peoples’ claims to space and disconnected from the possibility of a future. Invoking Antonio Gramsci, István Mészáros writes that even

34 as the Italian Marxist intellectual and activist “was…gravely ill in prison, [he] kept on repeating: ‘Time is the most important thing; it is a simple pseudonym of life” (21).

Mészáros continues,

The defenders of the ruling order could never understand the

meaning of [Gramsci’s] words. For them time can have only one

dimension: that of the eternal present. The past for them is nothing

more than the backward projection and blind justification of the

established present, and the future is only the self-contradictorily

timeless extension of the –no matter how destructive, and thereby

also self-destructive—“natural order” of the here and now,

encapsulated in the constantly repeated mindless reactionary dictum

according to which “there is no alternative.” Perversely, that is

supposed to sum up the future. (21-2)

As Mészáros continues, he extends Rosa Luxenburg’s proclamation “socialism or barbarism” to “socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” (149). Maintaining a capitalist temporality and continuing the capitalist production of space can only mean the end of us. Barbarism may represent the tragic and unequal spatiotemporal production of capitalism, but the system itself and those who profit from the system cannot last.

But note that in this formulation, both Luxemburg and Mészáros identify an alternative to barbarism or death: socialism in our time.

In First-World Theory, Theory’s First

Michael Lewis introduces Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, with the story of

Dan Spivey who in 2009 began construction on a secret fiber optic line to connect a data center in Chicago to a building across the street from Nasdaq servers in New

Jersey. Spivey’s work to create a shortcut between these two financial hubs ended up shaving 100 miles off what had previously been the shortest route of communication between markets in Chicago and New York. This meant that on

Spivey’s line information could be transmitted three milliseconds quicker between these two points (Steiner). Lewis notes that Spivey,

saw how much money could be made trading futures contracts in

Chicago against the present prices of the individual stocks trading in

New York and New Jersey. Every day there were thousands of

moments when the prices were out of whack—when, for instance you

could sell the futures contract for more than the price of the stocks

that comprised it. To capture the profits, you had to be fast to both

markets at once. (9)

Of course “fast” is relative here; you just had to be a little bit faster than the public.

Trading along these lines—sending information across dark fiber, “the industry term for fiber optic strands that can be sold or leased”—creates a special dimension within the market. Lewis continues, “the whole point of the line was to create inside the public markets a private space, accessible only to those willing to pay tens of millions of dollars in entry fees” (19). I point to this example to highlight the discrepancy between the theory of the free market, and capitalism as it actually exists. Mainstream economic theory identifies the market as a neutral site in which

36 buyers and sellers meet in their own best interests to exchange resources. But in the real world, in which there is an unequal balance of resources and access to time and space, as Lewis’s example demonstrates, these economic centers function as points that restrict exchange and foster monopolization.

As outlined in Economics: A Tool for Critically Understanding Society, political economic study or analysis is primarily focused on “the relationship between the economic system and its institutions to the rest of society and social development”

(Riddel, Shackelford, and Stamos). In short, political economy takes on the crucial mutual dependence between the distribution of resources and power. As such, using a political economic analysis to critique the significance of capitalist markets emphasizes the historical production of “the market” vis-à-vis the development of capitalism. From this perspective, there is a base distinction between a reciprocal market of exchange, a market of redistribution, and a capitalist market created for the purposes of the endless accumulation of profit. Fernand Braudel identifies the latter, for reasons identified above, as the sphere of monopolies or the “anti- market.” In our time, mainstream economists overwhelmingly conflate capitalism with “free”-market economy (Sackrey, Schneider and Knoedler). The result is that position disallows the possibility of alternative political economies and political economic models of markets out of history. Furthermore this level of analysis naturalizes markets for profit. Nonetheless, monopoly capitalism continues to produce—must continue to produce— a historically specific space and sites exchange to maintain the circulation of capital.

No matter how hard people have worked to measure time precisely, generalized time or homogenizing time (Greenwich Mean Time and the prime meridian that runs through Greenwich, England for instance) abstracts time and space from local places.

“Enlightenment thought operated within the confines of a rather mechanical

‘Newtonian’ vision of the universe, in which the presumed absolutes of homogeneous time and space formed limiting containers to thought and action”

(Harvey, Spaces 252).

While focusing on space, Lefebvre characterizes this process. He writes, “We already know several things about abstract space. As a product of violence and war, it is political; instituted by the state, it is institutional. On first inspection it appears homogeneous; and indeed it serves those forces which make a tabula rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them—in short, of differences.

These forces seem to grind down and crush everything before them, with space performing the function of a plane, a bulldozer or a tank” (285).

A traditional economic interpretation of the self-regulating market necessitates an abstract time and space with no limiting factors. The theory is based on the existence of Newtonian time and Euclidian space. Not only do buyers and sellers need equal access to the market—remember a market is a time and space of exchange—but Commodity, money, and labor markets also need to function in the same spacetime. In this way the concept of the self-regulating market in fact defies physics. And so we have here an economic theory that is supposed to direct social and economic policy, with no real basis in the physical characteristics, or the

38 materiality of the universe. (The notion of the invisible hand, even when sold with the rhetoric of removing or not allowing “anti-market” policies, is itself a political policy.)

The mythology of the self-regulating market is based upon the presumption of spacetime neutrality. In traditional models, the market is a space in which all buyers and sellers have equal access to at the same time. But in this perceived spatiotemporal vacuum, traditional economists suggest the market works. Self- regulated market is an anthropomorphism in which agency is given to the market and taken away from people. The market-clearing price becomes the fulcrum point of the self-regulating market and is thus imagined to be the (spatiotemporal) meeting of competing self-interests. The utopian vision of the self-regulating market is based upon two premises. One, homo economicus, the concept that all people are self-interested being with unlimited desires. And two, time and space are neutral and consistent. The first premise proves to be more challenging because while there is some truth to it, its truth lies in our historical and cultural conditioning. We are products of our time or time beings.

The construction of marketplace ideology sees the market not as simply a site of trade and exchange but as a site ruled by self-interest—economic man. In fact, this logic, the logic of capitalism, sees this self-interest as the leveling—and at the end of the day dehistoricizing—element of the market place. This concept translates into the position that inequality and exploitation are just human nature.

And so the proponents of so-called free-market capitalism have to squeeze physics to fit their world-view. The notion of the market clearing price and equilibrium or

39 the premise upon which the theory of a self-regulating market is based, depends upon making or thinking what is organic static and what is fluid concrete. Karl

Polanyi’s concept of fictitious commodities gets at this. But furthermore it is based on the notion that all agents have access to information at the same time and has the ability to sell their products or labor power for what it is worth. But one doesn’t have to look too closely at history to unpack the contradictions here between the real world and the time sense and place sense of this to see the historical inconsistencies.

That the state should free the (spatiotemporal and technological—railroads, communication lines and satellite connections) constraints on the market and that technology allows for the market to be freed even further from time and space.

Everything is a market of exchange directed by the magic of self-interest fueled equilibrium. And while some put forth arguments against the self-regulating market for one “industry” or another, it’s important to recognize that the logic for any industry is deeply flawed for it depends upon abstract neutral time and space.

One of capitalism’s defining characteristics, compared with pre-

capitalist societies, is the legal and organizational differentiation

between state and economy. This is not to say there was ever

anything like an actual separation between the political and economic

spheres of capitalism. The distinction between differentiation and

separation is so important because as capitalism developed states in

fact became more involved in economic life than ever, especially in the

establishment and administration of the juridical, regulatory, and

infrastructural framework in which private property, competition,

and contracts came to operate. Capitalist states were also increasingly

major actors in trying to contain capitalist crises, including as lenders

of last resort. Capitalism could not have developed and expanded

unless states came to do these things. Conversely, states became

increasingly dependent on the success of capital accumulation for tax

revenue and popular legitimacy. (Panitch and Gindin 3)

The marketplace, informed as it is by western constructions of time and space, is an utopian construction that is based on the assumption that people have the capacity to understand all significant variables.

This demonstrates the danger of forcing a theoretical perspective onto the world. The Lomé Agreement was a small attempt to adjust the market to meet the needs/capabilities of formerly formally colonized African Caribbean and Pacific nations. Black Nationalism of the Garvey/Malcolm X trajectory adjusting markets to meet local needs.

The organization of labor would change concurrently with the

organization of the market system. But as the organization of labor is

only another word for the forms of life of the common people, this

means that the development of the market system would be

accompanied by a change in the organization of society itself. All along

the line, human society had become an accessory of the economic

system. (Polonyi 79)

Actually existing global capitalism produces polarization by its very

nature. Capitalism, considered abstractly as a mode of production, is

based on an integrated market with three dimensions (social products

market, capital market, labour market). Considered as an actually

existing global system, however, capitalism is based on global

expansion of the market in only its first two dimensions; the

formation of a genuinely global labour market is excluded by the

frontiers between states that persist in spite of economic globalization

and restrict its scope. For this reason, actually existing capitalism

necessarily produces polarization on a world scale so that uneven

development becomes the most violent contradiction of modern times

and cannot be overcome within the logic of capitalism. (Amin 159)

Regardless of the neoliberal utopian ideal, the (free) market is not the economic base. In fact there is an inherent contradiction between capitalism and the concept of a self-regulating market. The capitalist political economy functions by a very specific type of market exchange, one based on maintaining the circulation of capital. But the materiality of these sites of exchange also supports, and is maintained by, a dominant ideology of the “free” market. And the ideology of the

“free market” is a capitalist utopian construction that comes to function as an ISA in

Althuserrian terms. Althusser argues,

“The Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but also

the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class

struggle…the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means

and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their

contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle

(Althusser 140).

Althusser also emphasizes that “no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological

Apparatuses” (Althusser 139). The ruling class exercises its control over the market, in part, by shaping the market space and rhythm.

The market as an ISA is a site/moment of exchange. The slash here identifies the necessity of the symbiotic relationship between market time and space. Even with new technologies that allow for economic exchange to occur even when seller and buyer are not in the same place, the market itself still exists in a specific timespace. Moreover obfuscating this fact, allows for a myopic concentration on consumption over production. One young organizer associated with the League of

Revolutionary Black Workers, an organization of black auto workers in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 70’s, makes this point explicitly:

They give you little bullshit amounts of money for working--wages

and so forth--and then they steal all that shit back from you in terms

of where they got the other things set up, this whole credit gimmick

society man--consumer credit, buy shit, buy shit on credit. He give you

a little bit of shit to cool your ass off, and then they steal all that shit

back with shit called interest, the price of money.

Muthafuckas are non-producing, non-existing industry muthafuckas

who deal with paper. There's a cat who'll stand up to you and tell you

he's "in mining." And he sits in an office, man, on the 199th floor of

some muthafuckin building on Wall Street. And he's "in mining!" And

he has paper, certificates which are embroydered and shit, you know

stocks, bonds. He's "in mining!" And he's sitting up in Wall Street and

his fingernails ain been dirty in his muthafuckin life. He went to

Phillips Andover or Exeter. He went to Harvard. He went to Yale. He

went to the Wharton School of Business, and he's "in mining." And the

muthafuckas who deal with intangibles are the muthafuckas who are

rewarded in this society. The more abstract and intangible your shit

is...ay stocks...what is stocks? A stock is a certificate, is evidence of

OWNERSHIP of something that's real. OWNERSHIP! He owns and

controls and therefore receives, you know, the benefit from...That's

what they call profit. He fuckin with shit in Bolivia. He fuckin with shit

in Chile. He's Anaconda [Copper Mine] He's United Fruit. He's in

mining.

He's in what?

He ain never in his life produced shit! Investment bankers, stock

brokers, insurance men. It's muthafuckas that don't do nuthin. We see

that it's this whole society, man, exists and rests upon workers and

that this whole muthafuckin society controlled by this ruling

clique...it's parasitic, vulturistic, cannibalistic, and sucking and

destroying, man, the life of the workers, and we have to stop it,

because it's evil. (Finally Got the News)

Here, the organizer reveals capitalism’s contradiction between ownership and production, or labor and capital. And while he identifies the basis of the economy as the workers, he also highlights the injustice of capitalists, those who own rather than produce, commanding political power.

It is important to consider both the material reality of the market, or how the market functions in space and time and market ideology to be able to reconcile the people’s material reality with time and space. David Harvey writes,

I think it important to challenge the idea of a single and objective

sense of time or space, against which we can measure the diversity of

human conceptions and perceptions…Neither time nor space, the

physicists now broadly propose, had existence (let alone meaning)

before matter; the objective qualities of physical time—space cannot

be understood, therefore, independently of the qualities of material

processes…The conclusion we should draw is simply that neither time

nor space can be assigned objective meanings independently of

material processes, and that it is only through investigation of the

latter that we can properly ground our concepts of the former.

(Harvey203-4)

What this means, in part, is that if peoples’ material conditions are not comparable, then their access to timespace is not either. Within a capitalist political economy, based as it is on the accumulation and monopolization of profit, our world becomes increasingly malformed and continuing along this historical path cannot address this dis-ease.

And so there are two competing theses here. One, market ideology functions as such; it is a dominant ideology that saturates our consciousness and worldview.

And two, markets—capitalist markets—exist in time and space and are made material through social or economic institutions. As defined earlier, a market is a time and space of exchange, and in this instance the market functions as a state apparatus. There is both market ideology and market as an Ideological State

Apparatus, in Althusserian terms. Consider for a moment Althusser’s characterization of the educational ISA. For Althusser, state education represents the most important ISA in terms of reproducing the forces of production. He writes,

“ no other Ideological State Apparatus has the obligatory (and not least, free) audience of the totality of the children in the capitalist formation” (Althusser). For my purpose here let me offer a basic definition of school: an institution of instruction or education. Althusser, of course, makes sure to note that this instruction is neither politically nor economically neutral, but rather prepares children for their role as productive forces –workers, managers, political leaders et cetera who consent to their prescribed role in the relations of production. There is however, another trend in the role of education that runs concurrent with the privatization of education. In this context, an education is something that one (if he

46 has the resources) can buy. In this instance, free market ideology not only influences institutions of education, but also transforms them into markets of education.

Furthermore, this trend plays out in similar ways vis-à-vis communication ISAs

(buying access to media, cable, internet) and some religious ISAs (buying access to megachurches and at the end of (the) day(s) salvation).

No Profit in Power and No Power in Profit

The neoliberal utopian conception of the marketplace is especially significant to any work concerned with social justice, and is especially important to black power politics in the United States at this juncture because of how the dominant and simplistic epochal progressive narratives of race and racism have functioned in this country. While, in chapter one, I tracked a production of black people from the colonizer’s perspective from African to black to slave to prisoner, the white supremacist U.S. history, the U.S. national narrative, tells a different tale. In this narrative, the United States had an issue with race at the inception of this country; there was this thing, slavery and then segregation, but we have moved beyond this.

We’ve reached a new time, a post-racial time, in which we have black moguls in industry, “black” popular culture, and black presidents.

In 2002 one Newsweek cover announced the era of “New Black Power” by introducing three recently appointed African American CEOs, Stanley O’Neal of

Merrill Lynch, Richard Parsons of AOL, and Kenneth Chenault of American Express.

Johnnie Roberts writes, “to a generation of young black Americans who’ve been led

47 to believe they have a better chance of landing in prison than in the executive suite, the rise of Parsons, Chenault and O’Neal is redefining what black power can—and should—ultimately be about” (49).

With the election of the United States’ first African American President,

Barack Obama, many continue to contend that we have reached a post-racial epoch simply by the inclusion of black faces in positions of economic or political power.

John Ridley, the screenwriter for 12 Years a Slave holds up successful African

American politicians and executives characterizing Colin Powell and Condoleezza

Rice as “American heroes” and, argues that it is time for successful African

Americans to shake off connection to black communities and “send niggers on their way. [to start] prais[ing] blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement.” He continues, “Dr. Condi and Colin earned for themselves positions from which to sway public debate. That’s power. Dr.

Condi and Colin personify what niggers have forgotten: All that matters is accomplishment” (Ridley).

In this respect, President Obama’s Presidency and the attacks on President

Obama, his administration and policies from both conservative and white nationalist circles is informative. In the last six years of his Presidency Obama’s policies have been remarkably similar to the previous Bush Administration’s in terms of expanding the global war of terror (now termed Overseas Contingency

Operations), rejecting the oversight of financial institutions, expanding the power of local police to act as federal immigration officers, and providing aid to allies of U.S. imperialism. Even in this political economic context, there has been a vitriol and

48 racist response to his administration. While it is not the case that the Bush and

Obama Presidencies have been the same, their administrations’ positions on most big issues have been close enough that their political differences do not explain the difference in the public’s perception of them.

One evening last year, as I drove home from campus, I passed by a used car lot, Austin’s Affordable Auto. Lit up on the lot’s reader board was a message that reflected the essence of similar messages plastered across bumper stickers, billboards, and t-shirts throughout conservative America. Matt Austin, the lot owner wrote, “THAT KENYAN IS NOT MY PRESIDENT!” (Mayer). This message makes clear that Austin takes his position, not based on the President’s policies, but on his identity, and the way Austin identifies the United States; President Obama’s perceived identity does not fit with Austin’s vision of the country.

Now I do not believe that Austin’s position is the majority position in the

United States. After all, Obama did win his first presidential election by a substantial margin in an election in which there was relatively high voter turn-out. But he won his second election after demonstrating, in his first term, that he was committed to many of the same policies of his predecessor. This suggests that his political supporters supported him for reasons similar to those that positioned his conservative political opponents against him. The effect is that Obama’s

Administration has been able to continue and even intensify U.S. imperialism with less resistance, and even support, from liberal political circles and a substantial element of black communities. (Recent Gallup Poll numbers indicate that Obama’s approval ratings remain over 80 percent among African Americans.) If we are to

49 believe Ridley’s argument that “all that matters is accomplishment,” then we should ask ourselves how Obama’s accomplishments as Head of State affect our world and how we move forward.

While people like Ridley celebrate the inclusion of a few new colorful faces into institutions as a sign marking the end of racism, the language of and organization for Black liberation too often shifts to a discourse of individual Black success. But, the language of success located within the current structures of power always reverts or is subjugated to the dominant ideology of rugged individualism. In this fashion so African American implants are held up as symbols of what Black success looks like and this “progress” foretells the dismissal of Black liberation.

Black liberation ceases to be a legitimate question as Black em(Power)ment— ripped from its historical context—takes on an exclusively individual meaning.

As the examples of President Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice show us the presence of Black bodies within current political economic institutions can just as effectively—or even more effectively— support U.S. imperialism and racism as the exclusion of Black bodies. We must recognize that inclusion into institutions of the existing system can never realize Black Power or liberation.

Reflecting upon his coauthored 1967 work Black Power, Kwame Ture notes, “we clearly warned that visibility did not equal power. We can be more precise today and say the more visible the African politician, the less power wielded.” He then characterizes the inclusion of African Americans into political Parties as a

“powerless visibility” (Ture and Hamilton 190). But the visibility is key.

Ridley argues that it is time for African American political elites like Obama,

Powell and Rice to “leave niggers behind; I contend that they already have and it is time for the people to shake them down. On August 9th, 2002, Powell, as Secretary of

State, announced that

Today we are taking another important step in our continuing

efforts to combat global terrorism. I am announcing the

designation of the Communist Party of the Philippines/New

People’s Army (CPP/NPA) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, as

defined under U.S. law. I made this decision in consultation with

the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury after an

exhaustive review of this group’s violent activities.

As Powell declares the CPP and NPA Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO)—a designation that can carry a death sentence—he also cites the circle of officials—

Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Secretary of the Treasury Paul H. O’Neill—who helped to influence his decision. Marking the alliances, we can note that Powell’s decision to declare the CCP and NPA—a political party and military group that have been fighting to free the Philippines from its neo-colonial relationship to the United

States for over 35 years—is based upon his connection to power rather than any connection he might have (had) to the Black community. In making this decision, as secretary, Powell falls right in step with the State’s interest of “protecting” the

Philippines from Filipinos. Powell allies himself with the Department of the

Treasury—a department whose primary responsibility is the financial “prosperity”

51 of the United States—never mind that that prosperity has never trickled down to the majority of Black people, and is in fact expropriated from Black labor.

When Powell’s designation of the CPP and the NPA is examined in the context of Executive Order 13224 in which the former President George W. Bush

“authorizes the U.S. government to block the assets of individuals and entities that provide support, services, or assistance to, or otherwise associate with, terrorists and terrorist organizations designated under the Order, as well as their subsidiaries, front organizations, agents, and associates,” he colludes with the political machine that limits Black people’s ability to connect with other people of color subject to U.S. imperialism and global apartheid. So at this point the State, fronted by a Black, or

African American, man makes the decision on who the Black community can build coalitions and alliances with based upon the financial interests of the United

States—or more accurately U.S. corporate interests. In this way the U.S. War of

Terror—while generally and generically imagined as an external war—is also a war against the poor and people of color within the United States.

Obama’s Presidency reveals the polarizing ways that U.S. Americans identify themselves and the nation in the context of U.S. racism and imperialism. It also illustrates the polarizing political discourse around electoral politics that divert attention from the material needs of a healthy society to individual concerns and conflates white-centric traditions with political process.

With this in mind, any project that attempts to deal with black power as a movement locked in time—an historical moment—rather than as a historical event must reckon with how the neoliberal market functions as an Ideological State

Apparatus in our contemporary historic bloc. The world has changed since the

1960s, and the technologies of capitalism, including that of language, production and commodification and cooptation and imperialism creates new challenges.

Returning to Samir Amin for a moment, his critical examination and characterization of the distinct elements of the market, or the globalizing effects of capitalism, outlines a necessary framework to understand globalization. It also, though, illustrates an important level of analysis for understanding the contemporary context for revolution. If capital accumulation, and the polarization of the world into haves and have nots, depends upon capitalists producing spaces of capital by “occupying space,” in Lefebvre’s terms, or expanding capital and commodity markets, and restricting labor markets or how people can move, then any revolutionary project demands that people organize to disrupt the sites of capital accumulation and build revolutionary alliances in spite of the expansion of capital and commodity markets. There is a danger in just assuming that expanding or freeing labor markets is inherently revolutionary; while this strategy could reveal or highlight the contradictions of capitalism, it’s not revolutionary. But to prioritize people’s labor and movement over profit can open avenues to revolutionary alliances.

In a 2008 presentation on the tradition of the prophetic black church,

Reverend Jeremiah draws from a framework William Augustus Jones constructs in his text God in the Ghetto. Wright recalls, “Doctor Jones argues that one’s theology, how I see God, determines one’s anthropology, how I see humans, and one’s anthropology then determines one’s sociology, how I order my society. For my

53 purposes here I’d like to take a few liberties with this framework and push it in a slightly different direction. I am arguing that one’s cosmology, “how I see the universe, space and time,” determines one’s anthropology, “how I see humans,” and one’s anthropology, determines his sociology, “how I order my society.”

So if, in the western tradition of Newton and Locke, we interpret space as homogeneous and abstract—defined independently from matter and people—then we identify people as isolated beings in timespace. And this anthropological lens thus determines a specific sociological arrangement, or ordering of society. To prioritize individuals’ desires over society, or the health and safety of the larger group, creates—and may even define—violence. Many argue that this is just human nature and thus not historical. But consider its premise. We now know, and I suppose many already knew, that spacetime is neither homogenous nor independent from actions in space. We are not isolated, but social beings.

Capital’s drive to produce and occupy iterations of timespace for the accumulation of profit marks its destructive nature. Attempting to tweak or shift positions within institutions of capitalism can never realize the people’s power. We must attack the destructive metabolic order of capitalism to re-embody time and space to build a future.

The American ethos, so saturated with the fantasy of the production of rugged individuals, helps create a very special relationship between those who identify as “American”—signifying their U.S. national identity—and history. We are all products of our time. But the significance of this point is lost if we do not recognize that our time is historical and thus, produced.

The base of the economic pyramid is broadening, not arithmetically

but geometrically. The masses, both black and white, are victimized by

the classes. But because of the racist ethos, suffering whites have little

desire to make common cause with their black brothers in tribulation.

They, along with many blacks, hug an illusion with respect to the so-

called ladder of success, a mythological ladder that blinds already

weakened eyes to the reality of an upside-down welfare state with

socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The rich are on

welfare but under other names, such as tax breaks, farm subsidies,

airline subsidies, oil depletion allowances, and business bailouts, for

example, Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. William O.Douglas correctly

states concerning the powers-that-be: “They accept that degree of

socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial

complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public

projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike. (God in the

Ghetto 25-6)

While I love Jones’ point here, he and many others, from MLK to Joe Biden, have misused the term “socialism” in this formulation. Socialism is not just a redistribution of wealth. No, Socialism is a political economic system in which ownership and control of the means of production are held communally and publically. Inherent to capitalism (its historical development and maintenance) is the theft of productive forces. The redistribution of wealth, the siphoning of wealth

55 from the public to the wealthy and capitalist class, that Jones’ takes up here isn’t

“socialism for the rich,” it’s a political economic plundering of the public.

To develop a clock consciousness means to adhere to based on an epistemological foundation of a mechanical passing of time. The significance of this is especially pertinent to Marx’s concept of the working day and dialectical materialism. Some have identified the importance of workers developing a clock consciousness, but I’d like to reemphasize a more fundamental point, which is without a clock consciousness surplus labor becomes untenable. Or in order to maintain and maximize surplus labor there needs to be a time or space break between the worker and the commodity. The conditions and relations of production that allow for profit or the creation of surplus value depend to a large extent upon the workers’ adherence and obedience to clock-time; if the capitalist were to say I’ll pay you for x amount of units that you produce in a day then that would be the number of units the worker makes. More importantly for my purposes here, alienating people from the passage of time truncates history.

CHAPTER THREE

BREAK TIME: TOWARD THE PRODUCTION OF A NEW PUBLIC TIME AND

SPACE3

the sphere of private life ought to be enclosed, and have a finite or

finished, aspect. Public space, by contrast, ought to be an opening

outwards. What we see happening is just the opposite

—Henri Lefebvre

Consider the following scene and scenario: A segregated city block; it is a block governed by Jim Crow laws and customs that restrict black pedestrians’ right to the sidewalk. Where/when white and black threaten to converge, Jim Crow dictates that the sister or brother stop, step off the walkway, and let white pass. To walk this block, from “A Street” to “B Street,” should take two and a half minutes and

175 paces, but that’s white time/space. Moving from point “A” to “B” in a “colored” dimension takes on a special (spatiotemporal) effect. So, if in the course of navigating this block, a black pedestrian encounters five whites, that’s five times they need to stop and five times they need to take five steps off-course to let white

3 I emphasize the capital “K” in break because many political economists and traditional economists use upper-case K as shorthand for capital. And my understanding of capital here is within a Marxist tradition that defines capital not just as resources and commodities but the circulation of resources and commodities—marked by exploited labor power. Marx’s equation M-C-M’ illustrates this circulation. So I’m not arguing that we need to break some abstract notion of time but that we must destroy a capitalist temporality as we create new public sphere. 57 pass. Thus, what should have taken two and a half minutes, takes five. And what should have taken 175 paces now takes 200. In this way, Jim Crow—as an institution of racism—alters the distance between A Street and B Street according to race.

I point to this anecdote not to rehash the relativity of time and space per se, but to foreground the social, and (taking Western civilization and social traditions into account) racist production of time and space. Most people will readily accept

Jim Crow as a historical institution, even if they’re too ready to dismiss it as past history. And to accept the agency of social institutions in the production of time and space is a necessary step for this project. Of course social institutions are not created or maintained by, of, or for themselves, rather people work institutions in a dialectical relationship to the political economic system. It is this relationship that defines the current historic bloc. And in this context, our spatial and temporal understanding of ourselves in the world and with each other influences and is influenced by social, political and economic institutions.

At work here then is a construction of time and space that affects people and is continually produced to maintain (in this case hierarchical) raced relations and relations of production. In this microcosm, that represents a much more complex and overarching socioeconomic system, the black pedestrian loses two and a half minutes of their life and the physical effort of negotiating that extra distance to those five whites and whiteness itself. On the other hand, each time those individuals participated in the ritual—white continues unimpeded and the brother or sister makes way—they produce or reproduce a time and space.

The Western abstract interpretation of space (in the tradition of John Locke) defines or constructs space by the location (place) of at least two objects in space. In this tradition we only know space by the relationship, or how we articulate the relation, between objects. From this perspective, space is neutral and homogenous; it is the articulation of space that is relational. Craig L. Wilkins critiques a Lockean interpretation of space by asking, what if this space were defined by a single black body and a single white body. The white body, he writes,

While recognizing the Black body because it is necessary—as a

relational point—to define their own (place in) space, at the same

time is hostile to the Black body’s right to be in the space. The

operation of Lockes’s space/place relationship creates and situates

identity (your [Black] place is always in relation to my [white] place)

and also places the emphasis on the importance of “knowing your

place” to the construction of that identity (my [white] space is the

standard by which your [Black] space is judged.) (18-9)

But to push Wilkins’ analysis, and in an attempt to illustrate the effect of the private sphere, I’d like to consider Locke’s relational interpretation of space when defined by public and private space as well. If, as Locke suggests, we can measure space by reference points (North Pole, South Pole and Greenwich for instance) to mark off claimed private space, I’d suggest that those private spaces then become points of reference vis-à-vis unclaimed spaces or publicly claimed spaces. So private spaces become placed objects in abstract space. Public space is just the in-between space.

Imagine standing in the middle of the street looking down the road in a suburban

59 neighborhood of houses. Public space, in this case, encourages or even demands movement rather than gathering—drive or walk between owned spaces.4

In his critique of Lockean abstract space, Wilkins highlights the hierarchical nature of the articulated relation between raced bodies. And I do not want to lose sight of this observation as I extend his analysis. Suggesting that private space is another lens through which we can confront Western constructions of space doesn’t necessarily foreground this element of hierarchy, but does speak to the claiming and domination of perceived abstract space. Both, I believe, are necessary. While the rights of private property may be valued equally, who has the right to private property, space and time has everything to do with maintaining unequal power relationships. Emphasizing the spatial nature of power, French theorist of space

Henri Lefebvre notes,

Socio-political contradictions are realized spatially. The

contradictions of space thus make the contradictions of social

relations operative. In other words spatial contradictions ‘express’

conflicts between socio-political interests and forces; it is only in

space that such conflicts come effectively into play, and in so doing

they become contradictions of space. (365)

So if the construction of whiteness is based on its relation to the raced Other, if whiteness can’t be identified on its own but only by its perceived superiority to the

4 My family recently started renting a house along a busy street with a fully fenced in yard and gate across the driveway. It’s nice to not have to worry about cars when the kids are playing in the driveway or front yard but it’s also a little disturbing to fence yourself in from the outside. 60

Other, any raced space can only be a contradictory space. A site of social, political economic contradictions or confrontations. Fanon explains,

At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will

say that the Black is not a man…the man is not merely a possibility of

recapture, or of negation…Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic

harmonies. The Black is a black man; that is to say that as the result of

a series of aberrations of affect, [the black man] is established at the

core of a universe from which he must be extricated. (8)

Fanon confronts the abstract perception of timespace and the white supremacist dichotomy of race. In order to realize black humanity, it is necessary to shake asunder Western cosmology.

I would like to make a distinction between institutionalized racism and institutional racism. Institutionalized racism is racism as law. Institutional racism remains so long as the institution remains part of a racist capitalist system. Now even as institutionalized segregation and racism seems at this point seems to be outdated, it would be a mistake to interpret this and conclude that racism has ended.

Currently, the relationship between Black and white bodies is no

longer defined legally by master/slave dynamic. But, and this is

crucial, that does not mean (a) this relational (and therefore, spatial)

conceptualizing is dead, and (b) some new form of relational (and

therefore, spatial) hierarchy has not taken its “place.” (Wilkins 16)

Social space maintains elements of the previous space it became a part of.

Capitalism and the Production of Private Time and Space

As I noted in the previous chapter, capitalism temporarily resolves its internal contradiction between capital and labor by the production, or occupation, of space and time. But more specifically, capitalism temporarily resolves its internal contradictions by the production of private space and private time by occupying public time and space. As with any form of production, something can never be produced from nothing. Precapitalist development produced this private sphere by eating the commons or public space. But when done, and when its internal contradiction reached a point of crisis, capitalism moved outward and continues to commandeer space and time—both the time of labor and the collective time that we have on the planet. The act of privatizing (whether it’s water rights, mining rights or the right to air) redefines space and who has access to space. So when water rights are privatized for instance, it is not only a matter of someone claiming water (or where water flows); within the current capitalist political economy water is turned into capital. This process creates a specific market. And make no mistake, markets continue to be spatial and temporal. It is in fact this spatial element of markets that allows us to see labor. What’s more, the production of private space and time colors the way we see the world.

I was new to teaching first year composition. Early on (within the first few class meetings) we begin talking about rhetoric and language in context. I ask the

62 students how they would characterize the difference between someone spray- painting a swastika on a synagogue and a student posting a flyer for a student group somewhere along the main thoroughfare on campus. To which, a student responded,

“Well, you can just tear a flyer down.” Okay. How about, “do you all recognize a distinction between someone spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue and a person throwing up their tag in the center of campus?” Silence…And then, another student said, “well, one is an act of vandalism on private property? And the other an act of vandalism on public property?” At this point I needed to take a moment; I guess I was a bit too surprised by these responses. For these students’ responses, reveals a primary concern with property rather than people. Their answers emphasize a perceived crime against property and the right to and of private property. The students were more prepared to recognize vandalism than the swastika as a symbol of violence against people. What’s left out is the historical connection between the swastika and the Nazi’s crime against humanity. For the students, it seems the violence symbolized by the swastika is farther removed from their experience than the “violence” of paint hitting private property. 5 So it seems disrupting the relationship between the owner and property is doing violence against not only the owner but the property as well.

Our consciousness is so interrupted by the concept of private property that a meaningful understanding of public space is corrupted by the notion of private property. As such, it’s not that everyone owns or has equal access to public space;

5 In hindsight, I might have asked them to consider the effect of a burning cross in a family’s front yard since it signifies the threat of violence but doesn’t do permanent damage to the property. 63 rather, public space becomes a not so neutral in-between space where the rights of property and those who control property must be maintained. Through this worldview precolonial societies and civilization were doing violence to the property they occupied because this so-called unclaimed land’s potential lay in its not yet realized transformation into capital. As such, colonizers “freed” Other’s land by privatizing space.

Toward the Personal to Reclaim the Public

In the winter of 2013 Greg Gopman, the CEO of AngelHack, posted on a public

Facebook page that San Francisco has been “overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers dropouts, and trash.” He continues his post to write that he thinks it would be acceptable if the homeless in San Francisco would just stay out of the way and realize that “it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town” and that the homeless should see themselves as “guests.” He concludes, “you can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class.” (O’Connor). Gopman’s assertion here is that one’s access to private property should be the prerequisite for access to public spaces. This mentality shapes legislation that outlaws actions necessary to homeless people’s survival. Cities across America have passed ordinances making it illegal to lay down, stand still, sleep, or sit in public. But the enforcement of these laws is dependent on the enforcers’ perception of one’s access to resources (Lewis). A police officer is not going to stop a white man in a business

64 suit from sitting on the steps of a building, but the police officer can use these ordinances to remove someone with dirty clothes and a garbage bag filled with their belongings.

Reclaiming the public sphere is about more than just granting more access to public spaces. Until we disrupt and abolish the dominance of the private sphere over the public, how we enter public spaces will remain hierarchical. People need to develop a conception of personal and public timespace based in people interacting with each other and responding to the needs of each other and the community.

Individuals can in some cases occupy a public space. Let us consider a homeless family and a wealthy businessman entering that space for instance. Until we recognize and disrupt the conditions and relations of production that afford the business man’s luxury (access to private space and time), the family’s unfulfilled needs remain unfulfilled. Or, as is the case in my earlier example, the white pedestrian has access to their private time and private space in ways that a black pedestrian does not. In fact the white has access to the black pedestrian’s time and space. Private property becomes a prerequisite for not only private space and time, but access to public space as well.

Private time and space demands race and class privilege. It’s here, in the private sphere, where one separates and centers the self from the world, to encounter the world, by claiming the world. We might translate the private sphere as “my own(ed) sphere—my time, my space.” To critique, confront and combat the insidious and diabolical relationship between capitalism and racism requires that we abolish the private sphere—abolish private time and private space.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we are or need to be total public beings.

But we must make a distinction between the private and the personal. The private is isolating; the personal is reflective. The private resists change; the personal encourages growth. The private is owned; the personal is purposeful and transformative, transgressive. Personal time and space is healthy and necessary for personal development and critical reflexivity.

Now there are two dangers in taking this notion of personal time/space too far. One is that eliminating the private sphere is inherently revolutionary or that eliminating the private property necessarily disrupts exploitative relations of production. If we don’t create a revolutionary path, one in which as Hugo Chávez notes, “The sovereign people…transform itself into the object and subject of power,” we fail to create a revolutionary space and temporality (qtd. in Foster). The second potential danger is the belief that revolution happens primarily on personal levels— emphasizing the person at the expense of the public. And I don’t want to suggest that systemic change occurs primarily on personal levels. But in order to put in the necessary work to make revolution or to change oppressive (raced) relations of production we must destroy the private consciousness.

Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Black Power

As some physicists, cosmologists and astronomers consider the passage of time (in one direction or another) and expansion or contraction of space they confront a perceived universal push/pull dialectic between dark energy and dark

66 matter. (Dark energy represents the force, unexplained by the big bang, that continues to grow the universe and dark matter is the force that holds it together such that the universe doesn’t explode outward or implode…yet.) But as the universe expands, it does not do so at the same rate. It may in fact contract in places as it expands in total. I believe Black Power has the potential to enact a similar dialectic to move toward the personal to recreate the public in a revolutionary manner.

Let me return to Wilkins for a moment. In The Aesthetics of Space while

Wilkins critiques and rejects the Western conception and Locke’s theorization of abstract space, he also (by critiquing, analyzing and or employing the works of

Lefebvre, Foucault and bell hooks) theorizes what he considers a liberatory conceptualization of space—“celebratory heterotopias.” Celebratory heterotopias, he argues, are those spaces reclaimed by those along or in the margins. He suggests that African Americans have been forced to make do with the space that they get.

But more than that, African American communities have developed creative and ingenious ways to make that space theirs. Wilkins uses the “hip hop nation” as an example of movement to reclaim and reconstruct urban space in a way that challenges dominant definitions and categorizations of space. Thus, Wilkins argues that hip hop has created a new aesthetic of space. So that it’s not just about making do, but rather our space is beautiful. In this fashion I’d suggest that Wilkins’ theorization of “celebratory heterotopias” is the spatial equivalent of the “black is beautiful” banner. And this, I believe is a politically useful (maybe even necessary) interruption of dominant evaluations of space. It’s not however, revolutionary.

In his introduction Wilkins himself acknowledges that he intends to position his critique “somewhere between—but not in the middle of” a reactionary deconstructionism and a revolutionary position (5). While I greatly appreciate

Wilkins’ work and insightful analysis of the aesthetics of space, my intention is a bit different. Because even if we learn to see value in the ways people make space in the margins, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve learned to critique, confront and combat the unequal and hierarchical system that created the center and margin in the first place.

Just as the “black is beautiful” banner, helped inspire black power as a political movement, I’d argue that a new aesthetic of space should inspire or inform a new politics of space. Similarly, to take up colored peoples time (CPT) as simply a different valuation of time, fails to account for the political agency of reclaiming colored people’s time. From my earlier example, those extra twenty-five steps and two-and-a-half minutes frame colored peoples time. But colored people’s time, or time used as a tool to sabotage production in the service of the community is political.

I worked a number of years for a major shipping company at an international airport. The majority of my coworkers working the night split-shift, from sundown to sun up, were black. During our shift, we unloaded and then loaded a seemingly unending parade of tractor-trailers. Working in three person teams per dock, we were all forced to coordinate our time—work fast enough (or be busy enough) to avoid the manager’s eye, but slow enough to meet our physical and financial needs.

Smoke breaks and break time became strategy meetings to evaluate our, the

68 workers’ situation. Do we need overtime?—slow down. Does someone need to get home to a sick kid?—speed up. Or do we just need a longer break—the trailor door got stuck/locked shut somehow. Folks (and managers) sometimes joked that this was just CPT, but it was also a strategy to affect our time.

Simply recalibrating the lens through which we evaluate timespace undervalues the labor that goes into the production of that timespace. And to really see value in space, and the space that black people make, we must participate in its production. Like the soundclash, the competing sound systems, selectors, toasters,

MCs and engineers, are only a part of the effect. The event itself is meaningless without the participation and response of the participants, the dancers and dancehallers.

Henri Lefebvre writes, “Revolutionary events generally take place in the street. Doesn’t this show that the disorder of the street engenders another kind of order” (Urban Revolution 19). Black Power, I believe, remains a timely and politically necessary call in this respect. And Huey Newton’s theorization of intercommunalism speaks to this dialectic between the personal/reflective and the public/global. Whereas the current system is based upon an inverse relationship between people and power, intercommunalism attempts to provide a framework to correct this unnatural equation, and is based upon the assumption that people equal power. The deployment of the phrase “power to the people”—born out of a Black

Power tradition—vocalizes this alternative conceptualization of power. In this light the phrase black power is a local iteration of power to the people with an international perspective. So as the Black Panther Party was based and worked in

69 local communities, the Party also constantly worked to see connections between the specific oppressions within their communities and communities of color around the world.

The black power banner has always been grounded in a practice that attends to the immediate needs of black communities in a way that directly relates the conditions that created those needs to those oppressed by U.S. imperialism and capitalism. In this way black power has both characteristics of dark matter— recognizing the need to work to locally to address the specific needs of the community—and dark energy—building international networks and alliances between people fighting for a new future. This ,though, demands a new temporality.

One which is personal in order to reclaim and remake the public.

Claiming Timespace

In his 2002 comedy performance, “Analyzing White America,” Paul Mooney explains,

Racism is here; it’s in the blood. Cause white folks OWNED us, and

they will never get over it. I’m gone tell you why, I read the white

book; getting away wasn’t a chapter, okay. We tricked their ass. We

got away and they ain never gone be the same. They ain been happy

since. Go back and watch all that old shit when they owned us, white

folks is some happy white people. Look at them now all depressed and

sad. Niggas got away. [Now] they don’t want us in their little areas and

shit…ain that funny they don’t want us in their neighborhood? When

they owned us we were in their house. Kinda bullshit is that? Oh, I

can’t come in the neighborhood, but when you owned me, I was

warming up your bed. Now there’s something wrong with this picture.

Shit, when they owned us we had 12 and 14 jobs. Now that we’re free,

“I’m so sorry. There’s no jobs.” Mad cause we got away. Let slavery

come back tomorrow. They’ll be out on that porch, “Welcome Home.

Get your rest; you’ve got to go to those 12 jobs in the morning.

As I noted in the preceding chapters, the objective of slavery and segregation was never to separate white and black people, but rather to establish rules of how black people could operate and the agency that black people had within (white) space. So the intent was never to create a white space and a black space—all space and time was/is imagined white. Creating space and time thus, In the “White Book” getting away wasn’t a chapter because white people couldn’t imagine that there was any time or place that wasn’t by right of their God or by nature, theirs. (Of course, as

Craig Wilkins argues, this doesn’t stop black people from carving out their own space in spite of and because of efforts to naturalize and universalize all space as white space, or to transform the globe into white space. My purpose for this chapter is to explore this process, strategies, of black power, old and new.) Here Paul

Mooney highlights this embedded contradiction/hypocrisy by zeroing in on the crux of western/colonial understanding of time and space: ownership. Black access to white space and time is dependent upon ownership—the ownership of black bodies or black labor. For labor is the way that we all interact in timespace and in turn

71 create a timespace. The images of colonialism and U.S. imperialism are saturated with the whitening of space. The so-called white man’s burden is a pseudonym for claiming space.

Paul Mooney’s examination of white nostalgia for the relations of slave production, reveals strong nuanced class critique of comments on the production of space, but also links between white feelings of entitlement to black labor or black bodies and access to space. Of course not all whites owned or own blacks but the maintenance of the U.S. social system is based upon selling the concept that whites can own black humanity. Examples of this include, blackface, Klan rule lynching, and the attacks on black youth.

In his attempt to emphasize the primacy of struggle—and the people’s capacity to forge alliances through struggle—to Gramsci’s politics, David Featherstone recalls

Gramsci’s observations on the third world. This in the section of black power and the black in black power—setting the terms.

Today flames of revolt are being fanned throughout the colonial

world. This is the class struggle of the coloured peoples against their

white exploiters and murderers. It is the vast irresistible drive

towards autonomy and independence of a whole world, with all its

spirituals riches. Connective tissues are being recreated to weld

together once again peoples whom European domination seemed to

have sundered once and for all. (qtd inFeatherstone 70)

It’s here that Featherstone argues that in “drawing attention to the ‘connective tissues’ being produced through different anticolonial struggles, it positions such struggle as integral to new geographies of internationalist struggle” (70)

In her chapter “As American As Cherry Pie: Contesting the Biologization of

Violence,” Alondra Nelson takes up the Panthers’ work to focus “on the dismantling of both the biologization of social issues and repressive medical surveillance” (153).

The biologization of social issues in the first place is an attempt to remove raced political economic hierarchies from history. Or, more specifically, it is an attempt to remove the poverty, the fact of ghettos, barrios, Chinatowns, and reservations from slavery, colonization and imperialism or U.S. imperialism/racism.

There are two main definitions of geography. Geography is the arrangement of physical features that make up the earth, or the study of these features. But an alternative reading of the term’s etymology reveals the possibility of a more critical analysis of the concept. It’s not just a study of the world but geography becomes quite literally writing the earth. Geography is not some neutral objective endeavor, but how we measure and make meaning of the world— an act of marking space. So in claiming Angola, Angola extends beyond southern Africa and resonates across the

Atlantic.

Malcolm X changes the geography of black liberation.

The color line long ago identified by W.E.B. DuBois was more than a

spatial metaphor; it was the literal inscription of social injustice and

inequality on the American landscape. For many African Americans,

their lives were spatially restricted to high-rise project buildings in

overcrowded and underserviced slums. These spaces of oppression

and degradation were not the result of local prejudices. Rather, for

Malcolm X, these spaces were the result of an entrenched and corrupt

system that marginalized peoples in America and beyond (Tyner 4).

Here Tyner advances a position on “the color line” that a simple literary analysis of

DuBois fails to reckon with. Yes, uses the color line as a metaphor—a trope that saturates our national and colonial consciousness—but as Tyner points out here, the color line is also a border. For me the term “marginalized” in this last sentence is not nearly strong enough; I think Malcolm’s phrasing would be more accurate here:

“For Malcolm, these spaces were the result of an entrenched and corrupt system that ‘economically exploited, politically oppressed and socially degraded’ peoples in

America and beyond.” But Tyner’s point here, I think, is really special. Malcolm X changed the geography of black politics in the United States. Of course Malcolm was working in a world and at a time where and when the Third World was combating imperialism with full force—struggling to create revolutionary space to redefine people’s connection to place. As Tyner puts it,

One might argue that without legally prescribed racialized

spaces, the contestation for African American social justice was

spatially more ambiguous. Therefor, whereas many of the southern-

based civil rights campaigns were predicated n integration (e.g., the

lunch counter sit-ins, school desegregation), a prime focus articulated

by Malcolm X, and later by the Black Panther Party, was control of

their own communities rather than integration into white

communities. Theirs was a very different geographical understanding

of the Civil Rights Movement, one based on separation; power within

one’s own community was paramount (Tyner 106).

While Tyner considers the way in which white-supremacist laws directed organizational philosophies, in these lines Tyner doesn’t account for how Malcolm’s, and the Panther’s, politics affected their geography and position in the world. (Tyner does some of this work in his The Geography of Malcolm X.) This may be due in part to Tyner’s focus on shifts in U.S. space. But what Tyner, in his focus on U.S. space, is not able to unpack—but what both Malcolm and the Black Panther Party’s politics highlighted—is that that U.S. space is defined by U.S. imperialism and colonialism.

This is as true in the 1960s as it is during the making of Angola.

The Black Panthers also take up this shift in the scope of blackness, or the geography of black liberation, with their internal colonial metaphor drawn from their reading of Frantz Fanon. “In response to the citizenship contradiction that became acute in the late 1960s when the fact that civil rights did not ensure social inclusion was brought into sharp relief, the Party envisioned a more radical form of democracy. The activists rejected capitalist liberalism and laid claim to democracy’s radical potential as this potentiality was articulated in ‘WHAT WE WANT’ and

‘WHAT WE NEED’ that was the Party’s ten-point platform. The Party imagined and tried to engender a society in which collective goods were put above economic gain”

(Nelson184). “The Party understood health as a scalar phenomenon; social health linked the body to society, and inextricably so” (Nelson 184).

These arguments suggest that black power can be realized—in fact must be realized—in spaces that have been created and are created by racism and the exploitation of labor. Rice, Powell and Obama are examples of blacks (or African

Americans) in positions of political power, but not of black political power.

BLACK POWER

In 1970, as the United States continued its assault on Viet Nam and the

Vietnamese people, The Black Panther published Eldridge Cleaver’s “Letter to My

Black Brothers in Vietnam” in which Cleaver instructs “the Black soldier to either quit the army now or start destroying [it] from the inside.” He then declares that

"anything else is…a form of treason against your own people” (qtd in Cleaver 233).

Two months later as Cleaver visited Hanoi with the American Peoples’ Anti-

Imperialist Delegation, he articulated a similar message over a Vietnamese radio broadcast, urging Black soldiers to “either refuse to fight, desert, or sabotage the war from within” (C. Jones 234). And indeed, many did. 6

With these statements, Cleaver voiced some integral connections between the Black Panther Party and Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (NLF). These connections originated from an interpretation of resistance that allowed for an understanding of the common struggle between Black liberation movements in the

6 Glen Ford addresses the internal race war within the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. He recalls Black dissenters’ creation of a community in Saigon named “Soul Alley.” He also researches the US Military’s construction of a predominantly Black stockade to imprison insubordinate Black soldiers. Several Black soldiers eventually burned it to the ground. 76

United States and the people of Viet Nam fighting against U.S. aggression.

Furthermore, this move to build alliances and link anti-imperialist/national liberation movements in Viet Nam and the United States was based upon continued reciprocal gestures of support. Kathleen Cleaver writes,

The NLF also acknowledged a connection between its fight in

Vietnam and that of Blacks in America. In 1969 an effort to

exchange American P.O.W.s for imprisoned Panther leaders

Newton and Seale had been proposed by the NLF through Cleaver

in Algiers. The plan was promoted within the United States by

antiwar movement activists, but the American government

completely ignored it. (234)

This engagement, along with other exchanges between the Black Panther Party and the National Liberation Front, represents a tradition of mutual recognition and support among radical Black (Power) activist organizations in the United States and

Third World anti-imperialist revolutionaries.

That Black Power is contentious and historically grappled with and argued over marks this organizational strategy—which has the potential to produce a revolutionary space—as a site of resistance to oppression, exploitation and degradation. With this in mind it is absolutely politically necessary to contextualize and historicize the terms.

Black, as a primary characterization of a people, becomes historically meaningful only with western expansion/colonialism. In other words black is,

77 because of a history of imperialism/colonization and slavery—interconnected as they are to the development of capitalism. So it is within the context of imperialism, that black is constructed as a colonial taxonomy. Frantz Fanon writes, “it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates [her and] his existence” (36). As a western colonial signifier, Black signifies the barbaric and uncivilized native—the Other.

Along these lines the label “Black” as part of the colonial project, becomes a primary marker of one’s worth as a human and is inscribed upon the bodies of colonized. But to speak of the body, the colonized body—which by definition has an antagonistic and unnatural structure of gender and sexuality imposed upon it—we must contextualize how those bodies experience colonization. As European colonizers inscribe blackness on the bodies of the colonized this colonial process is informed by the dominance of patriarchy and white male supremacist ideology. As such, the ways in which the colonized can self-identify and understand gender and sexuality, rather than being born of their connections to each other and with the land, are dismembered and forcibly replaced with a western ontology. Without this level of analysis—which must inform all levels of colonial critique and decolonial/national liberation politics—seemingly polarized gendered social relations of the colonized are interpreted as natural and indigenous to pre- contact/pre-colonial cultures.

In order to take black back—or, to redefine blackness as a liberatory space— we must not lose sight of its colonial construction. Because how we contextualize and historicize Blackness directs our praxis of black power. Naturalizing

78 blackness—which has historically translated into some form of racial determinism with, at times, opposing objectives such as with white supremacist nationalism and black cultural nationalism—does not allow for an effective framework from which to build necessary alliances between black communities and other colonized peoples. I am not attempting to conflate white supremacy and Black cultural nationalism here. In order to critically reflect upon either one, we must take into consideration the historical context from which each ideology or approach arises. In this respect, Black cultural nationalism is a response to white supremacist ideologies and rule.

Blackness is not the absolute nature of our being, but neither is it an ephemeral appendage to who we are. The greater than five-hundred-year history of colonialism, slavery and global apartheid creates blackness in such a way that it becomes a central pillar supporting the ways in which we can identify ourselves against, or with the world. It would be a mistake to either naturalize this process or consider it something we can simply transcend with sing-alongs and multicultural buffets. This history—which is our history—not only interpolates our consciousness but also constitutes underdevelopment on a global scale based on race and gender.

Along these lines the question of black ownership—historically voiced within the United States—is a colonial question. Indeed the history of black people in the

Americas is inextricably connected to colonialism. Colonialism informs and—given the dialectical relationship between imperialism and capitalism—demands the transatlantic slave trade. The institution of chattel slavery in the United States is unimaginable without the conquest and colonization of the Americas and Africa. The

79 disembodying of the economy—or when the unfettered drive for profit takes precedence over the ability to produce and work within a sustainable economy— ushers in European territorial expansion and supreme exploitation of labor at any cost to lives or life.

Within this context, national liberation—which is still a pressing question— is not a postcolonial state, but a process of decolonization. It remains meaningless to speak of postcoloniality—within a (neo)colonial reality—without at least a tentative vision or connecting praxis that demands and directs movement(s) from what is still a colonized time and space, toward and for a postcolonial world. In other words, marginalized narratives of the past must inform our understanding of the present and help us envision a future of justice. Black power as a political movement or as it informs political organization allows for a shifting of the term Black; a taking back, or more accurately, a reclamation of identity.

I see the Black Panther Party as a foundational pillar of both the black liberation struggle and as a cornerstone of contemporary radical political movements in the United States. In the late 1960s, “ many thousands of young black people, despite the potentially fatal outcome of their actions, joined the Black

Panther Party and dedicated their lives to revolutionary struggle” (Bloom and

Martin 2). And there is no other movement that so effectively linked the black liberation struggle and anti-imperialist/national liberation struggles throughout the formerly/formally colonized world. Even as the international abolitionist movement proved to be global in scope, organizational efforts were primarily focused on

Western sympathies. The Panthers, on the other hand, in the tradition of W.E.B

Dubois, and Malcolm X, shifted the spatiotemporal scope of black struggle in the

United States, revealing the connective tissues between race and class oppression in the United States and the colonial/neocolonial oppression of Asia, Africa, Latin

America and the Middle East. Bloom and Martin note that, “not since the Civil War almost a hundred and fifty years ago have so many people taken up arms in revolutionary struggle in the United States” (3). Even as the Panther’s revolutionary fervor that encouraged black people across the nation to see revolutionary rebellion as not only necessary, but possible, and picked up the gun, The Panther’s local programs were never limited to armed rebellion.

Through the Panther’s Survival Programs the Party built and maintained community based institutions: The Intercommunal News Service (Black Panther

Paper); Free Breakfast for School Children; Petition Campaign—Referendum for

Decentralized Police Departments; Liberation School/Intercommunal Youth

Institute; People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic; Free Clothing Program; Free

Bussing to Prisons Program; Seniors Against Fearful Environment (S.A.F.E); Sickle

Cell Anemia Research Foundation; Free Housing Cooperative Program; Free Shoe

Program; Free Pest Control Program; Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program;

Free Food Program; Child Development Center; and a Free Ambulance Program

(Jones and Jefferies). The Black Panther Party’s survival programs were about more than just survival though; they affected the way that people of the black community interacted with each other and institutions of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. As

Alondra Nelson takes up in Body and Soul, the Party’s community programs worked to create black agency to affect the people’s environment. Of course there was (at

81 times deadly) in-fighting—fueled to a large extent by state violence and counterintelligence—over the nature of revolution. But the Party’s work to create a national and an international people’s radical movement is special.

After the Party’s demise, many of the programs that the Panthers’ created were later taken up by the state or other organizations including the free breakfast for children program, free healthcare facilities, and the Panthers’ organizing around sickle cell anemia pushed the field of medicine to start paying attention to sickle cell disease. But the Party’s success shouldn’t be measured exclusively by these programs. These programs and the Panthers’ organizational efforts made revolution and black liberation seem possible and realizable.

I do not discount critiques of the party, many of which are necessary if we are to revive black power in the twenty-first century. The increasing centralization of

Party administration, the undervaluing of women’s labor, and the internal violence have been well documented and should inform how we analyze the Black Panther

Party. Romanticizing any historical moment or movement only separates that moment or movement from our time. But it is equally damaging to a radical reading and application of history to myopically focus on the Party’s, or any movement’s shortcomings. For this myopic focus truncates history just as effectively as romanticization.

CHAPTER FOUR

BLACK PANTHERS RELOADED

We were all sitting in a big circle around four classroom tables that had been pushed together to form one big rectangle, I suppose to create the sense that we were all participants in the discussion. It was our Program’s weekly colloquium; in this particular meeting, during my first year of graduate school, we discussed how to

“negotiate” the university. Our considerations revolved around the potential of academics to do progressive work in academic institutions that—as we all agreed— have been defined increasingly by liberal politics and neoliberal economics. I agreed with the group that it’s important to learn how to be strategic in working to carve out spaces within the institution, but, by invoking Assata Shakur’s analysis of the relationship between the political economic base and institutions of capitalism, I wanted to emphasize that it is also necessary for us all to remain constantly cognizant that the relationship between community intellectuals or academics and upper administrators is, at the end of the day, an antagonistic relationship. Our

Chair, an incredibly smart man and an accomplished and respected academic, seemed to get frustrated with my position. He responded, “Sky, in case you don’t know, we are in the middle of the Palouse; this is neither the time nor place of revolution.” I guess I didn’t know, but if I had, and if he were right, then wouldn’t it be our burden to make the Palouse a place of, and our time, the time for, revolution?

The university has a hard time coming to terms with black power in general and the Black Panther Party specifically. Now this is not to say that all academics have this same challenge. Indeed many academics either involved with the movement or involved in other ways with justice work help keep the movement moving. But when the disciplines of the movement, Ethnic Studies, Women’s

Studies, Critical Race Studies, et cetera are locked in the precarious position between chronic underfunding and institutional or corporate service, the university isn’t the most effective site to maintain the history of the Panthers. Today nearly fifty years since Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party

(For Self Defense), there are dozens of autobiographies, biographies or memoires about members of the Party and dozens more readers, anthologies of primary texts or academic analyses—academic manuscripts, anthologies, or articles that “review,”

“reexamine” or “reconsider” the Black Panther Party. Such is characteristic of the academic trend to try and remove politics from academic research. But this level of academic work is insufficient to maintain the history of the Panthers. The history of the Panthers—like the soundclash—is not a politically neutral history; it is the animation of history.

It is not enough to read, review, reexamine, or reconsider the Black Panther

Party. In our time, one in which the fundamental challenges that the Black Panthers

Party organized to meet and overcome continue to threaten black communities and the world, we need some stronger stuff. In this respect Sebastian Budgen, Stathis

Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek offer an active alternative in their introduction to their

84 recent collection that examines the significance of Lenin. They write that for them,

“Lenin”— who was also a pillar of Panther praxis—

is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite the

contrary, the Lenin that we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming,

the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown

into a catastrophic new constellation in which old reference points

proved useless, and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism. The

idea is that it is not enough simply to return to Lenin, like returning to

gaze at a painting or visit a tombstone, for we must repeat or reload

him: that is, we must retrieve the same impulse in today’s

constellation. This dialectical return to Lenin aims neither at

nostalgically reenacting the “good old revolutionary times” nor at the

opportunistic pragmatic adjustment of the old program to “new

conditions.” Rather, it aims at repeating, in the present global

conditions, the “Leninian” gesture of reinventing the revolutionary

project in the conditions of imperialism, colonialism, and world war—

more precisely, after the politico-ideological collapse of the long era of

progressivism in the catastrophe of 1914. … What Lenin did for 1914,

we should do for our times.” (Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek 3-4)

Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek’s move here, in which they attempt not only to produce another analysis of Lenin, but to help create a contemporary praxis of

Lenin, challenges the assumptions of most academic work and the assumption of many academics that they have the key to understanding social and structural

85 change. “If only the common man understood, then the world would be better; if only people understood race, for instance, then racism would end.” No, realization— the dialectic between conceptual and material—is in the doing. Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek’s call to repeat or reload Lenin shifts our role from historical observer to historical agent. The Black Panther Party took up this mantel, applying or reloading

Lenin, Marx, Mao, and Malcolm. And what the Panthers did for 1966, we should do for our times. We must revive and revise the Black Panther Party—we must reload the Panthers.

There is a liberal tendency to espouse “revolutionary” desires but eschew radical politics. And while many liberals rationalize this contradiction away with claims of pragmatism, such claims reveal an alienation from one’s time and space, or a pessimism that one cannot change her world. Now this isn’t to say that every time and every space is ripe for revolution, but that every revolutionary moment and every site of revolution is a product of the people’s labor. Of course the reverse is also true; any reactionary timespace is also produced. As such, at our current historical juncture, liberal “realism” inspires a political paralysis that is culpable in the lack of radical politics in liberal circles. Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek write, “At a time when global capitalism appears as the only game in town and the liberal- democratic system as the optimal political organization of society, it has indeed become easier to imagine the end of the world than a far more modest change in the mode of production” (1). This illusion of the inevitability of capitalism and the primacy of liberal politics is devastating for the poor and communities of color. For the current system, that continues to restrict people’s access to time and space does

86 so unevenly and if we don’t create alternative times and spaces—revolutionary time and space—the limited choice that the most economically vulnerable are already forced into, fight or die, will become even more acute.

Critiquing the passive liberal accounting of the 1960s, that “revolution was in the air,” Bloom and Martin respond,

We do not especially favor the subtler implications of this

formulation. Much like the “structuralism” of the political opportunity

thesis, this view treats the question of whether revolution was “in the

air” as exogenous to movement dynamics. In our view, the advent of

effective revolutionary political practices itself makes revolutionary

ideology more broadly appealing, putting revolution “in the air.” Thus,

while the broad political climate has a strong effect on the reception of

a movement’s political practices, it is itself contingent, and highly

susceptible to change, often driven by the practices of movement

activists themselves.” (Bloom and Martin 483-4)

From this perspective, one does not wait for the right time for revolution, it is our responsibility, our “challenge and burden” to make the conditions for revolution.

While I owe a great deal to the academics and intellectuals who have analyzed the history of the Black Panther Party, for documenting that history, and correcting inaccuracies and misinformation of the state or that were fueled by white anxieties, we need more. The Black Panther Party worked to reload Lenin, Mao and

Malcolm to build revolution in its time. Part of the problem in simple reexaminations of or reconsidering the Panthers is that the discussion never moves

87 beyond critique or analysis. Consider the edited collection The Black Panther Party

Reconsidered and the introduction to this collection: “Reconsidering Panther

History: The Untold Story.” The anthology does a nice job responding to reactionary platitudes that cast the Black Panther Party as an anti-white hate group, violent criminal organization or a patriarchal sexist sect, and this is necessary work. The collection addresses the gap in previous scholarship that had been informed by both the state’s dissemination of counterintelligence, and by white anxieties. But if we use this as the bar by which we interrogate black power, we sap the significance of the history of the Party from our current condition.

My point here isn’t just to critique the work on or the Party itself; I start with the assumption that the Panthers and the banner of black power crafted by the

Black Panthers represents a crucial and radical and transformative construction of the black liberation movement. At this point we do not know if the Black Panthers had not been formed, if there would have been another alternative revolutionary movement, but we can say that the Black Panther Party changed our world in some really dramatic ways. The Panthers pushed health research and increased concern for health of the black community. The Party changed the academy by demanding that schools, colleges and universities respond to the people’s needs and helped create new spaces in education including Black Studies. (The movement’s effect on education also influenced Wallerstien’s understanding of world-systems analysis.)

The Panthers created a free breakfast for children program that was later instituted by the state. And the Party provided a foundation for radical politics that is both global and dialectical. So critiques of the Black Panther Party are necessary for what

88 those critiques show us about forging our own revolutionary spacetime. This work is especially necessary to correct the misinformation that limits our ability to ground the panthers in the black liberation struggle (C. Jones 8-9). But it is also important that we not let that misinformation dictate how we value the significance of the Panthers. While critiques of the Black Panther Party are a necessary component of what we learn for contemporary party building, that level of academic critique is insufficient for applying the historical significance of the Panthers to contemporary conditions. Reloading the Panthers isn’t about a romantic interpretation of the movement and Panther aesthetics. Reloading the Black Panther

Party means applying the theoretical and organizational frameworks.

The perspective that Black Panther Party is simply an organization of a revolutionary time pushes a level of critique that interprets the Party’s shortcomings and destruction as the Panther’s inability to take advantage of their time and characterizes the Party as a failed opportunity. This also removes any responsibility from the critic. For if the Panthers failed in their “revolutionary” time, what hope is there in our time? Furthermore, remaining at the level of critique never allows us to consider the radical praxis of the Party. Just as significantly however, if we only interpret the Party as an effect of their time, we efface the

Party’s revolutionary spirit.

In order to reload the Panthers and recharge our time with revolutionary fervor we need more than critiques of former movements, we need to apply our connection to our time and place. What many of these works that deconstruct or only negatively critique the Party have in common is that they attribute the

89 destruction of the BPP to internal causes. There were, to be sure, internal conflicts and contradictions within the Black Panther Party. In fact, conflict and contradictions are necessary to any revolutionary movement. But as much of the scholarship on the Panthers focuses on these internal conflicts as effects fo Panther culture or cults of personality, they miss the more pressing and transformative lesson: The Party’s dialectical praxis to respond to its contradictions. It is this process that allows the Party to respond—at times in revolutionary ways—to sexism, heterosexism, internal violence and interracial or international alliances.

Freedom Dreaming

Terms that emphasize the imagination such as, “black liberation dreams,”

“Freedom dreams,” “imaginary,” or “utopian vision” have been employed or appropriated by many academics to characterize strategic methods for confronting the “intellectual hegemony” that dominates colonial and internal colonial thought.

Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams is one such work that sharply identifies creativity and poetics as necessary elements of social movements or justice work.

But this work also at times obscures the dialectic of praxis. While Kelley is careful to note that “revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge,” his interrogation of the connective tissues between our capacity to dream “freedom dreams” and the work that activists and organizers do to create the time and space to dream a future prioritizes imagination (8). Furthermore, Kelly positions these black freedom dreams at the

90 end of a grand arc that begins in our individual or collective imagination but disconnected from the material world and labor.

If I stick with the language of dreaming for a moment, even though I feel it’s obfuscating and imprecise, dreams don’t work like that. When we dream, our material environment continues to shape our dreams. For instance, as a parent, I might (however improbable) be having a peaceful dream, but if my body hears a crying child, that dream changes even before I wake. Similarly visions of the future are divined from the work the people do. I do not think that academics do not understand this, but it is easier to skip over the meaningful dialectic of praxis than it is to come to terms with the inadequacies of the academic profession as a whole. By no means do I contend that there are not a number of academics who do or have done this work. Angela Davis immediately comes to mind, but those who do, do so in spite of the institutional constraints of the profession. And Davis’s professional trajectory bears this point out.

Distinguishing Marx from the utopian thinkers of his day, Bartell Ollman characterizes utopian thinkers as those who prioritize their visions of the future over analysis of and action in their contemporary world. “What determines one’s classification, therefore, is the degree of importance given to wishes and hopes in constructing the ideal and the relative importance of this ideal in one’s subsequent thinking and actions” (Ollman). Distinguishing Marx from this ilk, Ollman characterizes Marx as one who rigorously analyzed the capitalist mode of production as it existed in (his) time and then sought out to interrogate the historic preconditions that allowed for the realization of the capitalist production of his time

91 by asking, “what had to have happened in the past for capitalism to appear and function as it does now?” (This is in a way the reverse of Andre Gunder Frank’s methodology.) Ollman then illustrates the next step in Marx’s method: Marx uses what he learned about the preconditions and contradictions that allowed for the development of capitalism to project an image of his world and the future. “By following this procedure, Marx, is able to conceive of the present as the future of its past which is in the process of becoming the past of its own future” (Ollman).

The academy (and all institutions of the current system) does not and cannot provide the time nor space to actualize creative and revolutionary praxis. In order to respond to these institutional limitations we must carve out liberatory spaces, and

Marx’s historiographic methodology is key in this respect. Harvey argues that the

“purity of any utopianism of process inevitably gets upset by its manner of spatialization” (179). So while the language of “dreams,” “imagination,” and

“visions” does not upset the institutions, putting those dreams to work does.

“Struggle—which is the only way that social justice can be advanced—is never without danger of violence. How that potential for violence is policed, encapsulated in law, sublimated in design, or turned toward either regressive or progressive ends makes all the difference in the world (Mitchell 5). Utopian dreams cannot be realized with utopian visions but by creative praxis.

In “How Not to be a Slave,” Kevin Young writes,

Rather than stay in their place, the slaves imagined a new one.

Remapping was for the slave a necessary form of survival—

reconfiguring the American landscape as Egypt or Canaan in order to

shore up (and keep secret) their search for freedom. At times

allegorical, always coded, such remappings—a kind of storying—

provided a set of radical metaphors for the slave’s exile. (Young 21)

Young suggests that in order to achieve freedom, we must first imagine freedom.

And while Young notes that this imagination is only an initial step, I want to emphasize that imagination, or mental imaging is temporally linked to activity. I mean temporally in both senses of the term. What we can imagine is intimately connected to what we do and what we think; and what we do isn’t just an A—B, cause and effect relationship but rather a dialectical process. Thus imagination is not purely a mental process. Just as time has no meaning independent of the material world/space, our thoughts, at least in this world, cannot be ripped from our actions. So as slaves imagined freedom they also worked to eke out freedom in the material world whether they escaped, slowed their pace, sabotaged production, or simply held on to or helped create a black way of seeing. The imagination and action work together. While Young identifies a degree of primacy of the imagination, I believe Young understands that there are mutual affects between imagination and action. He writes that “the black imagination involves much that is hidden squirreled away, storied” (23). So in characterizing black imagination Young uses verbs that signify physical actions, even if the physical effort is to hide an emotion.

I’ll return to this concept of the primacy of imagination shortly, for this approach to theory, academic work and practice is a necessary consideration for black power.

But I don’t want to move my discussion too far before I take up Young’s crucial argument here. Young identifies a number of ways in which slaves, self-

93 emancipated or free blacks in the United States, used “storying” or other methods to claim their agency and “not be a slave,” such as Harriet Jacobs’ use of storying or the use of diversion for freedom—an alternative timespace.

As Jacobs escaped from slavery, she spent seven years hiding in a crawl space in her grandmother’s quarters just a short distance from the slave owner who claimed her. During this time, Jacobs had letters that she wrote and sent from, or as if from, the north. Young notes, “Jacobs stories a series of letters ironically giving her more freedom in the sough. In doing so, Jacobs creates a counterfeit epistolary

‘loophole’ to match her physical one; this in turn increases her physical freedom”

(28). Young’s analysis, and concept of storying, points to the dynamic and materially engaged act of creating alternative timespace. Storying is not just conceptual but embedded in one’s effect on her environment.

In considering the ongoing relevance of and necessity to revive and revise black power, it is necessary to directly confront, critique, and combat the political economic conditions that continue to deny the people’s right to healthy and sustainable life. For without this critique scholarship or praxis gets lost in abstractions and obfuscations. It’s not good enough to theorize or historicize space even global space; we must ground our praxis in our material world as we imagine new possibilities. Of course this isn’t a linear process in which one’s survival or survival programs lead to revolutionary change or where one’s revolutionary imagination satisfies the people’s survival, but rather a realization of the dialectical process. The Panther Ten-Point Program remains significant in this regard. The final point reads, “ We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and

94 people’s community control of modern technology.” In this line the idealistic constructions, “justice” and “peace,” are embedded in and sandwiched between their basic—but no less radical—material demands. The Panther program rooted its vision of a future of justice and peace in the material realities of the people. And the

Party’s work in the community continues to inform and was informed by their vision of the future. My point here is that in order to understand the significance of the black power movement to our contemporary world, we must be clear headed about, and rigorous in, our analysis of the challenges that we face, the challenges that demand a contemporary black power movement.

The Black Panther spatial projects, community police patrols, breakfast programs, schools health programs created revolutionary sites which foster people’s relationship with time. The alienating aspects of U.S. racism mirror the alienation and degradation of colonialism and it’s a result of these similarities that black power activist intellectuals began to apply the colonial framework to black communities in the United States.

Along these lines, there is no greater obstacle to the possibility of a future, any future much less one based on justice and peace, than capitalism and its dominant expression—U.S. imperialism. The black liberation movement, including the black power movement, has always been clear on this point. From Frantz Fanon, to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, from the Third World Liberation Front to The

Black Panther paper and Emery Douglass’s artwork, all sustained a protracted critique and condemnation of capitalism and U.S. imperialism as the twin obstacles to the security and health of black communities. That being said, the time sense and

95 spaces that capitalism creates have changed in the last forty years, and while this change has not been an epochal break, it does demand a revision of previous black power strategies.

Political Power Grows (Like a Flower) out of the Barrel of a Gun

In The Art of Protest, T. V. Reed considers the significance of the Black

Panther Party to social justice movements and cultural movements. His chapter

“Scenarios for Revolution: The Drama of the Black Panthers,” reflects upon the

Panther’s import through a cultural lens. Reed does a wonderful job critiquing sensationalized readings of the Panthers armed resistance and shootouts, focusing instead on the day to day organizational efforts and international alliance building

(67). He also provides a nuanced reading of the Panthers’ decline and positions internal conflicts of the Party and individual conflicts in the context of state violence and social dis-ease.

But in focusing on culture, or the cultural impacts, of the Panthers, T.V. Reed characterizes the arming of the Panthers as a type of street theatre, a theatre that, because of the Party’s political naiveté blurred the lines between the spectacle and armed rebellion. He recalls Frantz Fanon’s position that “in revolutionary situations, symbolic violence could turn into armed struggle.” And then argues that “the late

1960’s in America was not a revolutionary situation in the military sense” (61).

Unlike the expressions of flower power as spectacle inspired by Allen

Ginsberg, the Black Panther Party organized not to garner white America’s

96 sympathy but to shift the local landscape. If not for the influence of the Black

Panther Party that led to thousands of Panthers picking up the gun to fight against

U.S. imperialism and for revolutionary change how many young brothers would have passively picked up the gun to fight an imperialist war against the Vietnamese.

Curtis Austin writes, “that violence, whether internal or external, rhetorical or real, psychological or physical, constituted the central element driving the group’s decision-making process (Austin xxi).

T.V. Reed sees the arming of the Panthers as a theatrical demonstration and

Panther militancy of the Panthers as an element of a culture of militaristic bureaucracy, but this leaves out the time/space specific reality of young black men in the 1960s and 70s. Thousands of Black Panthers armed themselves ready to engage a revolutionary struggle and fight an armed rebellion to fight U.S. imperialism, capitalism and racism. To claim that the 1960s was “not a revolutionary situation in the military sense” projects our time backwards. That the

Black Panther Party did not create an armed revolution, does not mean that the

Panthers could not have been part of creating revolution. Just as importantly, the

Panthers armed rebellion may have affected, to a lesser or greater degree, other revolutionary struggles or opportunities for U.S. imperialism.

My point here is not to call for armed rebellion, but to bring in to focus how the anti-revolutionary, or ahistorical, critiques of armed rebellion rejects the possibility of creating revolutionary time and space. By assuming the time of armed revolution is dead, one adopts a type of progressive time sense that has the potential to deactivate history. The success of armed rebellion is directly proportional to

97 organization and the people’s support. Before we start attempting to define future movements, we should take responsibility for our spacetime. Malcolm X’s often cited call remains pertinent: justice “by any means necessary.”

Foregrounding the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 as an example of a return to outright military aggression (formal colonialism) to institute economic, or neo-colonialism, Arundhati Roy disrupts the postcolonial assertion that the world has moved beyond the direct and outright violence of the colonial era. Furthermore, she argues that “The Iraqi resistance if fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.” She continues,

before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct a

secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up

our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. government and its allies

to withdraw from Iraq. The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the

frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our

battle (Roy).

The fact that it is our battle, if we want to engage it or not, as was evidenced in the 2005 state response to Hurricane Katrina. Following the Hurricane and flooding of the city that left the City’s most vulnerable stranded in their own city.

Kathleen Blanco announced a zero tolerance policy concerning “looters.” She noted that she was deploying the National Guard and gave them orders to “shoot to kill any perceived looters. She continued, “they are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets. They

98 have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so” (“Troops Told ‘Shoot to Kill’”).

A number of folks have emphasized the Panther’s guns, violence, violent rhetoric, criminal activities, coercive tactics, in fighting, or celebration of street culture to mark the Party’s self destruction or to argue that the party eased state- sanctioned erasure (Theoharis 2003; Auerbach 2005). Many of these articles reveal a middle-class familiarity and identification with the ideological state apparatus, interpreting the state as a neutral player in political movements. These critiques under estimate, if they even recognize the force and violence of COINTELPRO. From this position Chris Booker rails against the “lumpenization” of the Panthers. He writes,

Male-female relationships in the lumpen culture are undergirded by a

lack of respect. The significance of the reality and legend of the Black

pimp, for instance, is a good example of the material factor anchoring

sexism within the male-dominated lumpen sociocultural milieu.

Unfortunately, lumpen values impacted gender dynamics in the Party,

particularly during its formative years” (354).

So Booker sees antagonistic gender relationships as a comprising element of lumpen culture, and more precisely black lumpen culture. What goes unsaid, but is no less suggested, is that middle class and working class culture is somehow not anchored in sexism and patriarchy. Booker later notes that “lumpen behavior made the organization susceptible to government repression” (354). While it would be ludicrous to suggest that sexism was not a part of the Panthers, it would be even

99 more absurd to suggest that sexism was not a part of every other organization in the

United States. In fact, the Panther’s praxis that allowed the Party to respond, in meaningful ways, to sexism and heterosexism was far more threatening to state power than the Party’s so-called “male-dominated sociocultural milieu.” Two thirds of the Party were women, and many held leadership roles. Elaine Brown even held the top position for a while.

Booker goes on to argue,

On many occasions, throughout their existence as an organization, the

Panthers seemed to reduce politics entirely to a question of military

action. Shortly before his assassination, Fred Hampton of the Chicago

branch, said in reference to the police, “If you kill a few, you get a little

satisfaction. But when you kill them ALL you get complete satisfaction.

(Booker 354)

Booker’s reading of Hampton is either inaccurate or purposefully misleading.

Booker reduces Hampton’s call for the Party to lead and work for the community to an empty call for violence against the police. In fact Hampton is arguing that the

Party Shouldn’t indiscriminately start killing police because the community isn’t ready for that step yet. It is important to consider Hampton’s message here,

A lot of these people will go up to you in a minute and say, ’Why all

these people being taken, why haven’t they shot it out with some pigs.’

Well, what do we say? If you kill a few, you get a little satisfaction. But

when you can kill them ALL you get complete satisfaction. That’s why

we haven’t moved. We have to organize the people. We have to

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educate the people. We have to arm the people. We have to teach

them about revolutionary political power. And when they understang

all that we won’t be killing no few and getting no little satisfaction,

we’ll be killing ‘em all and getting complete satisfaction. So what

should we do if we’re the vanguard? What is it right to do? Is it right

for the leadership of the struggle to go faster than the followers of that

struggle can go? NO! We’re not going to be dealing in commandism,

we’re not going to be dealing in no tailism. We say that just as fast as

the people can possibly go, that’s just as fast as we can take it.

(Hampton 142).

To interpret this as a call to start “offing the pigs,” misses Hampton’s point and ignores his message: Moving with the people, organizing among the people, is how the Party activates a revolutionary spacetime. As István Mészáros puts it:

In this sense the historical time of humanity transcends the time of

individuals—bringing with it the most fundamental dimension of

value—but remaining at the same time in a dialectical sense

inseparable from it. Accordingly, only through the closest

interrelationship between the individuals and humanity can a proper

value system be established and further developed—both expanded

and intensified—in the course of history. Humanity is not acting on its

own, but through the intervention of particular individuals in the

historical process, inseparably from the social groups to which the

individuals belong as social subjects. (Mészáros 37)

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Newton notes, “the only time an action is revolutionary is when the people relate to it in a revolutionary way. If they will not use the example you set, then no matter how many guns you have your action is not revolutionary” (Newton Reader

204). In my analysis of black power, I focus on the Black Panther Party not because the Party represents an aberration from the black liberation struggle, but because I see the theory and practice of the Panthers as a culmination of the long struggle and with specifically radical/revolutionary intent and international scope. Begins with the first anti-colonial/slavery rebellions of African peoples and continues through the twenty-first century.

There are two primary problems with liberal critiques of armed struggle.

One, this perspective emphasizes the Panther’s guns as the weak link within the

Program that allowed the state to destroy the party. Two, liberal critique that emphasizes particular strategies over the work to create a revolutionary context.

This isn’t to argue that armed rebellion is necessary to revolution, but that the key ingredient to revolution or black power is the alliance between the people and the party. So critiques that start with denying the potential or the inherent futility of armed rebellion assume that there needs to be certain revolutionary conditions before revolutionaries. I’m not arguing that revolution is possible at any time in anyplace. What I’m saying is that people make a spacetime revolutionary.

Revive, Revise—Reload

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What has also changed is the degree of global capitalism. Whereas in the 1960s there was a bigger buffer between the U.S. economy and Asian, African, Latin

American and European markets those barriers have been destroyed such that the

U.S. economy is intimately dependent upon global production, consumption and trade. This opens up avenues for revolutionary “constituencies” that Bloom and

Martin haven’t imagined.

Huey Newton himself in tracking the Panther’s ideological and practical path from black nationalism to intercommunalism, identifies how technology and the development of new technologies creates new spaces and thus necessitates new strategies. “Technology developed until there was a definite qualitiative transformation in the relationships within and between nations” (Newton Reader

186).

Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. do a really wonderful job contextualizing the spatiotemporal context of the Black Panther Party. They also do a nice job interrogating how the Panthers colonial metaphor influenced the Party’s understanding of space and thus informed the Party’s understanding of space and the revolution. What’s equally important though is to reckon with the how the Party helped create a revolutionary accounting of time. Revolutionary time historicizes capitalism/imperialism and measures time by (the) people’s movement rather than the charting to the clock. Here movement is more than just organizing but people working to produce the next moment. “Change, destroy and rebuild. It is time for us to build a world free of selfishness, racism, narrow nationalism and the desire of any group of people to claim this world as their own. The universe belongs to the

103 people—to live to create—for each other.” (In BPP revisited 349. Ericka Huggins,

“Revolution in Our Lifetime,” The Black Panther, 9 Jan 1971, 5.)

“ Reorientation [of black political movement] means an emphasis on the dignity of man, not on the sanctity of property. It means the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society, not an indication of laziness or lack of initiative. The creation of new values means the establishment of a society based as [John O.] Killens expresses it in Black Man’s Burden, on ‘free people,’ not ‘free enterprise.’ To do this means to modernize—indeed, to civilize— this country” (Ture and Hamilton 41). “Radicals in their radicalism must abolish racial boundaries; they must throw off the American psychology which either completely ignores Negroes or gives them very little significance” (McKay 39).

Blacks in our blackness must abolish our middle-class desires. We must throw off the American psycology that completely ignores our humanity and our relationship to the people of the world.

So the question of the timing of revolution and the assertion that this is a reactionary time in the United States is all based on myopically U.S. focused analysis.

All mass movements have taken shape on much broader scales, this is a time of revolution we just have to ask ourselves how are we positioned in the ongoing tectonic shift? What’s more, The people of Asia, Africa and Latin America continue to create the climate of revolution. Nepal, Venezuela, Bolivia. The same is true of those critics, activists or academics who are quick to call an historic end to armed rebellion. Citing the state’s superior capacity to wage violence, seemingly overwhelming capacity to exact violence against anyone it deems a threat, many

104 argue that armed rebellion is an old and self-defeating strategy. But the potential in any rebellion or activism is always connected to the connective tissues linking the action and actors to the broader community.

It is always possible that revolutionary movements are crushed by state violence economic pressure: “However, as one Zapatista in La Realidad replied in response to this possibility of state repression: ‘They want to bury us, but they have forgotten that we are seeds’” (qtd in Hesketh 14).

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CONCLUSION

You don't bring people freedom; you find it among them. And working in

that fashion is the way that you free your mind.

—Immortal Technique

In these lines Immortal Technique presents an alternative paradigm that confronts both the U.S. imperialist rhetoric that attempts to characterize U.S. military operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan as democratic operations, and the inversely formulated perspective that strong leaders, or community messiahs create social movements. Moreover, the pivotal conditional, “working in that fashion,” foregrounds the labor involved in building social movement(s).

Working among, not just for, or on, the people, means transforming power relationships within justice movements and larger structures. In a U.S. context,

James Wilson notes, “Negroes tended to be the objects rather than the subjects of civic action. Things are often done for, or about, or to, or because of Negroes, but they are less frequently done by Negroes” (qtd. in Ture and Hamilton 43). In organizing and by working among the people, the Black Panther Party, in the tradition of the Lowndes County Black Panther Party, addressed this tendency. The

Party’s Free Breakfast Programs, free healthcare centers, and schools created community operated institutions and fostered the development of political black subjects.

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The film, The (R)evolution of Immortal Technique, from which I have drawn the above epigraph, chronicles the time Technique spent in his birthplace, Lima,

Peru, his home, Harlem, New York, and documents his 2009 trip to help open an orphanage, school and medical facility in Kabul, Afghanistan. As the camera captures him walking through the streets of all three cities, sites that have been economically depressed and militarized, he observes,

The so-called Third World countries might all speak different

languages, but our struggles are very much the same. We’ve

experienced war, genocide, revolution, occupation, and our roots are

based in some of the greatest civilizations. Our stories of colonization

sound so similar, that sometimes they even make the streets look the

same.

Technique’s message here is important, but I would like to make a necessary observation. While our struggles are systemically linked to a common political economic system, capitalism, they are not the same. Place still matters, and we have to be able to identify the specific challenges in whatever place we are located, in order to be able to carve out revolutionary spaces. Fighting to abolish the prison industrial complex, for instance, is different from fighting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Our challenge is to be able to address those specifics and coordinate our efforts.

Technique’s underlying message here is so important because he sees similarities across struggles for liberation, but also because he roots the development of any specific methods to the people.

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The politics of, and non-ranking structure that informs the title of spokesperson (or spokespeople) for Mexico’s National Zapatista Liberation Army

(EZLN) exemplifies Technique’s position. Indigenous communities organized the current Zapatista movement—in the tradition of Emiliano Zapata’s commitment to land reform—in the1980s to respond to the ongoing occupation of their lands. But with President Salinas’ 1992 modification of Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, a move that signaled the end of community held land (ejidos), and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the EZLN initiated a new phase of the struggle by taking up arms and temporarily reclaiming a number of public centers and hundreds of ranches throughout the southern state of Chiapas.

Since that effort, the Mexican government has deployed massive military resources to restrict the people’s movements and wear down the resistance. In the face of this occupation, the EZLN continues to build and operate autonomous schools, collectivized healthcare facilities and subsistence cooperatives.

From 1994 until May of 2014 Subcomandante Marcos was the most public figure of the Zapatista rebellion; most public figure, not leader. Always publicly presented beneath a balaclava Marcos was not a leader but a character, or a

“colorful ruse,” to make people see what for over five-hundred years, they have been trained not to see, the subjectivity of indigenous people. (Many people have speculated on who wears the mask; this speculation, though, misses the point.) The title, Subcomandante identifies Marcos as beholden to the Zapatista Army and the people. Zapatistas created Insurgente Marcos as a character to make the people’s movement and desires visible to those outside. In his speech that announces the

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EZLN’s retirement of Subcomandante Marcos, he announces, “it is our conviction and our practice that in order to rebel and to struggle, neither leaders nor bosses nor messiahs nor saviors are necessary. To struggle, one only needs a sense of shame, a bit of dignity, and a lot of organizing.” Here we might read “shame” and

“dignity” as the dialectic of critical self-reflection. Marcos, in his farewell, continues to foreground the people’s movement, rebellion and resistance over commands from on high.

In August 2014, Comandante Tacho, on behalf of the Indigenous

Revolutionary Clandestine Committee, spoke at the First Exchange of indigenous

Peoples of Mexico with Zapatista Peoples (Rohana). Tacho took this opportunity to express the Zapatistas’ alliance with the Palestinian people. At this time, Operation

Protective Edge, Israel’s two-month long military attack on Gaza that killed over two thousand Palestinians, including over five hundred children, and wounded tens of thousands of Gazans, was in full swing. Tacho notes,

We hear and read what they say about “the conflict in Gaza,” as if

there were two equal forces confronting each other, and as if saying

‘conflict’ would hide the death and destruction such that death would

not kill and destruction would not destroy. But as the indigenous

people that we are, we know that what is happening there is not a

“conflict” but a MASSACRE, that the government of Israel is carrying

out a war of extermination upon the PALESTINIAN people. Everything

else is just words to try and hide reality. But we also know, as the

indigenous people that we are, that the PALESTINIAN people will

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resist and will rise again, that they will once again begin to walk and

that they will know then that, although we are far away on the map,

the Zapatista peoples embrace them today as we have before, as we

always do, with our collective heart.

Tacho’s statement reflects a solidarity with the Palestinian people and an understanding of the similarities between the Zapatista’s fight against colonization and the Palestinian struggle against occupation. And these similarities are not by chance, but by design.

In 2013, Mexico’s newly-appointed Secretary of Public Security in Chiapas announced that “discussions had taken place between his office and the Israeli

Defense Ministry. The two countries talked about security coordination at the level of police, prisons and effective use of technology” (Johnson and Quiquivix). While the Mexican government announced these discussions publicly, the collusion between the Mexican and Israeli states is not new. In response to the 1994 Zapatista uprising, Israel was among a handful of counties that secretly supported Mexico’s war on the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico and “provided training to

Mexican military and police forces” to squash the Zapatista rebellion (Doyle;

Johnson and Quiquivix). The state institutions that continue to suppress the

Zapatista rebellion and those that occupy, isolate and attack Palestinian territories are not the same, but they maintain many political economic links and share resources in a way that attempts to regulate who has access to space and the right to time.

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The summer of 2014 brings into sharp contrast the contradiction between the people’s time and right to space, and state violence. This contradiction, I argue, is characteristic of the modern state’s complicity in maintaining a capitalist spatiotemporality. It is not that any specific example of state violence is the archetype of state violence and anti-people production of spacetime, but that any one example of state violence should be interpreted through a lens that brings into focus the political economic links that mark our world.

On August 9th, as Israel continued its Operation Protective Edge, a Ferguson,

Missouri police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an unarmed black teenager,

Michael Brown. Multiple witness accounts attest that following a struggle, Wilson shot Michael Brown multiple times, first in the back, then in the front, as Brown was trying to retreat (Kaye; Clarke and Lett). This incident, one not unlike countless others including the murders of Kenneth Chamberlain, Oscar Grant and Trayvon

Martin, and the state violence that followed in the days to come, reflect the operation of modern state security.

The state’s terms, “national security” and “homeland security” are reminiscent of Orwellian newspeak in this respect and obscures the state’s complicity in maintaining a capitalist timespace. Similar to the weeks following

Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, during which time the Louisiana Governor sent the National Guard to protect property from dehydrated and hungry people,

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon recently issued an executive order to call a precautionary state of emergency to activate the National Guard in order to

111 dissuade civil unrest/protest or rebellion in the event that Darren Wilson is not criminally charged with Brown’s murder.

In the weeks that followed Michael Brown’s murder, as people took to the streets to protest the protracted assault on Missouri’s black communities, the State’s police departments responded in military fashion with armed vehicles and so-called riot gear that a former Marine catalogues for us:

What we’re seeing here is a gaggle of cops wearing more elite killing

gear than your average squad leader leading a foot patrol through the

most hostile sands or hill of Afghanistan. They are equipped with

Kevlar helmets, assault-friendly gas masks, combat gloves and knee

pads, woodland Marine Pattern utility trousers, tactical body armor

vests, about 120 to 180 rounds for each shooter, semiautomatic

pistols attached to their thighs, disposable handcuff restraints, close-

quarter battle receivers for their M4 carbine rifles and Advanced

Combat Optical Gunsights. In other words they’re itching for a fight. A

big one. (Rubin)

The Missouri police have spent weeks aiming their rifles at protesters, or anyone in the community, to create order, but order for whom? Or maybe, more accurately, what? The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has characterized the recent events in

Ferguson as yet another theatre of “Operation Ghetto Storm,” the ongoing assault on communities of color in the United States. And not so coincidentally, this Operation also sustains intimate links to Israel’s Operation Protective Edge.

112

Rania Khalek writes, “Decades of testing and perfecting methods of domination and control on a captive disenfranchise Palestinian population has given rise to a booming ‘homeland security industry’ in Israel that refashions occupation- style repression for use on marginalized populations in other parts of the world, including St. Louis.” Khalek also notes that two out of the four policing agencies that were deployed in Ferguson had recently (in the last couple of years) received training from Israeli security forces. Avi Ashkenazi contextualized this fact noting,

“at this point (in our so-called post 9/11 world) it would be hard to find a police department in any major city that has not received Israeli ‘counterterrorism’ training. The New York Police Department even maintains a branch of the NYPD in

Kfar Saba, Israel.” It is important to note here, though, that Israel’s booming security industry is supported and maintained by U.S. imperialism and the U.S. military industrial complex. Conservative estimates indicate that since World War II, the

United States had given Israel well over 100 billion dollars in aid, nearly all of it military aid. Just in 2014, the United States provided three-and-a-half billion dollars in military aid to Israel and nearly eight billion in loan guarantees. So Israeli occupation of Palestine is not just a local state conflict but an effect of U.S. imperialism.

This is our charge: to see, clearly, the relationship between our struggle against racism in the United States and the people’s struggles against global capitalism and U.S. imperialism in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Malcolm X’s call that I have cited earlier continues to be informative in this respect.

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I would like to impress the importance of realizing a direct connection

between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the

struggle of our people all over the world. As long as we think that we

should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the

Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out. Not until you

start realizing your connection with the Congo. We have to realize

what part our struggle has in the over-all world struggle. (Malcolm X)

In order to do this we must see how capitalist spacetime—and U.S. imperialism, as the primary state structure of global capitalism—affects our world.

In order to realize justice, we must work to create alternative and revolutionary spaces and develop a new accounting of time. What this means, in part, is redefining our connections or alliances among peoples’ organizational movements, or how we position ourselves with or against U.S. imperialism. Only then will we be able to break from this current historic bloc, and break from the continuity of criminal-justice that continues to recreate colonies, the colonized and mass incarceration.

Kwame Ture writes, “We are going to extend our fight internationally and we are going to hook up with the Third World. It is the only salvation—we are fighting to save our humanity. We are indeed fighting to save the humanity of the world, which the West has failed miserably to preserve. And the fight must be waged from the Third World” (93). But this fight that Ture suggests must be waged from the

Third World cannot be considered either peripheral to our communities, or even a struggle that can be waged outside of ourselves. As Audre Lorde notes, “the 60s

114 should teach us how important it is not to lie to ourselves. Not to believe that revolution is a one-time event, or something that happens around us rather than inside us” (141).

It is only by way of a critical systemic analysis that we can continually develop and nurture these revolutionary spaces. In a 1983 article June Jordan wrote of her experiences in Nicaragua following the Sandinista revolution. Jordan recalled how, “in 1969, ten years before the Sandinista victory, the FSLN (Sandinista Front of

National Liberation) published the thirteen articles of its program. This is Article XI,

Section B: ‘It will support the struggle of the Black people and all people of the

United States for an authentic democracy and equal rights’” (56). So as the FSLN waged a revolutionary struggle against the Somoza dynasty and bourgeois rule— connected as they were to U.S. financial interests and State support—they worked to forge revolutionary connections with Black liberation movements in the United

States. Her trip to Nicaragua helped Jordan to conclude that, “perhaps the most important contribution we can make to international justice is just this: Stop United

States’ collaboration with the enemies of self-determination” (145). In this context, the United States is more than just the State. Jordan’s pronouncement pushes those concerned with social justice to disturb and disrupt political-class alliances not only between the U.S. government and the Contras, but between all profiteers of alienation and exploitation. And, in fact, this proves to be a necessary contribution to realize Black Power.

During the August 2014, Block the Boat protest at the port of Oakland, hundreds of Bay area activists organized to block the Israeli cargo ship ZIM Piraeus

115 from docking. The organizers stopped the cargo ship from docking for several days by forming a barrier around street entrances to the port. Oakland longshoremen would not cross the line. And as the police presence increased, the International

Longshore and Warehouse Union President of Local 10 responded, “We will not work under armed police escort—not with our experience with the police in this community” (“Longshore Workers”). When the ship was able to dock several days later, only some of the cargo was unloaded due to a shortage of available labor on the dock. The protesters held a banner outside the gates that read “Ferguson,

Oakland, Gaza—INTIFADA.” That same month, United Parcel Service part-time handlers in Minneapolis refused to ship packages that they identified in their station as being shipped from a law enforcement supply company to Missouri law enforcement. Many of them took pictures with the packages as they held signs reading, “Hands up, don’t ship.”

Black Power is not just about large-scale movements, it demands everyday organizing, in your productive capacity to affect spacetime. This can mean labor organizing, occupying vacant homes, or organizing community based institutions, whatever it takes to confront, critique, and combat the stranglehold that the private sphere has on the public, and the monopolization of time and space by the capitalist state. And it is from working with people to create a freedom not just to dream of freedom, but to free ourselves from neo-liberal dreams, dreams that not only restrict our present conditions time and space, but that also restrict the possibility of a future, to create healthy communities and a healthy society free from all forms and forces of oppression and exploitation.

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