The Life and Times of a North American African Poet at 67

Born May 29, 1944, Fowler, California













Daughter Muhammida



El Muhajir and granddaughter



Mahadevi



photo Sam Anderson










The controversial



$100.00 book













Violinist Tarika Lews,



first female member



of the Black Panther Party






MX and Phavia Kujichagulia,
poet, musician, griot. "If you think
I'm just a physical thing, wait til you
see the spiritual power I bring."











Hunia Bradley,
social activist/educator
Minister of Ceremony,
First Poet's Church of the
Latter Day Egyptian
Revisionists








Master dancer/choreographer
Performed in Marvin 1981 musical
drama, In the Name of Love, Laney
College Theatre, Oakland CA. A woman
of deep political consciousness.










Rama Lamar,



Metaphysician,



Academy of da Corner,



First Poet's Church








Oldest daughter Nefertiti El Muhajir

Happy Birthday, Dad!!!!!!!!!!

As much as you are celebrating a new day, I cannot help but to hear the pain of the possibility of death. Life and death exist as one and the same of two continuum's. I thank you for being an example of one who lives out passionately what he believes in and loves.

My prayer for you today, is that you love yourself as much as you have given life to your writings. It is time to love the pain, hurt, guilt and regret away. You've done what you have done. You've caught up, I pray on what needs to be said. I know that as life continues to unfold their will be more to say, but when do you find time to love, truly?

Not a love out of passion, lust, but a love that is inspiring, less based on lust, but based on compatibility and learning how to give what you've been unable to give before. A love that is unconditional, where you give in and embrace the other and you look back and be proud of what you have done, so that you have room to love, and love is not pushed away and put on the back burner.

This is a holistic love born out of all of the knowledge of what you've learned about mind, body and soul. It doesn't look like all of the other relationships. This is a new love, not only for woman, but for man, and for yourself. I thank you for enriching my life with the knowledge that I have, about myself, my people and my history. As much as I have been proud to give credit to all that my mother had invested in me, I realize that I am a beautiful reflection of the two of you, and I love and embrace who I am.

I thank you for the beautiful people that I have met through you which have helped to constantly expand the power of my influence and my knowledge. Although we are far away, I bless you and I thank you on this day and I pray that you will continue to manifest all of the spiritual beauty that is still remaining to come forth from a man who is seeking to be all that God desires of you. With each waking day, it is a reminder that you are still here to grow and not wither. Grow.




Nisa Ra, former wife, still my very dear friend, mother of Muhammida

X, thinking of you, Bro, and giving thanks for your presence on the planet. I trust that all is well with you and that you are making "self care" a priority. Give thanks. Keep the positive works coming. Blessings to you always.
One love, Nisa




Daughter Muhammida

with hip hop diva,Mary J. Blige

A filmmaker: Hip Hop, the New

World Order.

















Poet, Critic, Novelist, Professor

Sherley A. Williams (RIP). Marvin and

Sherley grew up together in Fresno.










Marvin Ellis Jackmon circa three or four years old






















Amina and Amiri Baraka, close friends since he met Amiri in 1964. Met Amina in 1967

when she came to the west coast along with Amiri to facilitate the Communications Project

at San Francisco State University. Off campus base was Black House, the political/cultural

center founded by Marvin, Eldridge Cleaver, Ed Bullins, Ethna X. Wyatt (Hurriyah Asar).
































Mother Marian M. Jackmon

with her brother, Clarence Murrill

(may they both RIP). She taught

her son, "Use the mind God gave

you!" His father, mother and uncle
published the Fresno Voice, one of
the first black newspapers in the
Central Valley. His father was a Race Man

who fought in WWI.



Playwright Ed Bullins and Marvin X founded

Black Arts West Theatre in San Francisco's Fillmore District,

1966. Marvin would join Bullins in Harlem at the New Lafayette

Theatre, 1968. Marvin became associate editor of Black Theatre

Magazine.














Marvin was the first person Eldridge hooked up with

upon release from Soledad Prison. They organized

the Black House. Marvin introduced Eldridge to

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, his friends from

Oakland's Merritt College, 1962-64. Eldridge immediately

joined the Black Panther Party. See Marvin's memoir

Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the devil, introduction byAmiri Baraka.







Fly to Allah is the seminal

work of the genre Muslim American literature, according to Dr. Mohja Kahf, professor of Islamic literature at the University of Arkansas. The Black Arts poets are the foundation of Muslim American literature.










Mohja Kahf says read this for Ramadan!








Cover design by Emory Douglas, Black Panther Minister of Culture.








I AM OSCAR GRANT, collection of essays on Oakland, Marvin X, focusing on the cold blooded murder of young Oscar Grant by BART police officer who received a two year sentence.

Michael Vick, NFL quarterback, got four years for killing dogs.























Marvin X first heard Malcolm when he addressed 7000 students outside UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall, 1964.

















Marvin X and Gregory Fields, legal advisor, at Academy of da Corner, Marvin's peripatetic school at 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland.













Marvin joined Nation of Islam in 1967, then

fled to Toronto, Canada to resist going to

Vietnam. Returned underground to US to

join the Black Arts Movement in Chicago and Harlem.

After conviction for draft evasion, fled the US again to

Mexico City and Belize, Central America. Was apprehended

in Belize and returned to the US. Served five months in Terminal Island Federal Prison.














Painters Dewey Crumpler, Arthu Monroe; poets Ishmael Reed,

Conyus, Marvin X, Al Young

photo Tennessee Reed









Grandson Jah Amiel. At two years old, he toldhis grandfather, "Grandpa, you can't save the people but I can!"

















Marvin X in Harlem, NY, 1968
photo Doug Harris
















Videographer Ken Johnson

and journalist/professor

Wanda Sabir, Marvin.

Wanda's parents read her Marvin's

classic fable of the Black Bird.





Bay Area Black Author
honor slain journalist Chauncey Bailey a Joyce Gordon Gallery,

downtown Oakland. Marvin and

Oakland Post Publisher Paul

Cobb (far right) have established

the Black Chuancey Bailey Project

to counter the Monkey Mind Media's

"Chauncey Bailey Project" that refused to investigate the police role in the murder of Chauncey, even though he was investigating police corruption at the time of his assassination in broad daylight, downtown Oakland. He was also investigating corruption at City Hall under then mayor Jerry Brown, now governor of California.

photo Gene Hazzard and Adam Turner






Lil Bobby Hutton, murdered in shootout with the Oakland Police, 1968. Eldridge Cleaver was wounded.




Lil Bobby was 16 when he became the third member of the BPP, along with

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.








The Oakland Post Newspaper Group purchased books from local black authors for Juvenile Hall. Pastor Brandon Reems, Marvin X and poet Ptah Mitchell made presentation at Juvenile Hall.



photo Gene Hazzard





Marvin's longtime artistic associate (since 1980), poet/actress/director/producer

Ayodele Nzinga








Poet/actress Aries Jordan, Assistant to

Marvin X



















Angela Davis. At the same time (1969) Gov. Ronald Reagan

was kicking Angela out of UCLA for being a black Communist,

he kicked Marvin X out of Fresno State University for being a black Muslim who refused to fight in Vietnam. He ordered the

State College Board of Trustees to "get Marvin X off campus by any means necessary." Supposedly he was "not qualified" to teach at FSU, but two years later he was hired to lecture at the University of California, Berkeley with the same qualifications.






Daughter Amira Jackmon, Esq.

Graduated from Yale and Stanford.
Decided to do for self with her food

business.













Young men reading at

Academy of da Corner,

14th and Broadway,

downtown Oakland.

Ishmael Reed says"Marvin X is Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland. If you want to learn about motivation and inspiration, don't spend all
that money going to workshops and seminars, just go stand at 14th and Broadway and watch Marvin X at work."





Tommy Smith and John Carlos

saluting Black Power at Olympics

in Mexico City, 1968. Marvin X

played basketball against Tommy Smith

in high school. Tommy was from Lemoore High,

Marvin attended Edison High in Fresno.









Revolutionary artist Elizabeth Cattlett Mora.

She gave poet refuge in Mexico City during his

second exile, 1969. She warned him not to go down

to Belize, then British Honduras. "It's raw colonialism,

Marvin, please don't go." He was later deported back

to the US for teaching Black Power. While awaiting deportation at the Belize, BH police station, the police gathered around him and begged him to teach them about Black Power.



Marvin and Muhammad Ali both

refused to fight in Vietnam. Ali
said, "Ain't no Viet Cong callled me
a nigguh!"



























Marvin and Akbar Muhammad,
International Representative
of Minister Farrakhan.











Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party

Bobby performed in Marvin's theatre before forming the BPP.

He starred in Come Next Summer,1965.



Black Dialogue Magazine brothers,

Aubrey Labrie, Marvin, Abdul Sabry,

Al Young, Arthur Sheridan and Duke

Williams. Black Dialogue was one of the critical journals of the Black Arts

Movement.
















Poet Ptah Mitchell, Marvin, drummer Kwic Time



Black Man Listen was published

by Dudley Randall's Broadside Press,

Detroit.








Black Fire, edited by Larry Neal

and Amiri Baraka was the Bibl

of the 60s Black Arts Movement.



























Marvin at Academy of

da Corner with grandson,

Jah Amiel



Mumia Abu Jamal called Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality

"an encyclopedia of knowledge."

Obama

Obama Must Give General Amnesty to all Prisoners


There has been a long call to free all prisoners unjustly held in American prisons and jails. Ninety per cent were mind altered at the time of their arrest, at least 50% were likely dual diagnosed, i.e., suffer drug abuse and mental illness. The majority are in for petty crimes and if they'd had proper legal representation would serve little or no time at all.

Not only are their crimes petty but should be seen as economic crimes due to poverty and lack of opportunity in a system that is advancing to what must be called neo-feudalism or wage slavery with little permanent employment, no health insurance, no unionism, thus they work at the whim of bosses who earn mega salaries and generous bonuses.

Once incarcerated, they suffer sexual and physical abuse, otherwise known as torture of the worse kind, and this includes inmates of mental wards, juvenile homes, jails and prisons. Those prisoners of conscious are often the most isolated for fear they will infect the population with radical ideology. The death row inmates are usually black and poor again, again, would not be on death row with proper legal representation.

The economic and social cost is astronomical, between fifty and sixty thousand dollars per inmate per year, more than it would cost to send them to Harvard, Yale and Stanford. But incarceration is big business in the era of de-industrialisation or the withering world of work, especially jobs with a living wage. Yet these neo-slaves, i.e., under the US Constitution involuntary servitude is legal, are a valuable commodity in the economic order. Prisons and jails are big business, in many communities the only business. They are now privatized and part of the military/corporate/university complex of institutions that perpetuate the capitalist system of free market exploitation. The incarcerated are of such value that the most powerful union in the state of California is the Correctional Officers Union that obviously has a vital stake in keeping the prison population high so they can maintain their lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. The Union will fight to the death to prevent a general amnesty.

In cahoots with the correctional officers are police departments who must arrest a quota of persons to maintain their jobs and justify their budgets. In some cities the police departments consume the major portion of city funds, to the neglect of schools, libraries and employment projects that would decrease arrests, court costs and incarceration. Many times the police are guilty of planting false evidence, false arrests, engaging in prostitution, drug dealing and money laundering. This behavior by law enforcement is a common feature below the border in Mexico, but is rapidly becoming a feature across the border in the US.

In some cases the police are in conspiracy with developers to destabilize neighborhoods that soon fall to gentrification. All the above applies to Oakland, California. It is a community under siege by police and gangs connected with the police. We suspect half the black on black homicide is police conspired.

A general amnesty must become a top priority of communities, especially with so many men falling victim to the slave catching police. This leads to family disintegration by increasing single family households. It is causing personality deformations in boys and girls who suffer prolong identity crisis since they lack positive male models. A young man attending a drug recovery meeting said, "Man, you might think some of my friends are gay, but they ain't gay, they just never heard a man's voice!"

We must reclaim are people from the dungeons , hellholes and Gulags in America. We cannot continue allowing them to be commodities in the capitalist system, similar to pork, corn, wheat and oil, to be traded on the stock exchange as neo-slaves.

If the last act of Saddam Hussein was a general amnesty, surely President Obama can do the same. It may get him some much needed brownie points for his 2012 election bid. But he must do so because it is the right thing to do. To not do so is economically and socially unsustainable.
--Marvin X
1/4/11

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow

There are more African Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste, not class, caste--a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits--much as their grandparents and great-grandparents once were during the Jim Crow era.--Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Congress to Palestinians: Drop dead - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Congress to Palestinians: Drop dead - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Harlem Discussion on Manning's Malcolm X Book

Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Black Revolutionary
A Critical Discussion of the New Biography-Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
SCHOMBURG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE /

MALCOLM X BLVD + 135TH STREET

Video link:*http://politube.org/show/3222**

This is a video of a panel organized by the Malcolm X Museum Chair: Sam Anderson*

PANELISTS INCLUDE...

Abdullah Abdur Razzaq Personal Secretary to Malcolm X.

Rosemari Mealy- Author-Activist, /Memories of a Meeting: Fidel and Malcolm X..

Bill Sales- Author-Activist, /From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the //Organization of Afro American Unity.

Kevin Powell- Public Speaker, and author or editor of 10 books, including /Open Letters to//America and /The Black Male Handbook.

William Strickland- Educator-Activist-Author, /Malcolm X: Make It Plain

Amina Baraka- Poet, Songstress and Activist

Amiri Baraka- Revolutionary Poet, Author and Jazz Composer

Zionism and National Insanity

Zionism And National Insanity

"Marvin X at his best, clarity of perception!" --Gerald Ali, UK

Recent events in Israel such as the planned building of 1,600 housing units in Arab East Jerusalem, lead us to the conclusion the Zionists are headed down a national suicide path that will surely take America, if not the world, with them. What makes their suicide a foregone conclusion is the fact they are surrounded by nations with populations more suicidal than they.

The Saudi Arabian brand of Islam promoted by Al Quida is a return to Ya'um Jahiliyah or the days of ignorance before the advent of Islam in 632 AD. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah are just as determined as the Jewish Zionists to execute their fanatical, dogmatic vision in the world, or in particular, the Middle East.

It is a dance of death for all peoples, with no hope in sight. The more the Muslims seem ready to conclude a deal with for some semblance of a Palestinian state, the more the Zionists expand their colonial occupation of Arab land.

Despite the winds of revolution and cries for social-political and economic justice throughout the region, the Zionists in Israel are tone deaf and determined to continue down the road to hell, for where else can they go as the Arab masses move toward a unity never before seen.

The recent visit of Israeli leader Netanyahu was a supreme example of hubris or simple minded White supremacy arrogance. He openly and unashamedly defied President Obama's call for a return to the pre-1967 borders in a final peace deal with the Palestinians. Despite having the greatest army in the world and nuclear weapons, Netanyahu claimed the 1967 borders are indefensible. How is this possible with an annual three billion dollar defense welfare check from America? And the Israeli sycophants in the US Congress treated the Zionist leader as a rock star, yet he is a star sure to fall from the sky. It is only a matter of time before the Zionist date with destiny.

Not long ago the son of a Hamas leader who confessed being a snitch for the Zionists, said he agreed to snitch after he saw nothing shall happen regarding Palestine as long as the two sides maintain their dogmatic religiosity or archaic mythology.

There can be no forward movement with such backward notions of history, of aboriginal claims of ownership based on mythology and religiosity, e.g., the Chosen people of God poppycock. At least the Arabs come from the reality that they were brazenly removed from their homeland.

How does one make peace with someone who has seized your homeland and relegated you to refugee camps within and outside your original space, especially when the occupation is based on injuries inflicted by someone else (Hitler)? Why should Arabs suffer for what Nazis did to the Jews?

The Arabs say they shall fight to the death to reclaim their land, with Hamas fighting for every inch of land taken, no matter how long it takes. It took 200 years before Saladin removed the last Crusaders! The Zionists claim Hamas will not recognize them, but what is the idea of a "Jewish" state but the non-recognition of the Palestinian people? Where is democracy in such a state, where is humanity. It is buried in mythology, a mythology that shall not survive the new era. I don't care what any holy books say, there shall be no peace without justice. This is the magic word missing in the vocabulary of both Netanyahu and President Obama. Nobody wants more than justice and nobody wants less.

What is amazing is that the Zionists have a nuclear arsenal and the greatest army in the Middle East, if not the world--at least until Hezbollah fought them to a standstill in Lebanon (a feat greater than the combined Arab armies in several wars against the Zionists)--yet all we hear is the need for security. What more security do you need? You have bombs, planes, tanks, soldiers, bio-chemical weapons of mass destruction and nukes, what more security do you need? Would tightening the grip on the Arab concentration camps suffice, i.e., will the Wall you are building satisfy your security needs, a checkpoint on every block, every mile? A snitch in every Arab home?

No matter the intractable positions on both sides, we are nearing a conclusion on this matter, yes, in spite of the duplicity of all concerned, the Zionists, their American sycophants, and the quisling Muslim governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States. Also, we cannot ignore the critical role of Iran in this drama, with their support of Hamas and Hezbollah for matters of their mythological dreams.

All these myths must be cast into the dustbin of history and a new vision must be adopted by all sides, no matter how painful. But again, the vision must be based on justice, not peace. Peace with boots on the neck is not a real and lasting peace. It is a sham peace and it will only hasten the day of judgment.

What we have is a prescription for full blown Armageddon. Let the fundamental Christians rejoice along with the 12vers in Iran who anxiously await the return of the 12th Imam or Mahdi, while the Christians savor the return of their Messiah with the destruction of Jerusalem, or an even more dramatic total destruction of the Middle East.

Either the Palestinians shall obtain their state or we shall simply await the final Holocaust that will supposedly usher in the new era of peace in the world. If the 1967 borders are indefensible, equally indefensible is the idea of a "Jewish" state. This idea doesn't border on insanity, it is the essence of insanity, a total break with reality.
--Marvin X
3/15/10

Revised 5/25/11

Although Marvin X is considered the father of Muslim American literature (Dr. Mohja Kahf), his thinking is Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, the title of his 2007 book on consciousness that Mumia Abu Jamal called "an encyclopedia of knowledge."

The World We Want is the World We Need

The World We Want Is the World We Need

This is the text of a talk presented by Vijay Prashad at The Riverside Church in New York on May 20, 2011 at an event entitled The World We Want Is the World We Need, sponsored by the Brecht Forum and Critical Resistance, and co-sponsored by the Mission and Social Justice Ministry of Riverside Church, Bluestockings Books, the Counterpublic Collective, the Indypendent, and the National Lawyers Guild, NYC Chapter. Also speaking at this event was Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore and Laura Flanders, and Mahina Movement performed two sets of music. 2400 people attended.

--Sam Anderson

by Vijay Prashad

We must love one another or die. --W. H. Auden

Capitalism is like a roller coaster. The dynamism of ruthless profit pushes against the constraints of humanity and technology to produce the boom years. But the very pressures of cutting wages and substituting machines for people creates unruly competition – the vast mass of humanity has not enough money in hand to buy goods, and the piles of wastedgoods tempers the enthusiasm of capital to make more. We enter the bust years.

Pressures from workers and the discovery of the dangers of the bust years lead to the idea that the State must spend taxed money or borrowed money to stimulate the economy. Where social democracy is stronger, the money was spent on the social side of things: on health care, on education, on public transportation, on public parks, on the social wages that both revved up the stalled economy and provided the basis of social solidarity. Such a social democratic path provided the objective basis for socialism: people might take pleasure in social interchange, in mutual care and solicitude. This was not capital's preferred path. It has a harsher tendency.

In the United States, from the late 19th century to the present, spending on the social side of the ledger has not gone above 15% of the Gross Domestic Product. Here, the government has conducted its countercyclical spending not on the social side but on the side of repression: on the international armed forces and the domestic armed forces; on the military and on the police. You get the stimulus you need but what you don't get is the objective basis for social solidarity. Military and police hierarchies are strengthened, and horizontal social life is eroded.

**

If this was not bad enough, over the past thirty years another social process has added to the grief of normal militarism: what we call globalization. The debt crisis in the Global South sent billions of dollars into the banks of the North. These banks and their industrial counterparts decided to finance their factories outside the high wage zones of the North. Wages are high in the United States because all our basic needs have been privatized: as individuals and families we are responsible for health care, education, transportation, insurance. If we don't earn enough, we will not survive. That is what makes our labor so expensive. If the rich were taxed and if services came to us through the State, we could receive lower wages and produce goods at a much more competitive rate. But that is not so. Instead, the State encouraged firms to take their industrial capital to zones of cheaper labor – making more and more people in the United States utterly disposable, redundant to the changed economy. It is to control them, to corral them that the prison-industrial complex grew, and that the police forces expanded. The State has no future for its people; it can only offer incarceration of one kind or another. Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.

Banks also turned their accumulated capital into financial wizardry. Mathematics is the lead science, not chemistry, physics or biology. Things are no longer to be made for profits to be harnessed; it is enough to manipulate numbers. Finance makes its own maps; it has its own atlas. Money makes wide detours around the human imagination. Disposable people are needed to sign the forms for no-money-down-payments; and then they are needed to take the blame for the system's torments. Their hopes and dreams, their visions and needs are not at the center of things.

Some believe that the world will end on Saturday. Our framework is not so random, so catastrophic. I too believe in the End Times. In the End Time for Capitalism, a system rooted in the destruction of the human spirit. Democracy is our prejudice, but it does not fully exist yet. It is an idea, it provides space for action, but it has not yet been incarnated fully: the secular Rapture will be the day when Democracy will come into its own.

**

Democracy makes its appearance in the streets of Egypt, and elsewhere in the Arab Revolt. They follow events in Latin America, from the Venezuelan Caracazo of 1989 to the Bolivian Gas Wars in 2003-2005. They follow as well the events in the rest of Africa, from the unrest over the Kenyan elections of 2007-08 to the Enough is Enough protests in Nigeria of the past years. The people know or feel this idea of democracy, and they have decided to enact it on their streets. For them, the idea is no longer simply a slogan; the script is being read out in public.

And furthermore, this is a socialist idea, for at its depth is a scream for popular control over institutions, not simply for a transference of power from one section of the elite to another.

Egypt's Pharonic State had a sophisticated security apparatus, with a necklace of prisons around Cairo itself. The upsurge has taken aim at these prisons. But it is not enough for them to target the prisons. These are an emblem of a system that relied upon incarceration for its stability and its treasury (The U. S. bursary of $3billion per year was designed to contain dissent among the Egyptian people and to keep in place the peace deal with Israel). To truly end the security state, the people had to recapture their politics and their economy and wash the toxicity out of their society. An early indication of this total view was the strikes by the Suez workers, and the threat to close down the Suez Canal: that would be an internationalist gesture, with their hands on the lever of a tenth of the world's trade.

Every country gets the fascism it deserves. And so too its revolutionary task. The Arab Revolt is taking care of its various confounding structures. It is their job. The help we can give them is to begin the long process of dismantling the imperial tentacles, including ending the subsidy given to the Egyptian army as a bribe on behalf of Israel. Our job is not to run their revolution; our job is to lift the
U.S. boot from the necks of the Arab people.

That boot goes down in the name of Justice and Peace, in the name of humanitarian intervention. By temperament, George W. Bush destroyedt his permission to bomb – he was too brash, too unable to mask raw force behind sweet words. Barack Obama is more sophisticated. He has rehabilitated humanitarian intervention, which is the window dressing that imperialism needs to counter our wider ideas and aspirations for democracy. When the empire acts, it is never on the side of the good. Historians go back and find that it is hard to rehabilitate the war aims of imperialism: negotiations are on to bring the Taliban back to authority, so where is the concern for Afghan women now? So too with Libya, where the neo-liberals like Mahmud Jibril and Shokri Ghanem will be handed the keys to the country – absent erratic and ruthless Gaddafi. Much the same in Haiti: the boot does not bring justice, which is the collateral damage of imperialism.

The neo-liberal project of the United States has come undone in the economic sphere. That project was never about economics alone. It had its limits, such as the reliance by the United States on others to buy its substantial debt. The way to ensure that this debt is covered is by political pressure, by military force: the Chinese, Saudis and Europeans continue to cover the US bills because they recognize the Dollar as the planet's main currency, and they allow the US to protect their interests with its substantial military force.

If domestic prisons and prison-like conditions maintain an immoral peace inside the country, the planetary reach of the US war machine maintains power for the global elite against humanity. Maps point to places where life is evil now: Afghanistan, Libya, Bahrain, Gaza, and Detroit. The military aspect of neo-liberalism is alive and well. We might not have responsibility for the way things turn out in Egypt, but we are certainly responsible for the militarism that keeps us afloat.

Our job is to build our movements, to incarnate democracy in our spaces. Critical Resistance and the Brecht Forum are anchors. They deserve our support. So do all the other small platforms that will help us build across our society, to end prisons and prison-like conditions, to make our politics more humane, our society less toxic. So do new formations like the United National Anti-War Committee, and others who want to unfurl the banner of Peace over our cities.

We live in freedom by necessity. We must reshape our world. We must love one another, or die.

[Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out. He can be reached at vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu.]
























---------------------------------------

New York Vision Festival, June 5-11

Louis Reyes Rivera




Woody King









Ed Bullins




Amiri Baraka















Marvin X















16 YEARS OF VISION FESTIVAL

take a stand
• Take A Stand – Arts and Community
Arts For Art maintains a commitment to understand what is at play in the world around us and theeffect on our creative community. We are leading the way in building opportunities for uniting the spectrum of the innovative creative jazz music and related arts. The Vision Festival draws people from around the world who are interested in the great, the creative and the innovative with a shared sense of social responsibility. AFA has been working to strengthen the artistic communities by holding town meetings, panel discussions and creating opportunities for artists to perform and come together – to build a power through unity.

This year’s festival features 3 Public Discussions:

June 5 – 4pm

Opening the Festival - Obama, Class Struggle, The Media & The Arts
Panelists:
Amiri Baraka - The last Poet Laureate of New Jersey
Ed Bullins – Playwright; former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party
Woodie King - director and producer; founder and president of New Federal Theatre
Marvin X - Prime Minister of Poetry, First Poet's Church of the Latter Day Egyptian Revisionists
William Parker – bassist, composer
Louis Reyes Rivera, moderator – Poet; Former host of Perspective on WBAI

June 6 – 5pm

Imagining a Culture of Resistance & Radical Vision: Artists & Social Action
A panel of artists and activists from different perspectives explore the role of art and culture in
changing the world today, challenging people to think critically and envisioning another way the
world could be.

Panelists: Marc Ribot, David Henderson, Patricia Parker, Annie Day, Brandon Ross,
Michael Heller moderator.

June 9 – 5pm

Innovative Music in Education –

Musicians take on the struggle to include innovative music as part of arts curriculum,
and discuss the why and how to accomplish this critical task.

Panelists: Gerald Cleaver, Daniel Levin, Tom Zlabinger, Nicole Federici, Juan Pablo Carletti
Michael Heller moderator

Abrons Art Center is at 466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street) New York, NY 10002.
For more information visit www.artsforart.org, or contact us at 212-254-5420.

Muhammad Ahmed on the Present Situation

Dr. Muhammad Ahmed, aka Max Stanford, has answered my call that a Black Revolutionary Nationalist stand up and represent the voice of radical intellectualism, largely unrepresented since Malcolm X. Yes, we must think globally yet act locally, i.e., nationally. We may live in the global village but we have national interests that must be addressed.

We have more brothers and sisters under the criminal justice system's virtual slavery than when were in chattel property slavery. This should be of great and immediate concern since we have a history of leaders coming from this class of individuals locked down. Mumia Abu Jamal is the most prominent example. Imagine how many other minds are behind bars with solutions that surpass the thinking of our socalled brightest academic minds that are in mental and material prisons far worse than the cell Mumia occupies on death row.

We appreciate Dr. Ahmed's attempt to clarify what's really going on. We need more radical voices to spread their points of view, if only to expand the dialogue. We do not and never shall control the Monkey Mind Media, so we must as Amiri Baraka says, "Stop thinking like Americans," and use the technology at our disposal. We must send and resend vital information such as Ahmed's statement below. Let us link up with each other to do as Baraka says, immediately shoot down any madness they put out. We most certainly have the brains to do it!

Let us move expeditiously to extricate ourselves from a situation that is way past due resolving.
The level of ignorance is abysmal. Information must be repeated over and over to get past the wretched central nervous systems blocked by the rap beats and addiction to cell phone mania.
--Marvin X
5/23/11

What is the Meaning of the Present Situation?

By Dr. Muhammad Ahmed
(aka Max Stanford)
Temple University, Philadelphia

There are several developments that represent a breakthrough in the
global finance monopoly capitalist system presently dominated by the
United States of America (USA). This is the result of the structural
systemic crises which is produced by the increasing use of automation
and robtics in the international production process:

The financial crisis brought on by the expanding use of electronics in
production is continuing to tighten its grip both internationally and
nationally. The cyclical crisis of under consumption is developing.
Automated production drives labor – produced commodities off the
market. In this process, wages are dragged down to the cost of
automated production.

What we have witnessed in the middle east with national democratic
uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen against neocolonial
dictatorships are due to the neo liberal austerity policies of those
regimes on their populations.

The rich got richer and more Westernized and the poor who constituted
90% of the population got poorer and more desperate.

While the figure heads have been removed, the neocolonial system
remains. But the uprisings represent a break in the consciousness of
masses of people and as Samir Amin has said, these movements may
eventually develop into socialist revolutions.

Libya on the other hand is a different situation in which the
imperialist north (U.S. Britain, Europe (NATO) led by the U.S. have
used an “opportune moment to subvert the Libian socialist revolution.
This is due to the world-wide peak in oil and rising competition for
oil, natural gas, water and other mineral resources. China and India
are viewed favorably by those countries who have these resources due
to their non-colonial and non- imperialist past (more on Libya later)

The US and its other capitalist allies, France, Britain, Western
Europe and Japan, have not fully recovered from the Great Recession of
2008. The US government is in great debt and has had to slash it
expenses. The Republican Party has forced Obama and the Democratic
Party to compromise on the budget.

This comes at a time when the Republican Party is on the attack to
attempt to destroy Obama‘s base i.e., Public Sector Workers, unions
and collective bargaining. Public Sector Workers, workers in
Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan New
Mexico and other states are all under attack by the Republican Party.
Barry Finger in, Public Sector Workers and the Crisis in the winter
2011 issue of New Politics says,

Behind the assault is the very real recognition that Public Sector now
has the highest concentration of unionized workers in the American
economy.

The Republican Party representing the reactionary racist fascistic
right wing sector of U.S finance monopoly capital has played the “race
card” with white workers using Sara Palin and the Tea party movement
to whip up a racist false class consciousness among white workers who
are becoming more dispossed due to industrial jobs going overseas and
the bursting of the financial bubble of 2008 which led to mass
mortgage foreclosures. It is these white workers who voted in the
Republicans.

Fascism is not a choice or program. It is arising objectively as the
only possible political superstructure for the economic takeover by
corporate power. It arises within the struggle of the capitalist class
– a class which is itself being transformed - to align the political
superstructure with the changing productive relations.

Dr. Grace Lee Boggs said that “Wisconsin represents the end of the
Welfare State.” Enter the permanent U.S warfare states.

The struggle in Wisconsin and other states can become a
transformational movement if those involved in the struggle recognize
that our current crises are rooted in the decline of the empire which
made possible the welfare state with its thousands of public employees
to take care of tasks for which we the people must become increasingly
responsible.

With the Democratic regime of the Obama administration attacking
Muammar Qaddafi and Libya, Africa it seems like it does not matter
whether the President is white or black, Republican or Democratic, his
or her job is to protect the interests of the American Empire.

Because oil is a global product, the USA’s higher consumption and
dependency means it must act globally to secure supplies. Its interest
in guaranteeing plentiful supplies of oil translates into the need to
secure access to virtually every region in the world, and this
explains why oil has such a widespread effect on America’s global
political strategy

It would not be farfetched to believe that the C.I.A, deprogrammed and
reprogrammed captured Al Qaida militants who were held in the U.S.
army base at Guantanamo in Cuba, released them and sent them into
Libya to fulfill the United States, AFRICOM (African Command)
controlled by the USA to destabilize Libya. Why?

Because Qaddafi has aligned Libya with Cuba and Venezuela and is the
force behind a call for a “United States of Africa” in the African
Union continuing the work of Kwame Nkrumah, past president of Ghana.
Qaddafi has also come to the aid of North African immigrants who have
migrated to Europe and who are being harassed, beaten and are racially
oppressed while living in Europe.

Before the “so-called uprising” and foreign bombing of Libya; Libya
had the highest standard of living in all of Africa.

Libya’s Revolution brought free health care and education to the
people and subsidized housing. In fact students in Libya can study
there or abroad and the government gives them a monthly stipend while
they are in school and they pay no tuition. If a Libyan needs a
surgery that must be done overseas, then the government will pay for
that surgery.

The U.S strategy is one to build Israel which constantly bombs and
subjugates the people of Palestine and to acquire by force Libya’s
oil.

The United States has sought to base its AFRICOM military operation
on African soil for years now. However the African Union has taken a
position, given its member states colonial past, to oppose foreign
troops on African soil. The Libyan situation has created a cover for
the United States for the first time to launch military operations
against Africa under AFRICOM’s new commander, General Carter Ham, who
took over command of AFRICOM just days before military operations were
launched against Libya

With raging battles in Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan and now
Libya, the United States has become a global warfare state. As more
breaks in the global system occurs, the increasing momentum for the
protracted world-wide permanent revolution for the overthrow of
capitalism develops. Not reported widely in the establishment media,
is that auto parts assembly workers at Honda plants in China recently
won higher wages and the right to elect their own union officers after
organizing a wave of successful strikes.

Since China now leads the world in manufacturing for export, the
struggles of Chinese workers to organize are crucial both for the
well-being of huge members of human beings in China, and for the
ability of workers in the rest of the world to end the race to the
bottom

With the recent tsunami in Japan and its nuclear meltdown, global
warming is becoming a concern for all of humanity. We must move to a
green economy and way of life or the end of the world as we know it is
near.

The USA produces 35 percent of the world’s transport emissions of
carbon-dioxide. Americans use five times the global average of energy
consumption. The USA is the largest contributor to global warming.…a
major problem is that the entire modern economy’s energy,
transportation, industrial, and residential infrastructure is built on
fossil fuels. It takes many decades to replace a society’s economic
infrastructure. Without fundamental transformation of the
infrastructure, short-term conservation measures and minor technical
changes are unlikely to achieve substantial sustained reduction of
greenhouse gas emissions.

In order to respond positively to the present situation we should
“think globally and organize (act) locally.” On the local level
spread the revolution by creating a local green economy; politically
“uprooting” racist reactionaries and neo-colonial comprador (sell
outs) by running grassroots candidates and “building a resistance
movement against racist- anti worker tactics by capitalists. As we
said in 1963, “Arise! Awake! Your Future is at Stake!”

(Max Stanford)
Assistant Professor
Department of African American Studies, Temple University
4/17/11 Dr. Muhammad Ahmad
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Distributed By: THE PAN-AFRICAN RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION PROJECT--
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http://panafricannews.blogspot.com
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http://english.aljazeera.net
http://www.freemumia.org
http://www.herald.co.zw/
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http://www.caribbeannewspapers.com
http://www.kpfa.org
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