“The Need for Revolutionary Leadership in #BlackLivesMatter”

by Ashton Rome

A year after Ferguson, and a year before the 2016 presidential elections, many forces are in motion:, the Democratic establishment and its galaxy of corporate philanthropic affiliates on the one hand, and nascent movement which has come to be known as #BlackLivesMatter on the other. With each day's news of new atrocities, new outrages and new demonstrations the need for historically grounded, forward looking analysis is greater. A Socialist Alternative organizer attempts some of this....

by Ashton Rome

Since the rebellion that began 15 months ago with the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, ordinary people and activists across the country have succeeded in bringing into the public consciousness the systemic racism and sexual oppression that roots the capitalist system. Despite the election of the nation’s first Black president and the increased visibility of LGBTQ people in mainstream media, the New Black Freedom Movement has shown the American public that the living conditions and life chances of the majority of oppressed people have actually worsened and their needs neglected. The national spread of the movement that began in Ferguson shows that the conditions present in Ferguson are ubiquitous. The struggle has increased the confidence and militancy among the LGBTQ layer of activists , who have been asserting the need for the Freedom Movement to also center on the specific needs of working class queers and women of color. This has opened up space for a renewed, militant feminist and LGBTQ movement.

To quell the movement, the Democratic Party has opened its arms to its most media-friendly and reformist activists, and in reaction the Movement has entered a period of stagnation in some cities and renewed revolt in others. In many cities, there have been spontaneous protests after police abuse or acts of flagrant prejudice and episodic direct actions led by a tiny activist layer. This reliance upon spontaneous eruption of black communities to affect change without clear demands, strategy, or a vision has created an illusion in the movement that the issues facing oppressed people can be resolved without revolution.

During a similar period back in 1971, Grace Lee and James Boggs, whose lifelong activism included work in the labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, and environmental justice movements, produced the pamphlet “The Awesome Responsibilities of Revolutionary Leadership” . In it they argued that the Black Power movement needed to develop adequate organization to take power from the ruling class and revolutionize society in the quest for black and ultimately human liberation.

What is Revolutionary Leadership?

A revolutionary party becomes historically necessary and justified when the contradictions and antagonisms of a particular society have created a mass social force whose felt needs cannot be satisfied by reform but only by a revolution which takes power away from those in power….the revolutionary vanguard party serves the function of escalating the vision and leading the masses from a sense of grievance or unsatisfied wants to an awareness of social needs, or what is necessary to remedy their grievances. Grace Lee and James Boggs, The Awesome Responsibilities of Revolutionary Leadership

The building of a revolutionary movement in the United States--a mass movement dedicated to radically reshaping race and class relations--will take the building of national and local level democratic structures, demands and a strategy, and most importantly leadership. The art of revolutionary leadership is primarily the art of expressing one’s political orientation to others hungry for direction. One of the most important elements in orientation is the determination of the willingness of working people to engage in struggle and on what issues will likely move them into struggle. This requires a sober assessment of the power of their organizations, like unions, and local, national and international social, political and economic conditions in which we live.

Leadership means understanding in what direction this mood is changing in real time and what factors are fueling it. As the leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky argued, it means creating a working hypothesis that “attentively follows the changes in the mood and temper of the movement, in order to opportunely introduce corresponding corrections in tactics”. The hypothesis or program is a way to bridge the gap between existing consciousness and revolutionary objectives. A program which contains key political tasks to the issues facing working and oppressed people and at the same time engages with existing consciousness is a vital instrument for intervention for activists.

Due to the political weakness of the organized Left compared to the tasks it faces and the lack of experience of the newly activated activists, it is imperative that we allow for debate over vision, tactic, and strategy. Some of the most visible activists in the movement have been hesitant to build structures that allow for ideological and political debate, partly to keep “unity”. This explains the tendency for more visible activists in the movement to use revolutionary phraseology instead of clearly articulated demands and strategy.

The need for ideological and political clarity and organization is imperative considering the new challenges that appear with every upheaval in cities and the changing political conditions and consciousness of ordinary working and oppressed people. In many cities, the realization for these needs occur during or immediately after a crisis. At such times, while opportunities abound for individual activists and organizations to take the center stage, without a mass democratic organizational structure, there is no space for critical evaluation or discussion of how people can use their time and energies most effectively.

Most importantly, without this, there is no space for ordinary people to buy in to the formation of the demands, approaches, and tactics of the movement. Those key decisions then become the decisions of small groups of activists and organizations, who often earn their livelihoods from this work and therefore make much more tepid and non-radical demands of those in power. The active participation in struggle is what more than anything radicalizes and deepens the understanding of the working class. On a local level, there is a need to organize mass meetings with a regularity that depends on the tempo of struggle that determines and reassesses demands and approaches. Advocacy groups, such as those that work in law, can be incorporated into democratic bodies to help deal with immediate needs of those engaged in struggle. National meetings, like another “ Movement for Black Lives Convening ” that occurred in July 2015, allowing for wider, nationally coordinated campaigns and action, is an example of where we should be going organizationally.

In order to prevent the movement from becoming politically isolated, it will be necessary for us to create outreach committees at the local level to appeal to new communities. The success of the recent #MillionStudentMarch national day of action and the solidarity movements after the campaign at the University of Missouri (MIZZOU), show that the students can be won over to the New Black Freedom Movement and bring the struggle to campuses. Isolating movements through media assaults as well as repression are tactics that the ruling class historically uses to crush militant movements, but social media has made it more difficult for movements to be silenced. Demands like $15 an hour minimum wage can be used for example to appeal to the wider--and especially white--working class to join the New Black Freedom Movement.

Organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Ford Revolutionary Union Movement, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers organizing of the late 1960s and early 1970s sought to bring the struggle for black self determination and against racism and imperialism into workplaces. A critical examination of their activism helps to develop strategies to reach out to new communities and open up new fronts in the Black Freedom Struggle. The book Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, describes the League emphasizing how car company elites in Detroit deliberately cultivated racism so that white and black workers would fight each other instead of acting in class solidarity. Through appeals to workers and the building of community support, most crucially among radicalized students at Wayne State University, they were able to cause major shutdowns in big auto plants and argue to large audiences the need for socialism.

The Need for Political Independence

As we head into 2016, the presidential election and questions around approaches to both corporate political parties will increasingly dominate discussion within the movement. Because millions of people will be thinking politically, it makes clarification of our approach in the movement imperative. Many activists in the movement have shown a willingness to openly collaborate with the Democratic Party and their Presidential candidates while others have tried to maintain an “inside-outside tactic” with no clear definition of what that means and what ends they hope to achieve. The openness to reforms have led to certain activists working under the banner of the broader #BlackLivesMatter movement to come up with a list of demands and negotiate with politicians on behalf of the entire movement.

The political representatives of the capitalist class are aware that any breakaway from the two-party system to the Left is a danger to them and thus seek to engage and influence the trajectory of movements and their demands. The Democrats have historically been more willing to ‘ally’ with social movements to ensure that the demands stay within what is acceptable to those whose interests they serve. While opening the doors to political employment and grant funds to some in the Freedom Movement and pushing symbolic reform in a few cases, the Democratic party has not opposed the surveillance and police violence directed towards Movement activists by state and federal agencies and has no serious plan to address the brutal policing of poor black communities and the lack of a decent future for black youth across the nation. It has in fact been the Democratic Party that has advanced policies like deindustrialization, mass incarceration, and welfare cuts that created the conditions in which the Black Freedom Movement has emerged.

The fear of a break from the Democratic Party is why in the recent Ferguson election , groups tied to the Democratic Party like MoveOn.org and the Working Families Party converged for a ‘Get Out the Vote!’ campaign. The Democratic Party in Missouri understands the weak position that it is in due to the intense struggle over the past year for racial and economic justice. It was Democratic Party politicians like Gov. Jay Nixon who called out the National Guard on demonstrators in Ferguson, Robert McCulloch, Prosecuting Attorney for St. Louis County, that refused to prosecute Darren Wilson, and St. Louis Mayor Slay, who continues to stall on enacting the demands of the movement. The local splits in the Democratic Party since Mike Brown’s murder, notably the Fannie Lou Hamer Coalition, reflect the people’s anger with the Democrats.

For activists that eschew collaboration with the Democratic Party, it is not enough to make statements arguing for the need for independence. It is necessary to create strategy to argue for and safeguard its independence. We also need to examine how running candidates can serve to build the movement and is within the ultimate aims of the movement. Running independent candidates would expose and challenge corporate politics not just by participating in the election but by organizing community actions and bringing ordinary people into the Movement. An electoral campaign can also quickly link up various political movements that exist in an area.

The rise of neoliberalism in the last forty years has forced social movements to deal with the challenges of budget cuts that have devastated poor communities and mass incarceration including increased immigration enforcement and deportation systems. It is important to remember that the creation of charitable foundations and political advocacy groups are one way that wealthy people and corporations avoid taxes and are key vehicles for the 1% to organize politically. Under neoliberal capitalism, social welfare has increasingly become dependent on private businesses and foundations, and as a result, we have seen a ballooning of nonprofit organizations beholden to donors and their priorities as government social welfare programs shrink.

The funding of organizations is the carrot to social movement while the stick is the ‘COINTELPRO-style’ tactics and criminal prosecution for those that go too far by making demands for actual change. Funding by the 1% establishes narrow parameters within which social movement work should occur—solely in forms that do not threaten the political and economic status quo of the capitalist class. Work that fills in gaps in services and provides limited survival support, while simultaneously stabilizing and advancing existing inequities, is funded, and work that exposes and challenges those root causes and conditions of harm and subjugation are targeted for destruction. Within our movement, groups that are willing to negotiate and work within the bounds of what is acceptable to the current structure are funded. Foundation funding of nonprofit organizations takes the direction of the work out of the hands of the people directly affected by poverty and constrains it to the agenda and timelines of funders; therefore, discouraging long-term self-sustaining movements from emerging. As radical trans activist Dean Spade points out in his book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law , “the use of short-term funding cycles (often 1-5 years) has meant that nonprofit organizations have been encouraged to operate on short term goals rather than being supported in building long term sustainable structures to achieve transformative demands” (pg. 99).

Strategically it is important that we avoid corporate funding and nonprofit approaches to organizing. A movement dedicated to challenging the power of the 1% and the class, racial, gender, and sexual oppression that it uses to support its position in society will not be funded by those it seeks to overthrow. We need to explore new ways of funding our movement that allow political independence and centers on the voices of ordinary and oppressed peoples. Unions, for example, are the strongest organizations that working people have to improve their living standards, despite unions’ declining membership, overall lack of militancy, and sustained attacks by politicians. New Black Freedom movement leaders need to make appeals for funding and support from them. This strategy will mean building support within the rank and file of unions to put pressure on union officials to move towards more aggressive organizing. The appeals should be on the basis of coalitions between the movement and union supported struggles like the fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage and other fights for better conditions in society generally.

The past two years have shown the nation that oppressed people are ready to fight back and struggle for a radical new vision for society. The tasks and challenges ahead of us are mountainous, but the political space and willingness for people to fight is greater. To take advantage of this space, we need to develop ourselves as leaders, which importantly includes studying past struggles and analyzing the conditions that exist presently and figuring out how best to intervene. The media has selected leaders for the movement who are more accountable to the Democratic Party and Twitter than the people themselves. We must develop the kinds of organizations that nurture leadership out of the newly radicalized youth and working class. Revolutionary leadership must train the people to develop a clear set of demands and strategy for their own liberation and empower them to reject the token reforms the political and economic elite will inevitability offer in response to their growing power.

Ashton Rome is an organizer with Socialist Alternative St. Louis. Contact him at stlsocialistalternative@gmail.com, or on Facebook at "socialist alternative St. Louis".