PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness ISSN: 1543-0855 Issue 5 (2007)

El Hadji Moustapha Diop

And at dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter into the splendid cities.
— Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (1990)

The Revolution Will Be Urbanized

Will it be? Blood in my Eye says so, loud and clear. For George Jackson, violence has hitherto been a consequence of the historical situation of the Blacks, and not a stage in the radical transformation of the state of affairs. On a theoretical level, this dialectic of violence is simply too hot to handle for dilettante radicals and coffee shop philosophers. To argue that the concept should pass from the category of effect into that of cause always sounds either quixotic, suicidal or adventurist to ears attuned to the bugle calls of courtroom battles. It’s true that one can always out-law the Law and beat it at its own casuistic game; it’s true that prisoners fully cognizant of their constitutional rights and of procedural moves available to them can win significant legal fights—they did and still do so. But while most of his fellow incarcerated comrades delved into law books, George Jackson studiously read radical writers, Marxist literature and handbooks on military strategy, he “went through the whole gambit, the whole line.” He knew from intimate experience that each time the (blunted) sword of reformism managed to behead the hydra of American fascism, the latter mockingly reared its head again. What he wanted was to severe the monster’s head, pure and simple, and we only catch a glimpse, in these scattered notes, of how he envisioned to do this: an urban revolution in the United States, with Blacks at the forefront.

Now they are his primary target, the oppressed Black underclass, those who stand on the edge. Who knows the streets and alleys of a city better than those labeled outlaws and criminals? Sense of space and territorial ken are the first weapons of any guerrilla organization, and these two prerequisites are found among the urban Blacks. Indeed, were we living in another century, the ghetto would readily lend itself to barricade fighting and the Black masses would besiege and take all major cities like so many Bastilles symbolic of the manifold repression which is their lot. No one other than ghetto dwellers can better understand and carry out the urban guerrilla tactics George Jackson devises, for to them it doesn’t require any stretch of the imagination to think of the American city as a battlefield, a site of violent experiences; they don’t need to cross the transitional gulf separating the revolted and the revolutionary, they are already brimming with a subversive energy that only needs to be channelled into the right direction. To this end, he draws extensively on urban guerrilla strategists, from the Russian anarchists down to the Cubans. All aspects related to this type of confrontation pass through his microscopic lenses: mobility, infiltration, ambush, camouflage, autonomous infrastructure. The Cuban foco theory will serve as a model for setting up an underground network of military units—and here one is reminded of Denmark Vesey’s “cell structure,” far more effective as an organizational chain and as a way of staving off sell-outs—although Vesey was betrayed by a slave who knew about the whole plot. The city’s vital organs (transportation systems, water, electricity) can be easily sabotaged—and then, in such a borderline-extreme situation, the stage will be set for synchronous and sustained guerrilla operations, the banality of violence will overcome all defense mechanisms and ethical barriers.

It’s very easy to frown upon George Jackson’s tactical elaborations and dismiss them as surrogate, wish-fulfilling fantasies of violence, as expressive of the emasculated Black male’s eunuch complex and what not. But again, he is not preaching to the unconvinced. Blood in my Eye is no political pamphlet catering to democratic-liberal sensibilities. The line of thinking George Jackson lucidly and cogently develops throughout the first three parts of this book is straightforward, as far as the liberation struggle of Black people in America is concerned: There were the slave rebellions of the slavery period and the race riots of the twenties and sixties: they can only make sense to us if we, in the Black Colony, carry it to their logical conclusion by waging a successful revolutionary war, on their own turf, against the oppressive forces of White Supremacism. The present should validate, redeem the past, not the reverse. Blacks can still learn and draw useful lessons from their past sufferings—but the Black Panther Party, and George Jackson more than any other leader, wanted them, when reflecting upon that past, to also draw a gun. . . .

The Semantics of Invisibility

The Tet offensive vindicated Giap’s contention during discussions on strategy among the Vietcong leadership that guerrilla tactics are preferable to conventional warfare if they were to defeat the US troops. History would prove him right: an invisible, unpredictable, seemingly ubiquitous enemy is always a hard nut to crack for Pentagon strategists, in spite of all the fascistic experiments of counterrevolutionary warfare conducted throughout the Third World during the Cold War: “low-intensity conflicts,” disappearances, military coups, psy-war, death squads and the like. You won’t find any impassioned denunciation of US invasion in George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye, he just has no time to wallow in the mire of righteous indignation, having become all too familiar, as a Black man, with the “invisible hand” of fascism in America. You will instead encounter a man who has devoted a great deal of his musings to the language of invisibility both as a technique of social control and as a tool for revolution in “urban, fascist Amerikkka.” The many-forked tongue of the State claims there are no such things as classes and political prisoners in American society, only ethnic groups or minorities and criminals or “alienated” individuals who must be brought back into the fold, “rehabilitated.” On this count, the issue is ideological, and brother George is quick to understand that the task of removing this debilitating blindfold is the proper business of the political vanguard (for him, then, the political wing of the Black Panther Party). He has himself done his fair share of visual training as a prison intellectual to turn inmates into ideology-wise revolutionaries who will no longer fall into the mousetrap of crime and race. But acute perceptiveness doesn’t necessarily translate into sustained revolutionary action—more often than not it leads to the cool, world-weary, I-till-my-own-ground attitude of hippies, communalists, pranks, psychedelics and other New Age disenchanted. The relevance of invisibility to military issues carries more weight for his contention that to counter state terrorism, whose shadow is cast over the whole political landscape, the People’s Army should likewise contrive strategies of harassment, infiltrate the enemy’s networks, exert the right of what Jonathan Jackson calls “selective retaliatory violence” for every “targeted assassination”—in the newspeak of Western media when reporting Israeli army’s political murders—and ultimately drive state agencies into a defensive position. It is alright to complain about the invisible status of oppressed minorities, to signify their unacknowledged identities with a face-mask as does today Marcos in Chiapas, but George Jackson infused it with a subversive potential that turns on its head the innocuous rhetoric of integration. Reformists integrate only to become more invisible—revolutionaries infiltrate to remain deceptively visible.

The Flaw in the Knight’s Armor

Remember those US Army Black Hawks and Little Birds drunkenly tumbling down on the streets of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993? The Somalis call that memorable victory Ma-alinti Rangers, the Day of the Rangers. They really beat the hell out of those Yankees then, arousing fears of the Vietnam syndrome in the American opinion, which, typically, didn’t act so hysterical when two weeks before, on September 19, those same choppers shot missiles into a crowd, killing 100 unarmed civilians. I had these events in mind when reading Jonathan’s and George’s discussion on the situational ineffectiveness of high-tech military gadgetry. Helicopters are pretty common in American urban repression (e.g., crackdown on MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia), and their use is still consistent with the Western fantasy of “bombing the savages.” In Palestine, US-supplied Israeli helicopters come and go unscathed, leaving death and desolation in their wake; in Ivory Coast, French choppers shoot into crowds of civilians and generals unabashedly issue fallacious statements ... yet, it takes only a long-range rifle equipped with a visor, maintains Jonathan, to expose the myth of invincibility behind superior technology as the colossus with clay feet it really is. Sophisticated weaponry, of surgical precision, is not hard to come by in American ghettoes, nor are advantageous vantage-points hard to spot, the only difficulty, then and now, lies in raising and training an army of urban guerrilleros who mean business when they get down to the task of revolution—without any utopian sloganeering. . . .

What Makes the American Cheese Binding?

The answer to this question obviously involves a high level of generalization. Capitalist societies, beneath their deceptively seamless textures, are riddled, teeming with contradictions—and by now we all know about or experience them, either way. But the overriding contradiction that lies deep at the heart of American society is that it is at once a settler/migrant society and one where popular movements are sporadic and, when successful, only rewarded with token victories. Now a cursory look at history tells us that migration, internal or external, goes hand in hand with the building of radical mass movements. Dyed-in-the-wool Parisians played no role at all in the French Revolution; northern cities became astir with social unrest and so-called race riots only after the Great Migration; the Windrush Empire carried cheap labor from the Caribbean, but it also ushered in the era of counterculture in England. Clearly, every migratory wave implies a shift, a displacement of the sociological coordinates; it brings with it the seeds of a productive explosion of those two mighty opposites: the haves and the have-nots.

So what is it that (still) keeps everything together in the United States, the settler/migrant society par excellence? Shall we accept the fact that the gravitational pull of the almighty dollar is so incapacitating that it holds everything at a distance and everyone in their right place? A slight disturbance in this mechanism should be easier to effect than a collision of planets, for this country, because it attracts scores of migrant workers, stands permanently on the cusp of revolution. There wasn’t many of them in the seventies, and although when speaking of the USA and the Black Colony George Jackson infuses these terms with an international thrust to include the entire oppressed Black world, his People’s Army, for tactical reasons, consists of African-Americans with a map of city streets in their heads. Today the make-up would be totally different, for Third World migrants are a potentially revolutionary force to be reckoned with. Blood in my Eye will have to be also read by the Mexican immigrants who organized and struck for improved wages and working conditions at New York green-groceries in 1999; by the Francophone African delivery workers who fought for respect from labor contractors for leading supermarket chains in the same year; and by the South Asians who organized for improved conditions and a union in the for-hire car service industry in 2005. For these politically conscious migrant workers provide an organizational expertise that, fused together with the urban firebrands of Black America, can move the struggle from the level of survival tactics a to that of urban guerrilla warfare—as George Jackson saw it. Otherwise, this budding militant consciousness among these migrants may pretty soon degenerate into the “I just want a piece of the (rotten) American-pie” complex.

Citation Format:

El Hadji Moustapha Diop. “The Revolution will be Urbanized: George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 5, 2007

Copyright © 2007 Africa Resource Center, Inc.