Continued Excerpts from Blood in My Eye
Amerikan Justice
“In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources, whatever the cost in blood.”
“I’ve been arrested, investigated and interrogated more times than I care to count. I’ve learned ten times more about the process than the most expert single groups of inquisitors. From the first moment I’m brought into this scenario, I attempt to establish control over the exchanges that will take place between myself and my captors. Depending on the situation, one learns to feign either indignation, surprise, idiocy or fear.”
“All Black people, wherever they are, whatever their crimes, even crimes against other Blacks, are political prisoners, because the system has dealt with them differently than with whites. Whites get the benefit of every loophole, every law, and the benefit of being tried by their peers — other white people.”
“The law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor, desperate people like me.”
“Acceptance of enslavement is deeply buried in the pathogenic character types of capitalism. It is a result of the sense of dread and anxiety which is the lot of all men under capitalist rule.”
“An armed attacker cannot be ignored. Gandhi and the gurus were all abject fools. I would certainly be dead if, when certain flash points matured, I hadn’t backed my rejection with blows.”
Toward The United Front:
“Throughout its history, the United States has used prisons to suppress any attempts to challenge its legitimacy — from the attempts to break up the early Workingmens’ Benevolent Organization to the banning of the CPUSA during what I consider to be the fascist takeover of the country, to the attempts to destroy the BPP.”
“The people must learn that when one ‘offends’ the totalitarian state that it is patently not an offense against the people of that state, but an assault upon the privilege of the privileged few.”
“We must educate the people in the real causes of economic crimes. They must be made to realize that even crimes of passion are psycho-social effects of an economic order that was decadent over a hundred years ago. All crime can be traced to socioeconomic conditions, socially productive or counterproductive activity. In all cases it is determined by the economic system, the method of economic organization.”
“Each of us should understand that revolution is aggressive. The manipulators of the system cannot or will not meet our legitimate demands. Eventually this will move us all into a violent encounter with the system.”
“There are no good aspects of monopoly capital, so no reservations need be recognized in it destruction. Monopoly capital is the enemy. It crushes the life force of all the people. It must be completely destroyed, as quickly as possible, utterly, totally, ruthlessly, relentlessly destroyed.”
“In order to create a united left, whose aim is the defense of political prisoners and prisoners in general, we must renounce the idea that all participants must be of one mind, and should work at the problem from a single party line or with a single party line or with a single method. The reverse of this is actually desirable. ‘From all according to ability’”.
“Each partisan, outside the vanguard elements, should work at radicalizing the area of their natural environment, the places where they pursue their normal lives when not attending the rallies and demonstrations. The vanguard elements (organized Party workers of all ideological persuasions) should go among the people concentrated at the rallying point with consciousness raising strategy, promoting commitment and providing concrete, clearly defined activity.”
“Democratic centralism is the only way to deal effectively with the American ordeal. The central committee of the people’s vanguard party must make its presence felt through the various levels of the overall movement.”
“I deny the existence of Black racism outright, by fiat I deny it. Too much Black blood has flowed between the chasm that separates the races.”
On Withdrawal
“After revolution has failed, all questions must center on how a new revolutionary consciousness can be mobilized around the new set of class antagonisms that have been created by the authoritarian reign of terror.”
“First, we, the Black partisans and their vanguard party, the old and new Left, must concede that the workers’ revolution and its vanguard parties have failed to deliver the promised changes in property relations or any of the institutions that support them. There have been two depressions, two great wars, a dozen serious recessions, a dozen brush wars, crisis after economic crisis. The mass psycho-social national cohesiveness has trembled on the brink of disruption and disintegration repeatedly over the past 50 years, threatening to fly apart from its own concentric inner dynamics. But at each crisis it was allowed to reform itself, with each reform, revolution became more remote.”
“We will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class. But if one was forced for the sake of clarity to define it in a word simple enough for all to understand, the word would be ‘reform’. We can make our definition even more precise by adding the word ‘economic’. Economic reform comes very close to a working definition of fascist economic motives.”
“And intellectuals still argue over whether or not America is a fascist country. This concern is typical of the American left’s flight from reality.”
“Of course, the revolution has failed. Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class. Compromises were made in the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s. The old vanguard parties made gross tactical and strategic errors. At the existential moment, the last revelation about oneself, not many members of the old vanguard chose to risk their whole futures, their lives, in order to alter the conditions that Huey P. Newton termed “destructive of life.”
“Reformism was allowed. The more degenerate elements of the working class were first to succumb. The vanguard parties supported the capitalistic war adventure in World War II. Then they helped to promote the mass consumers’ market that followed the close of the war, the flea market that muted the workers’ more genuine demands.”
