“Direct action loses effectiveness if there isn’t a mass movement,” Dhoruba bin Wahad, co-founder of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), told a packed room at our election night town hall on Tuesday. In under ten minutes, Wahad elegantly summarized some of the movement’s most pressing disconnects: the disconnect between underground direct actionionists and mass movements; the fact that AIPAC and police unions “have more power in the Black community than the Black community has.” Palestine has forced U.S. leftists to become internationalist and Wahad’s analysis connects American imperialism in Gaza and Lebanon to America’s internal colonies.
Wahad’s wisdom comes from decades of struggle, including 19 years of incarceration on charges of attempting to murder two NYPD officers in 1971. In prison, Wahad learned about COINTELPRO, the covert FBI operation used to break up anti-Vietnam protests, feminist groups, and Black liberation organizations like the Black Panthers, from which the paramilitary BLA emerged. Wahad sued the FBI in 1975, forcing the federal government to release 300,000 pages of confidential documents that Wahad would eventually deploy to overturn his own conviction. Today, as the U.S. and Canada label Samidoun a “terrorist” group, and as Georgia officials charge Stop Cop City activists under RICO and domestic terrorism laws, it’s crucial to study the history of state repression in order to battle evolving forms of counter-insurgency. Wahad’s work and life are a model of steadfast invention in the fight against what he has dubbed “democratic fascism.” Below is an excerpt of his speech:
We have to organize people where they are at, in the streets, around issues that impact their lives. We have to be able to create centers of people’s power and control in the urban areas where we can access the electoral system and use it to our advantage. All politics is local, you see. So we’re in a moment right now, as the genocide is proceeding in broad daylight, every day we pick up the news, we see 53 children and women slaughtered with American bombs and American military hardware.
But we need to understand that the trillions of dollars and millions of dollars the U.S. spends on its proxies never leave the United States. It goes to the corporations and the companies that manufacture the weapons of mass destruction in war. They go to the Boeings and McDonnell Douglas and they go to all of these corporate agencies.
And this is the working class. This is the class of technicians that underwrite and support and make the fascist nation-state possible. We have to understand the police are not workers, so why do they have a union? So that’s a struggle right there. That’s part of our mass line in the united front, that the armed agents of the state are not workers. They kill workers when workers get out of line. They beat students when students protest against the policies of their schools and the policies of government. They enforce the policies of the white supremacist nation state.
And the state is involved into what I call democratic fascism; the delusion of democracy.
Why do African people who have been brought here as an act of war and declared slaves and chattel, why are we paying taxes when these crackers that started this country, this nation, said no taxation without representation. And Africans aren’t, Black folks are represented in the halls of Congress. They are not represented. AIPAC has more power in the Black community than the Black community has. The police unions exercise more power in urban governments in New York, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in Seattle than the people that live in those communities.
This is the militarized, corporate national security state.
So I just want to say to you, when you consider direct action, you have to consider: where to strike, who to strike, and how to strike, and it has to be attached to the needs and the requirements of a mass movement.
We have to build a mass movement first. We have to be clear about our role domestically and clear about our connection to other oppressed people around the world and their struggle and how the U.S. empire uses proxies in order to suck the resources of the Third World and North Africa and use it for the benefit of the elites and the powerful here in this country.
So you are in the belly of the beast so you have a unique opportunity to strike blows that nobody else can strike. And these blows have to constitute a monkey wrench.
We have to understand, we have to put a monkey wrench in the machinery of war, in the machinery of death and destruction that’s dissolving our planet right before our eyes.
Source: Writers Against the War in Gaza