Afroamerican Movements:

Political Contests and Historical Challenges

Agustin Lao-Montes
<oxunelegua@yahoo.com>

Assistant Professor, Sociology 
Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies  
Afro-American Studies  
University of Massachusetts at Amherst  
514 Thompson Hall Amherst, MA 01002 
tel (413) 545-2769

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(Keynote Presentation, Conference “Afro-Latinos: Global Spaces/Local Struggles” University of California at Los Angeles, March 6-7, 2008)

Last week there were two conferences in U.S. universities concerned with people we call Afro-Latinos. The counterpoint between a conference at Howard University titled Times of Change and Opportunities for the Afro Colombian Population organized by the Colombian embassy, and a conference The African Diaspora in the Americas: Political and Cultural Resistance at the University of Minnesota, exemplify poles within the contested terrain of Black politics in the Americas. The fact that we are today closing a third conference in less than two weeks is not only a demonstration de que los negros estamos de moda como dice mi amiga Claudia Mosquera (that we Afro-Latinos are in fashion) but more so that Afro-Latin American politics is now a key arena, not only in local and national but also in hemispheric and global politics.

The contrast between the speakers and sponsors of the conferences at Howard and Minnesota represent two distinctive modes of racial politics that are associated with opposing social and political ideologies, cultural politics, and historic projects. For instance, the conference at Howard had speakers from the U.S. Agency for International Department (USAID), and U.S. Black conservatives politicians like Gregory Meek, while the conference at Minnesota featured Jesus “Chucho” Garcia, the main leader of the network of Afro-Venezuelan organizations as the keynote speaker.

In fact, last week Chucho Garcia published an article in the internet critiquing the conference at Howard as an example of the complicity of the Afro-Colombian right with global neoliberalism and with the U.S. imperial project. In the same vein, a U.S. coalition in solidarity with Afro-Colombian grassroots organizations denounced the conference as yet another example of a developing partnership between Black conservatives in Colombia and the U.S. with the twin governments of Bush and Uribe. Likewise, an email of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (one of the largest organizations of the Black movement in Colombia) observed that what was named by the Colombian government as the Afro-Colombian week at Washington, D.C., namely the conference at Howard along with other meetings and a free concert by Afro-Colombian singer Petrona Martinez, was “part of the enchantment that the government deviced to try to get the votes for the Free Trade Agreement”. The title itself, Times of Change and Opportunities for the Afro Colombian Population, reveals an optimism about the current situation of Afro-Colombians, an angle of vision articulated from the standpoint of an increasingly visible political class whose point of view sharply contrasts with the sad condition of millions of Afro-Colombians displaced by the armed conflict, and by the evidence from social research that shows that Afro-Colombians have among the worst indicators of social and economic inequality in the Americas.

The contest over the character of Black politics in Colombia, that so far in our narrative presents an Afro-Colombian elite supportive of Uribe’s regime (with all the implications of his anti-terrorist/pro-war policy of “democratic security”, and his unconditional alliance with U.S. neoliberal and imperialist politics), and allied with conservative sectors in the U.S.; in contrast with Afro-Colombian grassroots organizations and their allies in the U.S. (like the TransAfrica Forum), should be framed in a larger landscape of hemispheric and global geo-politics, cultural politics, and political economy. In this sense, in mapping Black politics in the Americas one of the main contradictions today is between Colombia and Venezuela. On one end the Afro-Colombian elite is becoming a transnational showcase and imperial lab for a conservative neoliberal Pan-Africanism, while on the other end the network of Afro-Venezuelan organizations is championing initiatives for articulating an hemispheric Black left. For the last two years, in the month of November Afro-Venezuelans had been organizing north/south meetings of Afro-Latinos and Afro-North American close allies with that purpose. The 2006 meeting was called Afrodescendents against Neoliberalism and the 2007 Afrodescendents for revolutionary transformations in Latin America. Even though there are close connections with the government led by Hugo Chavez, to the extent that there was government financing for both meetings, there also is a meaningful level of autonomy of the network of Afro-Venezuelan organizations and their leaders from the Venezuelan state. In short, this contrast between the path of the Afro-Colombian Black elite and the Afro-Venezuelan web of social movements is an important point of entry for a cartography of a complex and contested terrain of contemporary Afro-Latino politics.

In this presentation, I will intend to draw, in broad strokes, some key historical, analytical, and political themes, for mapping the arena of Afro-Latino politics within a more general field of social, cultural, and racial politics. For this, I’ll try to present a world-historical perspective on Black social movements as antisystemic forces, in counterpoint to the global pattern of domination and exploitation that Anibal Quijano baptized as the coloniality of power, while engaging in dialogue with Mark Sawyer’s analysis of racial politics as a process of race cycles. I will close by making some practical observations about our roles as intellectuals working on Afro-Latino diasporas from U.S. institutions.

The race cycles perspective articulates a comprehensive framework for an historical analysis of Black politics in the Americas in so far as it combines political-economy and cultural hermeneutics, the interplay of national and transnational forces, the societal significance of critical conjunctures, and Black historical agency. In this analytical schema racial formations are conceptualized as a complex field and a contested process marked by the “constantly unsettled meanings of race and their tension with other societal structures”. In the same vein, racial politics is understand as a structurally determined and historically contingent process, a contested terrain mediated by state formations, imperial statecraft, and the vast array of struggles that compose the everyday scenarios of power relations. The very concept of race cycles signifies a dynamic temporality in which a central scenario is the relationship between the racial state and Black movements as prime movers of the historical ebb and flow between moments of crisis and social unrest, and moments of equilibrium in dominance and hegemony. I will like to suggest that we can engage this theoretical framework with world-historical analysis in order to frame Afroamerican politics in general and Afroamerican movements in particular within larger landscapes of power, this adding a global spatiality to it. A full development of this thesis is beyond the scope of this presentation but I will like to advance some ideas that are necessary to make my argument here.

I will begin with a historical argument that we can identify four main cycles of Black politics in the Americas that correspond to four critical world-historical conjunctures: the first one is the 18th century wave of slave revolts that had it climax in the Haitian revolution (1796-1804), which in turn marked the birth of Black politics as an explicit terrain of identity, rights, and as a project of emancipation. That was the time that Eric Hobsbawn called the “Age of Revolution” when, arguably, the most profound social revolution of the era was in Haiti. Here, I want to quickly highlight the concern that Rebecca raised yesterday about the need to keep-up an active memory of Haiti as the foundation of Black liberation, as an imperative of any transformative transnational agenda of Afrodiasporic politics, a disposition that is enacted by the efforts of Afrovenezuelan representatives to the Andean Parliament to organize a world forum in solidarity with Haiti as approved in the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi. The second period I locate between the first and second world wars, an epoch that was also defined by the Russian and Mexican revolutions, and by the world-economic crisis of the 1930s. In the Black world this was the time of Garveyism and its huge transnational movement of Black self-affirmation, but it was also a tome of a radical Pan-Africanism in which Black marxisms and socialisms were crucial (for instance CLR James in the Fourth International and Claude McKay in the 1921 meeting of the Third International in Russia). On the cultural front it was the period of the Black modernist cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance, and of Black surrealism and the negritude movement in the Francophone zone of the African Diaspora (France, Africa, and the Caribbean) that articulated their own webs of Black cosmopolitanism and visions of Black freedom dreams (to use Robin Kelley’s _expression). This Afro-Francophone world was the historical universe that produced world-historical figures such as Aime Cesaire and Franz Fanon. The third moment, I date from the post World War II period to the global wave of antisystemic movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This is the period that Nikhil Pal Singh characterizes in his book Black is a Country as the long view of the civil rights movement. This moment was marked by a systemic cycle of struggles for decolonization in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and by the rise of movements against Jim Crow in the United States. In the particular conjuncture of the sixties (which here is not a decade but a historical time that we can trace between 1955 and 1975), the main axis of Afroamerican movements was located in the U.S. that served as an inspiration to struggles of Black liberation in South Africa, and later to the rise of Black politics in South America (as we heard yesterday from Daniel Garces reference to the 1975 Congress of Black Cultures of the Americas in Cali, Colombia). In its second moment (1968-1975) the U.S. Black Freedom Movement (to use Cornel West’s concept to characterize the times) coined the _expression Black power that was later translated into women power, indigenous power, Chicana/o power, etc, thus inspiring and providing language for the new social movements that emerged. The wave of antisystemic movement of the sixties converged with a world-economic recession that was deeply felt in the oil crisis of 1973. The combination of a wave of antisystemic movement and a global crisis of capital accumulation, informed the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The fourth period I am proposing to conceptualize Black racial politics in the Americas, begins in late 1980s and early 1990s. This is the time of the rise of the new American imperialism (for instance, of the invasions of Grenada and Panama, and of the first Iraq war), of the end of the enchantment with neoliberal state policies because people already felt their negative economic and political effects. This was also the era of the peaceful revolution that dismantled the soviet bloc, exacerbating the crisis of actually existing socialism. This was also the moment of the emergence of an array of social movements against the effects of neoliberal globalization and particularly of the rise of Black and Indigenous movements in Latin America.

This current period is the one that I have been researching for several years and I will talk more about this, but before I’ll like to flesh out the argument a bit more by quickly addressing three key theoretical issues that are germane to the main theme of this conference. The first refers to how to analytically represent the global and how to methodologically articulate the relation between the global and the local. There are volumes written and lots to discuss about this sort of questions, but there are a few things I’ll like to say here.

First, that I see globalization as a long-term process, articulated by a world-historical matrix that following Anibal Quijano I conceptualize with the notion of the coloniality of power. In a blurb, the coloniality of power can be represented as the interweaving of four regimes of domination (racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism) and the inter-sectionality of the forms of identity (race, class, gender, sexuality), culture and knowledge, as well as the modes of political-economy (capitalist exploitation and accumulation), and the institutions of geo-politics and political community (modern nation-states and empires) associated with them. There are two dimensions of this argument I want to highlight here. The first is that this sort of world-historical perspective oppose a pervasive methodological nationalism wherein the nation-state is the primary unit of analysis (a methodology and a politics that is clearly challenged by African diaspora perspectives), but it also against top-down world-systems analyses in which the national and the local are simply subordinated to the global. In contrast, I contend that what we call globalization or world-space is a contradictory and relatively open process, in which specific “parts” (such as nations, regions like the Pacific coast in Central America, the Antilles, and the Afroamerican diaspora) have their relative autonomy and therefore their own temporalities and configurations of space. The other point I want to make is that in this understanding of global constellations of power, race and racism and their articulations with labor, gender, sexuality, and knowledge, are central elements in this long-term process of globalization. An important conclusion of this sort of argument is that “racial formations” and racisms (deliberately in plural), are complex and historically specific processes that, on the one hand articulate and unfold in particular ways in time and space (e.g., locally, regionally, and nationally), and on the other hand compose world-historical orders (hence the possibility and significance of concepts such as “world racial order” as proposed by scholars such as Bonilla Silva, Goldberg, Ferreira da Silva, and Mills, among others).


This leads me to address the second analytical question which is: what is the world-historical significance of Blacks movements. As proposed by Bill Martin and Howard Winant, arguably, the first movements for global justice and democracy were the composed struggles against slavery and the abolitionist movement. If by antisystemic movements we mean the constellation of struggles, collective actions, and organizational forms that are able to challenge and transform the global order of things in different key moments in world history, when we analyze the different waves of antisystemic movements, we will see that they correspond to the transnational race cycles that we described before. This is not an historical accident because of the centrality of racist regimes in modern/colonial scenarios of economic, cultural, and political power. I will say that one of the best examples that we have of this kind of world-historical analysis in which individual and collective agency and racial politics are framed within complex and contradictory processes in different spaces and scales (world capitalism, empire-building and imperial competition, state formation, regions, class and race, but unfortunately with no gender analysis) is The Black Jacobins, CLR James’ 1938 book on the Haitian revolution.

My third analytical question is: how to conceptualize the African Diaspora and Afro-Latinidades within the diaspora. I’ve written about this and here I will just say that I build from Tiffany Patterson’s and Robin Kelley’s analysis of the African diaspora as a condition linked to world-historical processes of capitalist exploitation, western domination (geo-political and geo-cultural), and modern/colonial state-formation; and as a process constituted by the cultural practices, everyday resistances, social struggles, and political organization of “black people as transnational/translocal subjects”. I add a third dimension, the African diaspora as a project of affinity and liberation founded on a translocal ideology of community-making and a global politics of decolonization. In this latter sense, the African Diaspora can be conceived as a project of decolonization and liberation embedded in the cultural practices, intellectual currents, social movements, and political actions of Afro-diasporic subjects. The project of diaspora as a search for liberation and transnational community-making is grounded on the conditions of subalternization of Afro-diasporic peoples and in their/our historical agency of resistance and self-affirmation. As a project the African diaspora can be described as a north, a historically grounded utopian horizon to Black freedom dreams.


In mapping African diaspora spaces we need to historicize them specifying their diversity and complexity while analyzing their linkages. Earl Lewis concept of African-American communities as “overlapping diasporas” is a useful tool to understand diversity and articulation within the African diaspora. I propose the concept of intertwined diasporas to signify no only the plurality of histories and projects articulated within the African diaspora, but also the world-historical entangleness of multiple genealogies of diasporic formation (e.g., African, South Asian, and East Asian diasporas composing a Caribbean diaspora space), and the transdiasporic character of world cities’ populations (e.g., working classes and new immigrants as subaltern modernities). Afro-Latinidades tend to be marginalized and even erased from most mappings of the African diaspora, at the same time that African diaspora perspectives need to play a more important role in Latino/American studies. This shows the marginalization of Afro-Latinidades from Latino studies while it reveals our invisibilization as Afro-Latinos/as in most cartographies of the African diaspora. The same Eurocentric ideology that place blackness at the bottom of the great chain of being and imagine Africa as a dark continent outside of history, locate Blacks at the bottom or outside of Latino/Americanist world-regional and national definitions. On the other end, the geo-politics of knowledge that corresponds to the sequence of British and U.S. hegemony in the modern/colonial capitalist world-system, informs cognitive mappings and historical accounts of the African diaspora and the Black Atlantic focused on the Anglo world. Nonetheless, in spite of this double subalternization of Afro-Latinidades from both Anglocentric accounts of the African diaspora and Latino/Americanist discourses, there is a long history of Afro-Latina/o diasporic consciousness and participation in African diaspora networks.


I will now return to the current period of racial politics in the Americas to focus on Afroamerican movements. Let me introject a testimonial element to locate myself and to ground the analysis in my own research. As an Afrodescendant and as an intellectual-activist, what appealed me the most as a topic of research, was the rise of Black movements in Latin America. But after digging more deeply into the subject, I decided to redefine the object of investigation in terms of three interweaved processes that compose the developing field of Black politics in Latin America. The three processes are: social movements of Afrodescendants, ethno-racial state policies, and the increasing importance of transnational actors of diverse character from the United Nations and the World Bank, to the US Agency for International Development and the U.S. Black Congressional Caucus.

Thus, the present dynamics of Black politics in the Americas should be framed within the contested terrain of neoliberal globalization and the forms of state and economy associated with it, the geo-political contest between U.S. imperial designs and its allies against dissident states that oppose it (especially Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Venezuela), as well as in relation to the struggles over the redefinition of nationhood and over recognition, rights, and resources that come along with the politicization of ethnic and racial identities of Black and Indigenous peoples in the region. There are local, regional, national, and transnational moments in this arena, and these are the concrete spaces of power that compose the field of forces (to use the _expression of Bourdieu and Foucault) that we are researching and in which we hope to be intervening. This is the general historical scenario within which I frame the current cycle of racial politics in the Americas.

The history of Black social movements had always been diverse and full of conflicts and debates between various political perspectives and ideologies of power, different ways of understanding the meanings of “race” and racism and how to fight against them, and among contending historical projects and their implications in regard to distinct alliances and horizons. For instance, in the 1930s, there were substantive differences among those regarded as the Pan-African leaders of the time. For example, we can see three different views on Africa and its meanings: first in Marcus Garvey’s transnational Black nationalism wherein Africa was the ultimate source of Black identity that needed to be recasted and modernized in favor of a sort of “Black empire” (as analyzed by Michelle Stephens); in contrast to WEB DuBois’ concept of Africa as a necessary referent in Black struggles for democracy and social justice conceived as centered in the Americas; both different from CLR James’ understanding of African struggles for decolonization as a key moment in the larger project of socialist internationalism and particularly within the politics of the Fourth International. Both DuBois and James developed a tradition that Cedric Robinson calls Black Marxism, which constitutes a challenge to both western Marxism with its tendency toward Eurocentrism and class reductionism, and to the dominant strands of Black nationalism that tend not to clearly see the links between racism and capitalism (and I will add patriarchy and imperialism, following women of color feminisms).

Likewise, during the wave of antisystemic movements of the 1960s/1970s, the Black Freedom Movement in the United States, that was one of the keystones of the tsunami of struggles that shook and to some extent transformed the world, was also heterogeneous and fill with all sort of internal differences. Most accounts tend to highlight differences between what is known as the southern-centered civil rights movement which climax is usually dated to the 1963 civil rights march to Washington, D.C., with the resulting approval of laws in 1964 and 1965, against racial discrimination and granting voting rights to Black citizens; in contrast with the Black power movement that is usually described as mostly placed in northern cities, is traced historically to the rise of Malcolm X as premier leader of African-American radicalism, to Stokely Charmichael Black power slogan in SNCC campaigns, and to the emergence of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The story is much more diverse and complex and we do not have time and space here for details and nuances, but it is important to say that the differences between the reformist integrationism of the dominant tendency within the civil rights movement, and the revolutionary projects of transformation advocated by organizations such as the Black Panthers and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, reveal meaningful differences in the U.S. Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s/1970s. Once again, these are just examples to provide a historical grounding to the outline of the present that I am trying to offer.

When we talk about waves or cycles of social movements, we should recognize a relationship between the rise and fall of antisystemic movements in critical periods of crisis and restructuring in the world-economy, moments of emergence or decline of imperial hegemony (like today), times of proliferation of war or of relative peace, and times of rebellion or of relative conformity. One of the biggest historical dilemmas of strong cycles of protest is that their successes tend to create the conditions for subsequent periods of cooptation and repression by the dominant powers with the consequence that the movements get ripped of their antisystemic character. This dynamics of the ebb and flow of antysitemic movements and race cycles, serves to partly explain the changes in U.S. Black politics after the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s and 70s. The approval of laws that extended the franchise catalyzed a considerable increase in elected position occupied by Blacks, while explicit state opposition to racism by means of laws and public policies against discrimination, and the increase in social mobility partly due to Affirmative Action policies promoted some improvements in education and employment.


All of these developments demonstrate some of the achievements of the U.S. Black movements of the 1960s/70s. However, today class polarizations among Afro-North Americans are more sharp than in the 1960s, while there is weakening of Black left currents (as we can see from the relative failure of efforts such as the Black Radical Congress) and grassroots organizations (even though they are re-emerging especially in the South), at the same time that we are witnessing a rise in Black conservatism, as we can visibly see in figures like Colin Powell and Condoleza Rice. To some extent, the very same successes of the movement facilitated the integration of much of its political energies and social activism within the structures of state and corporate power that champion the racial ideology that Eduardo Bonilla Silva calls “color-blind racism”, a racist regime whose ugly face was revealed in the racial and class underpinnings of federal policies toward New Orleans in the crisis of Katrina, and that is embellish with an imperial multiculturalism wherein a Black secretary of state defends another invasion of Haiti and a Latino Attorney General justifies torture in Iraq.

In contrast to the relative weakening of Black social movement and grassroots politics in the U.S., in Latin America there was in the 1980s an effervescence of explicitly Black (or Afro) social movements, a change that we describe as a shift of the main locus of Afroamerican movements from north to south. We know that there is a long tradition of racial politics in Latin America, and nowadays very often the the Partido Independiente de Color in Cuba (from 1908 to the 1912 racial massacre) and the Frente Negra Brasileira in the early 1930s, are used as examples that Black political parties were first organized in Latin America. However, until the 1970s and 1980s most of Afro-Latin American political participation was within the main political parties (mostly liberal and left) and most grassroots efforts within multi-ethnic/racial labor unions and peasant organizations.

A constellation of social movements explicitly self-defined as Black (or Afro) began to emerge unevenly in Latin America and the Creole Caribbean in the late 1970s-early 1980s, and began to bear fruits locally and regionally in the late 1980s-early 1990s. In my research I found that many of the main leaders of Black movements across the region used to be members of the Latin American left who were disappointed with the racism and class reductionism of the mestizo left and consequently shifted gears in the context of the crisis of the Soviet bloc and of socialist discourse in general. The mutual influence of Black and Indigenous movements that emerged together in that period, also place them together with the emergence of new social movement politics (ecological, gender, sexual, cultural, ethnic) not only in Latin America but throughout the world, changing political identities and cultures and the ways and means of doing politics. At the same time there was a maturation of the negative effects of the neoliberal project that included corporate colonization of regions and populations that were relatively apart from the logic of capital and state regulation (like the Pacific Coast of Colombia and Ecuador and the Caribbean coast of Central America). In this process of development of Black cultural and political identities in Latin America, U.S. Black movements and their most visible figures (like ML King and Malcolm X) were (and are) a fundamental referent.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Black and Indigenous movements in Latin American, had been able to organize local grassroots organizations, articulate national webs of social movements and began to weave transnational networks. Along with the so-called Washington Consensus, there was a rise of explicitly Black movements and organizations that led struggles for cultural identity and recognition, ethnic education, land rights, economic justice, ecological integrity, ancestral knowledges, and political representation. By the 1990s, Black and Indigenous movements championed campaigns to declare Latin American states as plutiethnic, multicultural, and even plurinational (especially indigenous) by means of constitutional reforms, thus challenging white elite creole discourses of mestizaje, that were founding ideologies of nationhood since the 19th century. This resulted in constitutional changes of that sort in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru. These changes were also associated with the organization of a transnational netoworks of Black and Indigenous movements in the Americas. Here, two important moments are the north/south organization in 1992 against the celebration of 1492 as a “discovery”, and the Zapatista uprising in 1994 along with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. For the web of Afro-Latino organizations that still known as the Alianza Estrategica de Afrodescendientes en las Americas (Strategic Alliance of Afrodescendants in the Americas), a strong glue was the process or organizing toward the 2001 world conference against racism in Durban, South Africa. That process served as an organizational and education space for the formation and consolidation of Afro-Latino webs of social movements such as the Alianza Estrategica and the Red de Mujeres Afro-Latinoamericanas, Afrocaribenas y de la Diaspora (Strategic Alliance of Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean Women and Women from the Diaspora) that Ivette Modestin, who is here in this conference, represents. It was within this process of hemispheric organizing where the movement developed a collective leadership and a political identity. As put by Romero Rodriguez from Mundo Afro in Uruguay, in one of the most important meetings of the web in 1999 at Santiago de Chile “entramos Negros y salimos Afrodescendientes” (we enter as Blacks and came out as Afrodescendents), meaning that the movement coined the term Afrodescendent as a new political identity with the purpose of including people of African descent of all colors. The term was later was adopted by the U.N, and by NGOs and international organizations. As a political category the signifier Afrodescendant embodies the will of developing diasporic ties with members of the global African diaspora in the Americas and beyond.

After the western boycott to the Durban meeting and its accord, led by the U.S. (which was worsen by its convergence with the events of September 11, 2001), arguably, the region of the world in which the Durban agenda against racism became more salient was in Latin America. The Black movements of the region had obtained important achievements such as the 1993 Law 70 in Colombia (the “law of negritudes rights” that grant collective rights over land primarily to community councils to rural Black communities in the Pacific region), that as Daniel said yesterday can be considered the most important piece of Afro-reparations in the Americas, as well as the land rights of the Quilombolas in Brazil. The organized efforts and collective actions of the movements had captured attention of the governments of the region (signatoires of the Durban accord) and of key transnational institutions (such as the World Bank and IDB). Consequently, now there is a general trend toward state recognition of the specificity of Black identities and cultures in the region, in several countries there are special legislations, and there are government institutional branches developing policies for Black populations. There also is an increase in elected and appointed officials of African descent in the as well as formal efforts to reunite them in a Black Parlament of the region.. There are programs of Affrmative Action developing in Brazil and Colombia, as well as efforts to document and combat institutional and everyday racism. As Linda Kolko mentioned yesterday, this December, in Ecuador there was a meeting to discuss and coordinate initiatives for racial equity in several countries, in this front Brazil is where the movement had the greatest achievement, given that it is the first country of the region with a ministry for racial equity organized at the level of the executive.

However, returning to the counterpoint of the two conferences with which I began this presentation, and bringing the analysis of race cycles in a world-historical perspective, it seems that the very partial successes of the Afro-Latin American movements had facilitated the conditions for the emergence of conservative Black elites, and also for the integration to the state and the NGOization of some of its key leaders and organizations. I don’t have time to develop this here but should say that part of my research could be defined as an ethnography of state and empire, and as an ethnography of transnational funders and NGOs. In my investigation I found that, as in Sonia Alvarez analysis of the women movement, we need a more nuanced analysis than simply speaking about cooptation and integration, and need to differentiate between the transnational actors (for example between USAD and the Interamerican Foundation, and between Gregory Meek and Charlie Rangel as two distinct position in the Black Congressional Caucus) as some Black movements in Latin America and Afro-Latinos in the U.S. do. On the other hand, we need to analyze and evaluate the overall effects of the alliances and the funding with state institutions and transnational actors (some of them powerful reps of transnational capital and the U.S. imperial state) in what for some sectors of the movement can be described as a shift from a politics of movilization and grassroots alternatives to a politics of accommodation and integration into transnational networks of neoliberal governmentality.

Colombia is perhaps the clearest example that we cannot simply understand racial politics in terms of Black movements, but as a more complex and differentiated field of Black politics in each country, in Latin America, and in the Americas. Here the task of the political cartographer is difficult and requires both theoretical sophistication and historical analysis. For instance, a call last week’s by Daniel Mera (from Colombia’s Proyecto Color) for a form of Black solidarity looking up to the U.S. as the only example of Blacks been in power since dynastic Egypt, is a very different strand of transnational Black politics from the one declared by Daniel Garces yesterday when he advocated for an Afrodiasporic agenda for human rights and grassroots development based on ancestral knowledge, territorial integrity, and community self-government. One way of representing this differences is as contending Pan-Africanisms, where we need to sharply distinguish, for instance, a neoliberal Pan-Africanism that advocates for the Free Trade Agreement as a means for “progress and possibility” while defending President Uribe’s policies of “democratic security” (which very much resembles President Bush’s “war on terror”), in contrast with a grounded grassroots Pan-Africanism that defends community self-government, ecological development, regional integration and globalization from below.

This whole scenario refer us to one of the main historical challenges that Afroamerican subjects in general and Afroamerican movements in particular are facing today, which is he question of what is going to be our role in a moment in which we are placed at the limelight of processes of national and hemispheric change. For instance, Afro-Colombians are central actors in the fights for or against Plan Colombia and the Free Trade Agreement. On the other hand, Afro-Venezuelans have been pressuring the government to support their demands to be recognized as a political category with rights, resources, and special policies, to the extent that President Chavez self-declared as Afrodescendant after they organized an hemispheric conference of Afrodescendents against neoliberalism (whether we can call this a gesture of effective change or of “ethno-populism” is an open question). In the context of the highly polarized situation in the Andean region, yesterday in Colombia around 5 million people participated in a march against the paramilitaries, that was largely organized by Afro-Colombian grassroots organizations and that defended Black legislator Piedad Cordova against conservative attacks that also have a racist component. In Ecuador, Afro-Ecuatorians have representation in the constituent assembly (a situation without historical precedents in the Americas), and the Black movement for the first time developed a unified political platform. On the other hand, in the U.S. there is the possibility that a Black person may be elected President. All of this poses big questions to Black politics and to Afroamerican movements in particular. What is the historical project for the African diaspora and what this concretely means in terms of the kind of policies of economic development, political democracy, and cultural politics that we are to articulate and enact? How racial politics is to articulate with class, gender, and sexual politics, and in search of which kind of project of freedom and equality?

I want to close with two very concrete set of observations and concerns that can be turned into proposals. I want to predicate them by saying that as an Afrodescendent intellectual-activist, I am here not only as an academic, but also to participate in one of many attempts to build intellectual-political community. For the last few years I engaged in what I call collaborative action research with Black organizations throughout Latin America, and as many of you know in the South there is ample need and interest in working with academic intellectuals from the U.S. I suggest that we look into the possibility of formalizing this kind of efforts and in addition of having an annual conference, also get involved in projects of translation and exchange to develop a rich and productive dialogue with Afro-Latina/o intellectuals and movements across the Americas. For example, we are witnessing the beginning of ethnic studies and Africana studies in Latin America and there is the possibility of developing a rich north/south dialogue for which Afro-Latinas/os could be a bridge in the positive sense of Gloria Anzaldua.

The last point is that socio-economic indicators from all sources reveal that Afro-Latin Americans suffer from the worst conditions of inequality, and in spite of the relative political and cultural achievements, the conditions of structural racism, cultural devalorization, and everyday racial violence and social marginalization characterizes the life of many of our people. In light of this, Afroamerican social movements are retaking the Durban agenda against racism. This July there will be a conference in Brazil to revive the agenda in the Americas with a projection of another conference in Durban. I suggest we pay special attention to these efforts and try to be part of them. We at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o Studies and the Department of Afroamerican Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, are committed to steer this process by means of our project on Black Cultures and Racial Politics in the Americas. For many of us it is a firm and concrete step for Afroamerican movements to keep-up the long-term tradition of Black movements as bearers of a radicalization of democracy to build the African diaspora as a transformative force for alternative futures, as an effective source of hope in favor of life and happiness.

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A Note from Brotha Dinizulu of Miami:

Thanks, Sam,

This is a most welcome and timely elucidation of the state of global Black affairs, which sheds light on a factor of the "Afrodescendant" population that has been overlooked, marginalized or otherwise excluded even from "mainstream Black" political discourse: the Afro-Latin population, which is defined in far more variable and far less rigid terms than those which have been most convenient and conventional in previous prevailing discourse. The discussion of Pan Africanism cannot be seriously engaged without including this broader scope of the Diaspora, and its many subtle nuances. Bro. Agustin also provides some very useful analytical tools with his identification of the four significant historical periods, and how the Black struggle essentially interfaces with other "structural" factors of those respective times, both as causes and results. It is very clear from this analysis (if it was not before) that much of our discourse regarding our social demands needs to be reconfigured to capture not what is a new degree of complexity, but a complexity that was always there, but had been for too long ignored, at our own peril and expense. The pluralizing of "racisms," for example, is one such excellent example of the new thinking that is required. It is certainly not a weakness of this analysis, by any stretch, that it focuses on "antisystemic" struggles, but it is a double-edged weapon. On the one hand, it stands as a cold and practical reminder that this is where we are at: there is a "system" in place that controls us more than we control it, and therefore much -- indeed most -- of what we do may be, by definition, reactive. The other side of that, of course, we ourselves are not defined by our struggle, or by the oppression which gives direct focus to that struggle, but rather by who we are and who, by definition, we are struggling to be in spite and in defiance of the oppression. This latter approach is even less amenable to analysis and is even more complex and nuanced for being something that is often not even articulated verbally, but produces and emerges from actions, often perceives as being without political content or motivation. Richard Wright wrote, in an excerpt (from Black Boy?) called "The Man Who Went to Chicago," about the experience of ending up on the unemployment line, with newly arrived country folk from the Deep South, for whom all of this was pretty alien. He observes, quoting roughly here, "If I were a member of the class that rules, I would not waste my energies spying on activists and dissidents or breaking strikes, because those people, by their aspirations, affirm the values of society as it is. Rather, I would concentrate on these newly arrived rural peasants, who have nothing to gain or desire from society and are, by their presence, making a genuine revolution that they themselves are probably not aware of." Wright is far more eloquent, of course, but he touches on the true radicalism that is at the heart of the Afrodescendant, and other colonized and oppressed populations, which activists, no matter how well informed, must also take into account. The Native Americans who function, as best they can but in the only way that makes sense, as if the nation state of the United States is nothing but an artificial construct imposed on stolen lands and captive people by force of arms (in addition to germ warfare/disease and chemical warfare/alcohol and, of course economic warfare/the money system), and insist on maintaining their traditional ways on their own terms, are much closer to a true analysis of the situation than those who couch their struggle in terms defined by traditional western analysis (right, left, center, anti-imperialist, etc.) Ditto for every Native population who, in a diametric difference from the settlers, have no other country to return to but the land they are on. The affirmation of one's own cosmological understanding of life and the universe as a pro-active way of living is only defined as problematical by the enemy, who might actually prefer, as Wright suggests, that this "opposition" to their authority be taken up along more convenient lines such as "communist" or "socialist" or "left wing." In another variation of that same vein, there is this concept, which I first heard from an Afro-Cuban Yoruba priest, and have heard a number of times since, often from people of that religious community. As the priest, who had been struggling a bit with English until he got to make this point, said, "With all of the death, the suffering and the horrors of the salve trade, that was the means by which the Ancestors saw fir to bring us here, because the African presence and the African genius were absolutely required to be here in order to prevent this from becoming a disaster far worse than anyone can even imagine." I've talked to brothers and sisters who have heard this and "don't buy it," which is, of course, anyone's prerogative. However, even if one disagreed, but still applied the wisdom of the African proverb --"When the fool speaks, the wise man listens" -- a deeper look at this shows that, while we may not have any intent of saying that the lowest of criminals did us a favor, one effect of the Middle Passage was to forge a new, solid African/American identity, in which we were free of the old enmities and divisions that fragmented and weakened us. Pan Africanism is a concept that originated on THIS side of the ocean, not in the Motherland. To this might be added that thought I have shared before, as to what interest that naked, emaciated, shackled Ancestor survivor of the Middle Passage would have in participating in the cultural matrix that is responsible for his or her condition. I say this is still relevant today, as we try to force children into school curricula that offers little respect or hope for them. It should be recognized that even the kind of intellectual analysis that Bro. Agustin is offering here might be deemed to be irrelevant or complicit. Of course, "might" doesnt mean "correctly." As Agustin has also done, I offer this as context, which gives his points more resonance and reality. The fact that we, Afrodescendants, unlike the Native people, do not have a similar coherent or unified "national" agenda, consisting of well understood principles that have withstood all attempts at eradication, partly because of its direct historical and social links to the land. What may be branded as "reactive" is in fact what we need -- a common definition of a common enemy. Even with that, however, the fact that we always have collaborators and defectors to the seductive powers of the enemy's matrix is a measure of how tenuous our hold on a productive cultural alternative for survival is, and this is even true of Native populations as well. (It is how we got put on the ships.) The worst irony is that even as information, like this brilliant analysis is become more available, we are experiencing an increasing rate of loss. The Maroons of Jamaica and Surinam and the U.S. (Black Seminoles in Oklahoma) all tell of the younger generation rejecting all of the old ways and the rich knowledge, seeking no productive role in the societies which nurtured them, prefering instead the lure of the bright lights and the big city. It is this present scenario that makes this article and this analysis so important today. Those who have been seduced, who find themselves in rapidly expanding shanty towns full of broken or exploited dreams, processing survival as an individual rather than collective matter, cut off from all nurturing lines and from all modes of self-sufficiency, such as agriculture, hunting and fishing, are the very ones who need to see their (our) condition in its truest light. Kudos to Agustin for contextualizing this in the "enemy," so to speak, realities of globalization and neoliberalism -- words whose only sense or reason for being comes from the perpetrators of this latest, higher-tech wave of imperial invasion and would-be population control. As with the whole mater of "race," there is DuBois' "twoness" at work here. It is at the same time a myth without any scientific foundation and a reality that can get us killed, as our skin color is our military uniform in a one-sided war that we never declared. We need to confront and analyze this fact as a guide to substantive action ("Action without theory is blind," as Nkrumah said), but we also have to know that our strongest opposition to it is not in our reactive analysis as much as it is in our pro-active affirmation that we have an inherited agenda, cultural and otherwise, of our own, which, in many ways, offers deeper and sounder insights into understanding the universe than what the concepts of Marx, Hegel, Darwin or Freud might have. Thanks again for sharing this. it is, as you said accurately, a very important piece. We easily forget that the majority language of this hemisphere is Spanish, and the vast majority of its population is "Latin" (Spanish, Portuguese and French). The English-speaking U.S.A. is but a fringe component of it all, even with having the largest arsenal of weaponry in human history, and we see ourselves becoming more Hispanic, just in sheer numbers, every day. Spain itself was Africanized before this experiment even started, so taking the effort to understand the Afro-Latin perspectives and cultures is a very real and necessary part of any serious strategy for survival in the 21st century. A luta continua, more than ever,

Dinizulu

TRUE LIES- a poem by talaam acey

Brotha Talaam breaks it down!

Cuba's HipHop Sistas: PostCastros Cuba Will Be Revolutionary Live and On Point

Folks,

Check out Cuban HipHop DJ Sista Leydis:



Her myspace: has lots of material and ... MUSIC--

Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism
by Samir Amin

Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His recent books include The Liberal Virus (Monthly Review Press, 2004), A Life Looking Forward (Zed Books, 2007), and The World We Wish to See: Revolutionary Objectives in the Twenty-First Century, forthcoming from Monthly Review Press. James Membrez translated this essay from the original French.

All the currents that claim adherence to political Islam proclaim the “specificity of Islam.” According to them, Islam knows nothing of the separation between politics and religion, something supposedly distinctive of Christianity.

It would accomplish nothing to remind them, as I have done, that their remarks reproduce, almost word for word, what European reactionaries at the beginning of the nineteenth century (such as Bonald and de Maistre) said to condemn the rupture that the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had produced in the history of the Christian West! On the basis of this position, every current of political Islam chooses to conduct its struggle on the terrain of culture—but “culture” reduced in actual fact to the conventional affirmation of belonging to a particular religion. In reality, the militants of political Islam are not truly interested in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of membership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation.

Such a vision of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies imperialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them. The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that such conflicts are unimportant.

Islamists are only present in these areas to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothing but works of charity and means for indoctrination. They are not means of support for the struggles of the popular classes against the system responsible for their poverty. On the terrain of the real social issues, political Islam aligns itself with the camp of dependent capitalism and dominant imperialism. It defends the principle of the sacred character of property and legitimizes inequality and all the requirements of capitalist reproduction. The support by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian parliament for the recent reactionary laws that reinforce the rights of property owners to the detriment of the rights of tenant farmers (the majority of the small peasantry) is but one example among hundreds of others.

There is no example of even one reactionary law promoted in any Muslim state to which the Islamist movements are opposed. Moreover, such laws are promulgated with the agreement of the leaders of the imperialist system. Political Islam is not anti-imperialist, even if its militants think otherwise! It is an invaluable ally for imperialism and the latter knows it. It is easy to understand, then, that political Islam has always counted in its ranks the ruling classes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Moreover, these classes were among its most active promoters from the very beginning.

The local comprador bourgeoisies, the nouveaux riches, beneficiaries of current imperialist globalization, generously support political Islam. The latter has renounced an anti-imperialist perspective and substituted for it an “anti-Western” (almost “anti-Christian”) position, which obviously only leads the societies concerned into an impasse and hence does not form an obstacle to the deployment of imperialist control over the world system. Political Islam is not only reactionary on certain questions (notably concerning the status of women) and perhaps even responsible for fanatic excesses directed against non-Muslim citizens (such as the Copts in Egypt)—it is fundamentally reactionary and therefore obviously cannot participate in the progress of peoples’ liberation.

Three major arguments are nevertheless advanced to encourage social movements as a whole to enter into dialogue with the movements of political Islam. The first is that political Islam mobilizes numerous popular masses, which cannot be ignored or scorned. Numerous images certainly reinforce this claim. Still, one should keep a cool head and properly assess the mobilizations in question. The electoral “successes” that have been organized are put into perspective as soon as they are subjected to more rigorous analyses. I mention here, for example, the huge proportion of abstentions—more than 75 percent!—in the Egyptian elections. The power of the Islamist street is, in large part, simply the reverse side of the weaknesses of the organized left, which is absent from the spheres in which current social conflicts are occurring. Even if it were agreed that political Islam actually mobilizes significant numbers, does that justify concluding that the left must seek to include political Islamic organizations in alliances for political or social action? If political Islam successfully mobilizes large numbers of people, that is simply a fact, and any effective political strategy must include this fact in its considerations, proposals, and options.

But seeking alliances is not necessarily the best means to deal with this challenge. It should be pointed out that the organizations of political Islam—the Muslim Brotherhood in particular—are not seeking such an alliance, indeed even reject it. If, by chance, some unfortunate leftist organizations come to believe that political Islamic organizations have accepted them, the first decision the latter would make, after having succeeded in coming to power, would be to liquidate their burdensome ally with extreme violence, as was the case in Iran with the Mujahideen and the Fidayeen Khalq.

The second reason put forward by the partisans of “dialogue” is that political Islam, even if it is reactionary in terms of social proposals, is “anti-imperialist.” I have heard it said that the criterion for this that I propose (unreserved support for struggles carried out for social progress) is “economistic” and neglects the political dimensions of the challenge that confronts the peoples of the South. I do not believe that this critique is valid given what I have said about the democratic and national dimensions of the desirable responses for handling this challenge.

I also agree that in their response to the challenge that confronts the peoples of the South, the forces in action are not necessarily consistent in their manner of dealing with its social and political dimensions. It is, thus, possible to imagine a political Islam that is anti-imperialist, though regressive on the social plane. Iran, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and certain resistance movements in Iraq immediately come to mind. I will discuss these particular situations later.

What I contend is that political Islam as a whole is quite simply not anti-imperialist but is altogether lined up behind the dominant powers on the world scale. The third argument calls the attention of the left to the necessity of combating Islamophobia. Any left worthy of the name cannot ignore the question des banlieues, that is, the treatment of the popular classes of immigrant origin in the metropolises of contemporary developed capitalism. Analysis of this challenge and the responses provided by various groups (the interested parties themselves, the European electoral left, the radical left) lies outside the focus of this text. I will content myself with expressing my viewpoint in principle: the progressive response cannot be based on the institutionalization of communitarianism,* which is essentially and necessarily always associated with inequality, and ultimately originates in a racist culture. A specific ideological product of the reactionary political culture of the United States, communitarianism (already triumphant in Great Britain) is beginning to pollute political life on the European continent. Islamophobia, systematically promoted by important sections of the political elite and the media, is part of a strategy for managing community diversity for capital’s benefit, because this supposed respect for diversity is, in fact, only the means to deepen divisions within the popular classes. * A political theory based on “collective cultural identities” as central to understanding dynamic social reality.—Ed.

The question of the so-called problem neighborhoods (banlieues) is specific and confusing it with the question of imperialism (i.e., the imperialist management of the relations between the dominant imperialist centers and the dominated peripheries), as is sometimes done, will contribute nothing to making progress on each of these completely distinct terrains. This confusion is part of the reactionary toolbox and reinforces Islamphobia, which, in turn, makes it possible to legitimize both the offensive against the popular classes in the imperialist centers and the offensive against the peoples of the peripheries concerned. This confusion and Islamophobia, in turn, provide a valuable service to reactionary political Islam, giving credibility to its anti-Western discourse. I say, then, that the two reactionary ideological campaigns promoted, respectively, by the racist right in the West and by political Islam mutually support each other, just as they support communitarian practices.

Modernity, Democracy, Secularism, and Islam

The image that the Arab and Islamic regions give of themselves today is that of societies in which religion (Islam) is at the forefront in all areas of social and political life, to the point that it appears strange to imagine that it could be different. The majority of foreign observers (political leaders and the media) conclude that modernity, perhaps even democracy, will have to adapt to the strong presence of Islam, de facto precluding secularism. Either this reconciliation is possible and it will be necessary to support it, or it is not and it will be necessary to deal with this region of the world as it is. I do not at all share this so-called realist vision.

The future —in the long view of a globalized socialism—is, for the peoples of this region as for others, democracy and secularism. This future is possible in these regions as elsewhere, but nothing is guaranteed and certain, anywhere. Modernity is a rupture in world history, initiated in Europe during the sixteenth century. Modernity proclaims that human beings are responsible for their own history, individually and collectively, and consequently breaks with the dominant pre-modern ideologies. Modernity, then, makes democracy possible, just as it demands secularism, in the sense of separation of the religious and the political. Formulated by the eighteenth century Enlightenment, implemented by the French Revolution, the complex association of modernity, democracy, and secularism, its advances and retreats, has been shaping the contemporary world ever since.

But modernity by itself is not only a cultural revolution. It derives its meaning only through the close relation that it has with the birth and subsequent growth of capitalism. This relation has conditioned the historic limits of “really existing” modernity. The concrete forms of modernity, democracy, and secularism found today must, then, be considered as products of the concrete history of the growth of capitalism. They are shaped by the specific conditions in which the domination of capital is expressed—the historical compromises that define the social contents of hegemonic blocs (what I call the historical course of political cultures). This condensed presentation of my understanding of the historical materialist method is evoked here simply to situate the diverse ways of combining capitalist modernity, democracy, and secularism in their theoretical context. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution put forward a model of radical secularism. Atheist or agnostic, deist or believer (in this case Christian), the individual is free to choose, the state knows nothing about it.

On the European continent—and in France beginning with the Restoration—the retreats and compromises which combined the power of the bourgeoisie with that of the dominant classes of the pre-modern systems were the basis for attenuated forms of secularism, understood as tolerance, without excluding the social role of the churches from the political system. As for the United States, its particular historical path resulted in the forming of a fundamentally reactionary political culture, in which genuine secularism is practically unknown. Religion here is a recognized social actor and secularism is confused with the multiplicity of official religions (any religion—or even sect—is official). There is an obvious link between the degree of radical secularism upheld and the degree of support for shaping society in accord with the central theme of modernity. The left, be it radical or even moderate, which believes in the effectiveness of politics to orient social evolution in chosen directions, defends strong concepts of secularism.

The conservative right claims that things should be allowed to evolve on their own whether the question is economic, political, or social. As to economy the choice in favor of the “market” is obviously favorable to capital. In politics low-intensity democracy becomes the rule, alternation is substituted for alternative. And in society, in this context, politics has no need for active secularism—”communities” compensate for the deficiencies of the state. The market and representative democracy make history and they should be allowed to do so. In the current moment of the left’s retreat, this conservative version of social thought is widely dominant, in formulations that run the gamut from those of Touraine to those of Negri. The reactionary political culture of the United States goes even further in negating the responsibility of political action. The repeated assertion that God inspires the “American” nation, and the massive adherence to this “belief,” reduce the very concept of secularism to nothing.

To say that God makes history is, in fact, to allow the market alone to do it. From this point of view, where are the peoples of the Middle East region situated? The image of bearded men bowed low and groups of veiled women give rise to hasty conclusions about the intensity of religious adherence among individuals. Western “culturalist” friends who call for respect for the diversity of beliefs rarely find out about the procedures implemented by the authorities to present an image that is convenient for them. There are certainly those who are “crazy for God” (fous de Dieu).

Are they proportionally more numerous than the Spanish Catholics who march on Easter? Or the vast crowds who listen to televangelists in the United States? In any case, the region has not always projected this image of itself. Beyond the differences from country to country, a large region can be identified that runs from Morocco to Afghanistan, including all the Arab peoples (with the exception of those in the Arabian peninsula), the Turks, Iranians, Afghans, and peoples of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, in which the possibilities for the development of secularism are far from negligible.

The situation is different among other neighboring peoples, the Arabs of the peninsula or the Pakistanis. In this larger region, political traditions have been strongly marked by the radical currents of modernity: the ideas of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the communism of the Third International were present in the minds of everyone and were much more important than the parliamentarianism of Westminster, for example. These dominant currents inspired the major models for political transformation implemented by the ruling classes, which could be described, in some of their aspects, as forms of enlightened despotism. This was certainly the case in the Egypt of Mohammed Ali or Khedive Ismail. Kemalism in Turkey and modernization in Iran were similar. The national populism of more recent stages of history belongs to the same family of modernist political projects.

The variants of the model were numerous (the Algerian National Liberation Front, Tunisian Bourguibism, Egyptian Nasserism, the Baathism of Syria and Iraq), but the direction of movement was analogous. Apparently extreme experiences—the so-called communist regimes in Afghanistan and South Yemen—were really not very different. All these regimes accomplished much and, for this reason, had very wide popular support. This is why, even though they were not truly democratic, they opened the way to a possible development in this direction. In certain circumstances, such as those in Egypt from 1920 to 1950, an experiment in electoral democracy was attempted, supported by the moderate anti-imperialist center (the Wafd party), opposed by the dominant imperialist power (Great Britain) and its local allies (the monarchy). Secularism, implemented in moderate versions, to be sure, was not “refused” by the people. On the contrary, it was religious people who were regarded as obscurantists by general public opinion, and most of them were. The modernist experiments, from enlightened despotism to radical national populism, were not products of chance.

Powerful movements that were dominant in the middle classes created them. In this way, these classes expressed their will to be viewed as fully-fledged partners in modern globalization. These projects, which can be described as national bourgeois, were modernist, secularizing and potential carriers of democratic developments. But precisely because these projects conflicted with the interests of dominant imperialism, the latter fought them relentlessly and systematically mobilized declining obscurantist forces for this purpose. The history of the Muslim Brotherhood is well known. It was literally created in the 1920s by the British and the monarchy to block the path of the democratic and secular Wafd. Their mass return from their Saudi refuge after Nasser’s death, organized by the CIA and Sadat, is also well known. We are all acquainted with the history of the Taliban, formed by the CIA in Pakistan to fight the “communists” who had opened the schools to everyone, boys and girls. It is even well known that the Israelis supported Hamas at the beginning in order to weaken the secular and democratic currents of the Palestinian resistance.

Political Islam would have had much more difficulty in moving out from the borders of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan without the continual, powerful, and resolute support of the United States. Saudi Arabian society had not even begun its move out of tradition when petroleum was discovered under its soil. The alliance between imperialism and the traditional ruling class, sealed immediately, was concluded between the two partners and gave a new lease on life to Wahabi political Islam.

On their side, the British succeeded in breaking Indian unity by persuading the Muslim leaders to create their own state, trapped in political Islam at its very birth. It should be noted that the theory by which this curiosity was legitimated—attributed to Mawdudi—had been completely drawn up beforehand by the English Orientalists in His Majesty’s service.* *The origin of the force of today’s political Islam in Iran does not show the same historical connection with imperialist manipulation, for reasons discussed in the next section.—Ed.

It is, thus, easy to understand the initiative taken by the United States to break the united front of Asian and African states set up at Bandung (1955) by creating an “Islamic Conference,” immediately promoted (from 1957) by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Political Islam penetrated into the region by this means. The least of the conclusions that should be drawn from the observations made here is that political Islam is not the spontaneous result of the assertion of authentic religious convictions by the peoples concerned. Political Islam was constructed by the systematic action of imperialism, supported, of course, by obscurantist reactionary forces and subservient comprador classes. That this state of affairs is also the responsibility of left forces that neither saw nor knew how to deal with the challenge remains indisputable.

Questions Relative to the Front Line Countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Iran)

The project of the United States, supported to varying degrees by their subaltern allies in Europe and Japan, is to establish military control over the entire planet. With this prospect in mind, the Middle East was chosen as the “first strike” region for four reasons:

(1) it holds the most abundant petroleum resources in the world and its direct control by the armed forces of the United States would give Washington a privileged position, placing its allies—Europe and Japan—and possible rivals (China) in an uncomfortable position of dependence for their energy supplies;

(2) it is located at the crossroads of the Old World and makes it easier to put in place a permanent military threat against China, India, and Russia;

(3) the region is experiencing a moment of weakness and confusion that allows the aggressor to be assured of an easy victory, at least for the moment; and

(4) Israel’s presence in the region, Washington’s unconditional ally. This aggression has placed the countries and nations located on the front line (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Iran) in the particular situation of being destroyed (the first three) or threatened with destruction (Iran).

Afghanistan


Afghanistan experienced the best period in its modern history during the so-called communist republic. This was a regime of modernist enlightened despotism that opened up the educational system to children of both sexes. It was an enemy of obscurantism and, for this reason, had decisive support within the society. The agrarian reform that it had undertaken was, for the most part, a group of measures intended to reduce the tyrannical powers of tribal leaders. The support—at least tacitly—of the majority of the peasantry guaranteed the probable success of this well-begun change. The propaganda conveyed by the Western media as well as by political Islam presented this experiment as communist and atheist totalitarianism rejected by the Afghan people. In reality, the regime was far from being unpopular, much like Ataturk in his time. The fact that the leaders of this experiment, in both of the major factions (Khalq and Parcham), were self-described as communists is not surprising. The model of the progress accomplished by the neighboring peoples of Soviet Central Asia (despite everything that has been said on the subject and despite the autocratic practices of the system) in comparison with the ongoing social disasters of British imperialist management in other neighboring countries (India and Pakistan included) had the effect, here as in many other countries of the region, of encouraging patriots to assess the full extent of the obstacle formed by imperialism to any attempt at modernization. The invitation extended by one faction to the Soviets to intervene in order to rid themselves of the others certainly had a negative effect and mortgaged the possibilities of the modernist national populist project. The United States in particular and its allies of the Triad in general have always been tenacious opponents of the Afghan modernizers, communists or not. It is they who mobilized the obscurantist forces of Pakistan-style political Islam (the Taliban) and the warlords (the tribal leaders successfully neutralized by the so-called communist regime), and they who trained and armed them. Even after the Soviet retreat, the Najibullah government demonstrated the capability for resistance. It probably would have gained the upper hand but for the Pakistani military offensive that came to the support of the Taliban, and then the offensive of the reconstituted forces of the warlords, which increased the chaos. Afghanistan was devastated by the intervention of the United States and its allies and agents, the Islamists in particular. Afghanistan cannot be reconstructed under their authority, barely disguised behind a clown without roots in the country, who was parachuted there by the Texas transnational by whom he was employed. The supposed “democracy,” in the name of which Washington, NATO, and the UN, called to the rescue, claim to justify the continuation of their presence (in fact, occupation), was a lie from the very beginning and has become a huge farce. There is only one solution to the Afghan problem: all foreign forces should leave the country and all powers should be forced to refrain from financing and arming their allies. To those who are well-intended and express their fear that the Afghan people will then tolerate the dictatorship of the Taliban (or the warlords), I would respond that the foreign presence has been up until now and remains the best support for this dictatorship! The Afghan people had been moving in another direction—potentially the best possible—at a time when the West was forced to take less interest in its affairs. To the enlightened despotism of “communists,” the civilized West has always preferred obscurantist despotism, infinitely less dangerous for its interests!

Iraq

The armed diplomacy of the United States had the objective of literally destroying Iraq well before pretexts were actually given to it to do so on two different occasions: the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and then after September 11, 2001—exploited for this purpose by Bush with Goebbels-style cynicism and lies (“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”). The reason for this objective is simple and has nothing to do with the discourse calling for the liberation of the Iraqi people from the bloody dictatorship (real enough) of Saddam Hussein. Iraq possesses a large part of the best petroleum resources of the planet. But, what is more, Iraq had succeeded in training scientific and technical cadres that were capable, through their critical mass, of supporting a coherent and substantial national project. This danger had to be eliminated by a preventive war that the United States gave itself the right to carry out when and where it decided, without the least respect for international law.

Beyond this obvious observation, several serious questions should be examined:

(1) How could Washington’s plan appear—even for a brief historical moment—to be such a dazzling success so easily?

(2) What new situation has been created and confronts the Iraqi nation today?

(3) What responses are the various elements of the Iraqi population giving to this challenge? and

(4) What solutions can the democratic and progressive Iraqi, Arab, and international forces promote?

Saddam Hussein’s defeat was predictable. Faced with an enemy whose main advantage lies in its capability to effect genocide with impunity by aerial bombardment (the use of nuclear weapons is to come), the people have only one possible effective response: carry out resistance on their invaded territory. Saddam’s regime was devoted to eliminating every means of defense within reach of its people through the systematic destruction of any organization and every political party (beginning with the Communist Party) that had made the history of modern Iraq, including the Baath itself, which had been one of the major actors in this history. It is not surprising in these conditions that the Iraqi people allowed their country to be invaded without a struggle, nor even that some behaviors (such as apparent participation in elections organized by the invader or the outburst of fratricidal fighting among Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shia Arabs) seemed to be signs of a possible acceptance of defeat (on which Washington had based its calculations).

But what is worthy of note is that the resistance on the ground grows stronger every day (despite all of the serious weaknesses displayed by the various resistance forces), that it has already made it impossible to establish a regime of lackeys capable of maintaining the appearance of order; in a way, that it has already demonstrated the failure of Washington’s project. A new situation has, nevertheless, been created by the foreign military occupation. The Iraqi nation is truly threatened. Washington is incapable of maintaining its control over the country (so as to pillage its petroleum resources, which is its number one objective) through the intermediary of a seeming national government. The only way it can continue its project, then, is to break the country apart. The division of the country into at least three states (Kurd, Sunni Arab, and Shia Arab) was, perhaps from the very beginning, Washington’s objective, in alignment with Israel (the archives will reveal the truth of that in the future). Today, the “civil war” is the card that Washington plays to legitimize the continuation of its occupation. Clearly, permanent occupation was—and remains—the objective: it is the only means by which Washington can guarantee its control of the petroleum resources.

Certainly, no credence can be given to Washington’s declarations of intent, such as “we will leave the country as soon as order has been restored.” It should be remembered that the British never said of their occupation of Egypt, beginning in 1882, that it was anything other than provisional (it lasted until 1956!). Meanwhile, of course, the United States destroys the country, its schools, factories, and scientific capacities, a little more each day, using all means, including the most criminal. The responses given by the Iraqi people to the challenge—so far, at least—do not appear to be up to facing the seriousness of the situation. That is the least that can be said. What are the reasons for this?

The dominant Western media repeat ad nauseam that Iraq is an artificial country and that the oppressive domination of Saddam’s “Sunni” regime over the Shia and Kurds is the origin of the inevitable civil war (which can only be suppressed, perhaps, by continuing the foreign occupation).The resistance, then, is limited to a few pro-Saddam hard-core Islamists from the Sunni triangle. It is surely difficult to string together so many falsehoods. Following the First World War, the British had great difficulty in defeating the resistance of the Iraqi people. In complete harmony with their imperial tradition, the British imported a monarchy and created a class of large landowners to support their power, thereby giving a privileged position to the Sunnis. But, despite their systematic efforts, the British failed. The Communist Party and the Baath Party were the main organized political forces that defeated the power of the “Sunni” monarchy detested by everyone, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. The violent competition between these two forces, which occupied center stage between 1958 and 1963, ended with the victory of the Baath Party, welcomed at the time by the Western powers as a relief. The Communist project carried in itself the possibility for a democratic evolution; this was not true of the Baath. The latter was nationalist and pan-Arab in principle, admired the Prussian model for constructing German unity, and recruited its members from the secular, modernist petite bourgeoisie, hostile to obscurantist expressions of religion.

In power, the Baath evolved, in predictable fashion, into a dictatorship that was only half anti-imperialist, in the sense that, depending on conjunctures and circumstances, a compromise could be accepted by the two partners (Baathist power in Iraq and U.S. imperialism, dominant in the region). This deal encouraged the megalomaniacal excesses of the leader, who imagined that Washington would accept making him its main ally in the region. Washington’s support for Baghdad (the delivery of chemical weapons is proof of this) in the absurd and criminal war against Iran from 1980 to 1989 appeared to lend credence to this calculation. Saddam never imagined Washington’s deceit, that modernization of Iraq was unacceptable to imperialism and that the decision to destroy the country had already been made. Saddam fell into the open trap when the green light was given to annex Kuwait (in fact attached in Ottoman times to the provinces that constitute Iraq, and detached by the British imperialists in order to make it one of their petroleum colonies).

Iraq was then subjected to ten years of sanctions intended to bleed the country dry so as to facilitate the glorious conquest of the resulting vacuum by the armed forces of the United States. The successive Baathist regimes, including the last one in its declining phase under Saddam’s leadership, can be accused of everything, except for having stirred up the conflict between the Sunni and Shia. Who then is responsible for the bloody clashes between the two communities?

One day, we will certainly learn how the CIA (and undoubtedly Mossad) organized many of these massacres. But, beyond that, it is true that the political desert created by the Saddam regime and the example that it provided of unprincipled opportunist methods encouraged succeeding aspirants to power of all kinds to follow this path, often protected by the occupier. Sometimes, perhaps, they were even naïve to the point of believing that they could be of service to the occupying power. The aspirants in question, be they religious leaders (Shia or Sunni), supposed (para-tribal) “notables,” or notoriously corrupt businessmen exported by the United States, never had any real political standing in the country. Even those religious leaders whom the believers respected had no political influence that was acceptable to the Iraqi people. Without the void created by Saddam, no one would know how to pronounce their names. Faced with the new political world created by the imperialism of liberal globalization, will other authentically popular and national, possibly even democratic, political forces have the means to reconstruct themselves?

There was a time when the Iraqi Communist Party was the focus for organizing the best of what Iraqi society could produce. The Communist Party was established in every region of the country and dominated the world of intellectuals, often of Shia origin (I note in passing that the Shia produced revolutionaries or religious leaders above all, rarely bureaucrats or compradors!). The Communist Party was authentically popular and anti-imperialist, little inclined to demagoguery and potentially democratic. After the massacre of thousands of its best militants by the Baathist dictatorships, the collapse of the Soviet Union (for which the Iraqi Communist Party was not prepared), and the behavior of those intellectuals who believed it acceptable to return from exile as camp followers of the armed forces of the United States, is the Iraqi Communist Party henceforth fated to disappear permanently from history? Unfortunately, this is all too possible, but not inevitable, far from it.

The Kurdish question is real, in Iraq as in Iran and Turkey. But on this subject also, it should be remembered that the Western powers have always practiced, with great cynicism, double standards. The repression of Kurdish demands has never attained in Iraq and Iran the level of police, military, political, and moral violence carried out by Ankara. Neither Iran nor Iraq has ever gone so far as to deny the very existence of the Kurds. However, Turkey must be pardoned for everything as a member of NATO, an organization of democratic nations, as the media remind us. Among the eminent democrats proclaimed by the West was Portugal’s Salazar, one of NATO’s founding members, and the no less ardent admirers of democracy, the Greek colonels and Turkish generals! Each time that the Iraqi popular fronts, formed around the Communist Party and the Baath in the best moments of its turbulent history, exercised political power, they always found an area of agreement with the principal Kurdish parties. The latter, moreover, have always been their allies.

The anti-Shia and anti-Kurd excesses of the Saddam regime were certainly real: for example, the bombing of the Basra region by Saddam’s army after its defeat in Kuwait in 1990 and the use of gas against the Kurds. These excesses came in response to the maneuvers of Washington’s armed diplomacy, which had mobilized sorcerer’s apprentices among Shia and Kurds. They remain no less criminal excesses, and stupid, moreover, since the success of Washington’s appeals was quite limited. But can anything else be expected from dictators like Saddam? The force of the resistance to foreign occupation, unexpected under these conditions, might seem to bemiraculous. This is not the case, since the basic reality is that the Iraqi people as a whole (Arab and Kurd, Sunni and Shia) detest the occupiers and are familiar with its crimes on a daily basis (assassinations, bombings, massacres, torture). Given this a united front of national resistance (call it what you want) might even be imagined, proclaiming itself as such, posting the names, lists of organizations, and parties composing it and their common program. This, however, is not actually the case up to the present for all of the reasons described above, including the destruction of the social and political fabric caused by the Saddam dictatorship and the occupation.

Regardless of the reasons, this weakness is a serious handicap, which makes it easier to divide the population, encourage opportunists, even so far as making them collaborators, and throw confusion over the objectives of the liberation. Who will succeed in overcoming these handicaps? The communists should be well placed to do so. Already, militants who are present on the ground are separating themselves from the leaders of the Communist Party (the only ones known by the dominant media) who, confused and embarrassed, are attempting to give a semblance of legitimacy to their rallying to the collaborationist government, even pretending that they are adding to the effectiveness of armed resistance by such action! But, under the circumstances, many other political forces could make decisive initiatives in the direction of forming this front. It remains the case that, despite its weaknesses, the Iraqi people’s resistance has already defeated (politically if not yet militarily) Washington’s project.

It is precisely this that worries the Atlanticists in the European Union, faithful allies of the United States. Today, they fear a U.S. defeat, because this would strengthen the capacity of the peoples of the South to force globalized transnational capital of the imperialist triad to respect the interests of the nations and peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Iraqi resistance has offered proposals that would make it possible to get out of the impasse and aid the United States to withdraw from the trap. It proposes: (1) formation of a transitional administrative authority set up with the support of the UN Security Council; (2) the immediate cessation of resistance actions and military and police interventions by occupying forces; (3) the departure of all foreign military and civilian authorities within six months. The details of these proposals have been published in the prestigious Arab review Al Moustaqbal al Arabi (January 2006), published in Beirut.

The absolute silence with which the European media oppose the dissemination of this message is a testament to the solidarity of the imperialist partners. Democratic and progressive European forces have the duty to dissociate themselves from this policy of the imperialist triad and support the proposals of the Iraqi resistance. To leave the Iraqi people to confront its opponent alone is not an acceptable option: it reinforces the dangerous idea that nothing can be expected from the West and its peoples, and consequently encourages the unacceptable—even criminal—excesses in the activities of some of the resistance movements.

The sooner the foreign occupation troops leave the country and the stronger the support by democratic forces in the world and in Europe for the Iraqi people, the greater will be the possibilities for a better future for this martyred people. The longer the occupation lasts, the more dismal will be the aftermath of its inevitable end.

Palestine


The Palestinian people have, since the Balfour Declaration during the First World War, been the victim of a colonization project by a foreign population, who reserve for them the fate of the “redskins,” whether one acknowledges it or pretends to be ignorant of it.

This project has always had the unconditional support of the dominant imperialist power in the region (yesterday Great Britain, today the United States), because the foreign state in the region formed by that project can only be the unconditional ally, in turn, of the interventions required to force the Arab Middle East to submit to the domination of imperialist capitalism. This is an obvious fact for all the peoples of Africa and Asia. Consequently, on both continents, they are spontaneously united on the assertion and defense of the rights of the Palestinian people.

In Europe, however, the “Palestinian question” causes division, produced by the confusions kept alive by Zionist ideology, which is frequently echoed favorably. Today more than ever, in conjunction with the implementation of the U.S. “Greater Middle East project,” the rights of the Palestinian people have been abolished. All the same, the PLO accepted the Oslo and Madrid plans and the roadmap drafted by Washington. It is Israel that has openly gone back on its agreement, and implemented an even more ambitious expansion plan.

The PLO has been undermined as a result: public opinion can justly reproach it with having naively believed in the sincerity of its adversaries. The support provided by the occupation authorities to its Islamist adversary (Hamas), in the beginning, at least, and the spread of corrupt practices in the Palestinian administration (on which the fund donors—the World Bank, Europe, and the NGOs—are silent, if they are not party to it) had to lead to the Hamas electoral victory (it was predictable). This then became an additional pretext immediately put forward to justify unconditional alignment with Israeli policies no matter what they may be.

The Zionist colonial project has always been a threat, beyond Palestine, for neighboring Arab peoples. Its ambitions to annex the Egyptian Sinai and its effective annexation of the Syrian Golan are testimony to that. In the Greater Middle East project, a particular place is granted to Israel, to its regional monopoly of nuclear military equipment and its role as “indispensable partner” (under the fallacious pretext that Israel has technological expertise of which the Arab people are incapable. What an indispensable racism!). It is not the intention here to offer analyses concerning the complex interactions between the resistance struggles against Zionist colonial expansion and the political conflicts and choices in Lebanon and Syria. The Baathist regimes in Syria have resisted, in their own way, the demands of the imperialist powers and Israel. That this resistance has also served to legitimize more questionable ambitions (control of Lebanon) is certainly not debatable. Moreover, Syria has carefully chosen the least dangerous allies in Lebanon. It is well known that the Lebanese Communist Party had organized resistance to the Israeli incursions in South Lebanon (diversion of water included).

The Syrian, Lebanese, and Iranian authorities closely cooperated to destroy this dangerous base and replace it with Hezbollah. The assassination of Rafiq al-Harriri (a still unresolved case) obviously gave the imperialist powers (the United States in front, France behind) the opportunity to intervene with two objectives in mind:

(1) force Damascus to align itself permanently with the vassal Arab states (Egypt and Saudi Arabia)—or, failing that, eliminate the vestiges of a deteriorated Baathist power; and

(2) demolish what remains of the capability to resist Israeli incursions (by demanding the disarmament of Hezbollah).

Rhetoric about democracy can be invoked within this context, if useful. Today to accept the implementation of the Israeli project in progress is to ratify the abolition of the primary right of peoples: the right to exist. This is the supreme crime against humanity. The accusation of “anti-Semitism” addressed to those who reject this crime is only a means for appalling blackmail.

Iran


It is not our intention here to develop the analyses called for by the Islamic Revolution. Was it, as it has been proclaimed to be among supporters of political Islam as well as among foreign observers, the declaration of and point of departure for a change that ultimately must seize the entire region, perhaps even the whole Muslim world, renamed for the occasion the umma (the “nation,” which has never been)? Or was it a singular event, particularly because it was a unique combination of the interpretations of Shia Islam and the expression of Iranian nationalism? From the perspective of what interests us here, I will only make two observations. The first is that the regime of political Islam in Iran is not by nature incompatible with integration of the country into the globalized capitalist system such as it is, since the regime is based on liberal principles for managing the economy. The second is that the Iranian nation as such is a “strong nation,” one whose major components, if not all, of both popular classes and ruling classes, do not accept the integration of their country into the globalized system in a dominated position. There is, of course, a contradiction between these two dimensions of the Iranian reality. The second one accounts for Teheran’s foreign policy tendencies, which bear witness to the will to resist foreign diktats. It is Iranian nationalism—powerful and, in my opinion, altogether historically positive—that explains the success of the modernization of scientific, industrial, technological, and military capabilities undertaken by the Shah’s regime and the Khomeinist regime that followed. Iran is one of the few states of the South (with China, India, Korea, Brazil, and maybe a few others, but not many!) to have a national bourgeois project. Whether it be possible in the long term to achieve this project or not (my opinion is that it is not) is not the focus of our discussion here. Today this project exists and is in place. It is precisely because Iran forms a critical mass capable of attempting to assert itself as a respected partner that the United States has decided to destroy the country by a new preventive war. As is well known, the conflict is taking place around the nuclear capabilities that Iran is developing. Why should not this country, just like others, have the right to pursue these capabilities, up to and including becoming a nuclear military power? By what right can the imperialist powers and their Israeli accomplice boast about granting themselves a monopoly over weapons of mass destruction? Can one give any credit to the discourse that argues that “democratic” nations will never make use of such weapons like “rogue states” could, when it is common knowledge that the democratic nations in question are responsible for the greatest genocides of modern times, including the one against the Jews, and that the United States has already used atomic weapons and still today rejects an absolute and general ban on their use?

Conclusion

Today, political conflicts in the region find three groups of forces opposed to one another: those that proclaim their nationalist past (but are, in reality, nothing more than the degenerate and corrupt inheritors of the bureaucracies of the national-populist era); those that proclaim political Islam; and those that are attempting to organize around “democratic” demands that are compatible with economic liberalism. The consolidation of power by any of these forces is not acceptable to a left that is attentive to the interests of the popular classes.In fact, the interests of the comprador classes affiliated with the current imperialist system are expressed through these three tendencies. U.S. diplomacy keeps all three irons in the fire, since it is focused on using the conflicts among them for its exclusive benefit. For the left to attempt to become involved in these conflicts solely through alliances with one or another of the tendencies* (preferring the regimes in place to avoid the worst, i.e., political Islam, or else seeking to be allied with the latter in order to get rid of the regimes) is doomed to fail. The left must assert itself by undertaking struggles in areas where it finds its natural place: defense of the economic and social interests of the popular classes, democracy, and assertion of national sovereignty, all conceptualized together as inseparable. * Tactical alliances arising from the concrete situation are another matter, e.g., the joint action of the Lebanese Communist Party with Hezbollah in resisting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006.—Ed.

The region of the Greater Middle East is today central in the conflict between the imperialist leader and the peoples of the entire world. To defeat the Washington establishment’s project is the condition for providing the possibility of success for advances in any region of the world. Failing that, all these advances will remain vulnerable in the extreme. That does not mean that the importance of struggles carried out in other regions of the world, in Europe or Latin America or elsewhere, should be underestimated. It means only that they should be part of a comprehensive perspective that contributes to defeating Washington in the region that it has chosen for its first criminal strike of this century.