Baraka was the Messenger and the Revolutionary Movement was his Message (Keith) by X.

In April of 1994 on the eve of college graduation I attended a speech given by Amiri Baraka at the Douglass College Student Center. I lived on Easton Avenue over a sub shop called “SubKing” at the time with my old lady -- Louise. I doubt the shop is there anymore. I was reading Marx, some strange European Anarchists, I took Bronner’s course “Theories of the Labor Movement” we read Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Kautsky, etc. I took a course called Marxism with a grad student who I think is still in academia, Manfred Steager, an Engels specialist. These courses taught me a lot but Bronner and Steager are both, finally, reformers. They acknowledge that working people get a bad deal or worse, but they don’t believe that the workers could actually run the society; that the society can be transformed in a radically democratic way. They ultimately preach capitalism with a human face.

I was, in a word, dissatisfied with these subtle pleas for limits on human possibility. Society under capitalism had nothing and still has nothing to offer me or the majority of the world’s people. Even life for the best off, although they may not agree or know it, is a pathetic excuse for human potential, all they can really do is buy stuff and consume, comfort and mild pleasure are their only aspirations, of course they are willing to pursue these aspirations with a frightful viciousness, as Marx says, the history of capitalism is written in letters of blood and fire. Louise and I walked into the auditorium with few expectations and not much hope, beyond an interesting lecture.

Baraka, however, is a real revolutionary and he blew open my mind; it was a secular religious experience. Baraka spoke for two and a half hours, the time passed in an instant, by the end his words made us high, I felt like I was levitating. The speech was captured on film and circulated among organizers, I dubbed the speech off of the VHS tape onto a two audio cassettes and listened about 50 times on my walkman while working as a house painter.

Baraka is a word sorcerer. He forces the language to conform to his thought, language becomes, in his hands, a sword of creation rather than thought’s cage. He is an avant-garde thinker and artist, but he defines the avant-garde as the expression of what is happening now. Most thought and nearly everything in academia and in the corporate media expresses something old, dead and crusty. Yet, Baraka is a popular thinker and artists, not popular in the sense that he sells a lot of books or whatever, but popular in the sense that he can communicate with everyone, he doesn’t dumb it down, he makes it plain without making it simple and false. I think that he achieves this in two ways. First, by grounding his thinking firmly in the knitty gritty of social reality, people’s real lives, and revolutionary struggle, and secondly, he is able to speak to multiple levels of understanding simultaneously, that is to say, he speaks to those with the most experience and newcomers in the same breath, although they may each get something different from his words. This is why I could listen to the speech over and over; I got something new out of it each time.

So what did he say? I still have the VHS tape, but don’t have a VHS player anymore, I plan to get it transformed to DVD soon. Anyway, he started with “we are here to tell you that there is still a revolutionary movement in the United States.” Louise and I were thinking about what to do with ourselves after graduation, we had vague notions of going out to California where the buds are greener. It seemed nothing was happening in New Brunswick, Baraka’s opening remarks knocked the shit off my shoes. He then explained how corporations not only commodify art, that is, make it into an object for sale, they transform they way art is produced, they transform the artist, and what is produced. He talked about the need to create an alternative and “alternative superstructure” as a beginning and basis for struggle. He used a few examples, to explain the transformation of art and artists. He pointed out how the avant-garde of Jazz music –“free jazz” or as he prefers to call it “the new Black music,” was transformed into fusion and “Weather Report,” how socially revolutionary music like the Reggae of a Peter Tosh and a Bob Marley was transformed by corporate domination into Yellowman and Shaba Ranks, or hip-hop from Africa Bambaata, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy into Gangster Rap. And although he didn’t use these examples, I would add this process also happened in country music where the outlaw movement of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings was transformed into Toby Keith and Garth Brooks.

This process of transformation from, “gold to shit, proving dialectics Muhammad Ali style,” as Baraka put it in a poem, is capitalism’s tried and true method. Not only does capitalism transform art in these obvious and appreciable ways, it also transforms the life of every working person whether an artist or not. The capitalist production process seizes our working lives, tells us what to make, when to make it, how to make it, and takes it away after we make it, to sell for profit.We, glorious human beings with potential unimagined, are transformed, just like the art, turned from gold to shit. Another Baraka poem: “We were slaves! Slaves! Slaves! Slaves! They threw our lives away.”

I began to see the gravity of the situation. Capitalism makes the world hell, or as Baraka put it, “they made the world into a stinking cave.” The world would be corny at best, and a horror at worst -- and our lives would reflect that world, we would be of that world -- if we don’t act. Leaving New Brunswick disappeared as an option, New Brunswick wasn’t the problem. Capitalism was the problem -- its shadow would darken our lives anywhere we went. We had to act, and here we had contact with something happening. I knew well before I arrived at the lecture that capitalism had to be resisted and overthrown but I didn’t know how to begin. I started to see that there isn’t a way out of capitalism, you can’t run off to California or Vermont, or to a good job and family life as a college educated person and escape. These are easily identifiable as dead ends, neither peace, nor freedom, not even glory exist on any of those paths only banal and bloody comfort at best. Submission or resistance is the only real choice.

My thoughts ran along these lines at the speech because I was also vitally concerned with my existential situation, with a search for some deeper significance, and meaning to this life. I was concerned with the questions that the system tries to convince you are only the concerns of teenagers. Adults and serious people, this system says, accommodate themselves, they consume or try to and they do it with joy, they have refined their expectations, their greatest hopes are a new car and a plasma TV, they live within what Freud called the reality principle --the psychological explanation of what happens when the freedom-seeking, meaning part of yourself is killed by your own hand at the systems’ command.

Fred Engels said that freedom is the recognition of necessity. Baraka forced us to see reality, to recognize the necessity of resistance. When the speech ended and we came down from its high our path was well lit. Throwing ourselves into the struggle gave life purpose, meaning, and intimations of immortality.

In future posts I will talk more about some of the specific concepts that Baraka explained like: an alternative superstructure; Cultural Revolution; and self-determination. These concepts guided much of our work in the People’s Campaign of 2000 and are best explained in relationship to that practice. (Keith)

Clips from Baraka's 1994 Douglass College speech will soon be available at the Pirate Caucus blog (via YouTube). (X)