Establishing The Black-Commune: Community Control of the Black Community

by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin

"How do we raise a new revolutionary consciousness against a system programmed against our old methods? We must use a new approach and revolutionize the Black Central City Commune, and slowly provide the people with the incentive to fight by allowing them to create programs, which will meet all their social, political, and economic, needs. We must fill the vacuums left by the established order. In return, we must teach them the benefits of our revolutionary ideals. We must build a subsistence economy and a sociopolitical infrastructure so that we can become an example for all revolutionary people." - George Jackson, in his book Blood in my Eye

The idea behind a ‘Black-Commune’ is to create a dual power structure as a counter to the underdevelopment, decline, and marginalization of Black communities due to economic globalization and the political neglect from federal, state, and local government. This means that Black people must form and unify their own organizations of struggle to take control of the existing Black communities and all the institutions within them for the purpose of progressive re-development.

The realization of this aim means that we can build inner city Black-Communes which will be centers of Black power and social revolutionary culture against the white political power structures and elected Black neo-colonial officials in majority Black cities of the United States. Once they assume hegemony such Black-Communes would be an actual alternative to the State and serve as a force to revolutionize Black people - it would serve as a living example of self-determination.

There's a tremendous fighting power of potential in the Black community but it is not organized in a structured revolutionary way to effectively struggle and take what is due. The white Capitalist ruling class recognizes this, which is why it pushes the fraud of "Black Capitalism" and Black politicians and other such "responsible leaders. These fakes and sellout artists lead us to the dead-end road of voting and praying for that which we must really be willing to fight for!

The Black-Commune is a staging ground for Black struggle for the struggle of political self-determination and economic self-reliance. This communal staging ground will be governed by community councils who make policy decisions, administer affairs, and develop the capacities of the Black community. These councils would be democratic neighborhood assemblies composed of representative elected by Black workers in various community institutions-factories, hospitals, schools-as well as delegates elected on a block basis.

As Black people due to our accute socioeconomic crisis we can no longer afford to depend on Black Mayors, other politicians, or government bureaucrats; we must reject them in order to struggle 'for real' community power. Therefore we must take up the political responsibility to gain community control of all the institutions of the Black community instead of just letting the State decide what is good for us! We need full control over our communities because it is not only our right to benefit from our resources and dollars but also the residents of a community have a true understanding of its needs and desires.

The local council would then be federated - joined together on a local level to create a city-wide group of councils who would run affairs in that community. The councils and other neighborhoods collectives organized for a variety of reasons would make a mass commune. This commune would be in turn federated at the regional and national level the aim being to create a national federation of Black-Communes, which would meet periodically in one or a number of mass assembly meetings. This federation would be composed of elected or appointed delegates representing their local commune or council.

Such a national federation of Black-Communes would allow Black community councils from all over North America to work out common policies and speak with one voice on all matters affecting their communities or regions. It would thus have far more power than any single community council could. However, to prevent this national federation from bureaucratic usurpation of power by political factions or opportunistic leaders, elections should be held regularly and delegates would be subject to recall at any time for misconduct, so that they remain under the control of the local communities they represent

The Black community councils are really a type of grassroots movement made up of all the social formations of our people: the block and neighborhood committees, Labor, student and youth groups, (even the church, to a limited degree), social activist groups, and others to unite the various protest actions around a common program of struggle for this period. These community councils represent direct democracy instead of the type of phony American "representative democracy,” which is really nothing but control by politicians and businessmen. The councils are especially important because they provide embryonic self- rule and the beginnings of an alternative to the dependency-deprivation reliance on the American government.

The Black-Commune also represents a Black revolutionary counterculture - it is the embryo of the new Black revolutionary society in the body of the old sick, dying one. It is the new lifestyle in microcosm that contains the new Black social values and the new communal organizations, and institutions, which will become the sociopolitical infrastructure of the new Black cooperative society. Our objective is to teach new Black social values of unity and struggle against the negative effects of a greedy materialistic - consumeristic white Capitalist society and culture. To do that we must build the Black-Commune into a Black Consciousness movement to build race pride and respect.

This Black communalism would be both a repository of the best in Black culture and ideology. We need to change both our lives and our lifestyles in order to deal with the many interpersonal contradictions and conflicts that exist in our community. We must examine the Black family, Black male/female relationships, the mental health of the Black community, relations between the community and the white establishment, non-Blacks, and among Black people themselves. We would hold Black consciousness raising sessions in schools, community centers, prisons and in Black communities all over North America that would teach Black history and culture; new liberating social ideas and values to children and adults, as well as relevant counseling and therapy techniques to resolve family and marital problems, all the while giving a Black revolutionary perspective to the issues of the day. Our people must be made to see that the self-hatred, disunity, distrust, internecine violence, and oppressive social conditions among Black people are the result of the legacy of African slavery and the present day effects of Capitalist greed.

Finally the main objective of Black revolutionary culture is to agitate and organize Black people to struggle for their freedom. As Steve Biko, the murdered South African revolutionary stated: 

"The call for Black consciousness is the most positive call to come from ally group in the Black world for a long time. It is more than just a reactionary rejection of whites by Blacks. At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realization by Blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Once the latter has been so effectively manipulated and controlled by the oppressor as to make the oppressed believe that he is a liability to the white man, then there is nothing the oppressed can do that will really scare the powerful masters. The philosophy of Black consciousness, therefore expresses group pride and the determination by Blacks to rise up and attain the envisaged self. "

By the "envisaged self," Biko refers to the Black self as a liberated psyche. It is that which we want to rescue with such a Black consciousness movement here in America. We need to counter Black self-hatred, defeatism, fatalism, and frivolous survival ’party mentality’. We also want to end the social degradation of our community - rid it of drug addiction, prostitution, Black-on-Black crime, and other social evils that destroys the moral fiber of the Black community. These negative social values, the so-called "dog-eat-dog" philosophy of capitalist greed teaches Black people to be individualists of the worst sort; willing to commit any kind of crime against each other, and to take advantage of each other. This oppressive culture is what we are fighting against and as long as it exists it will be hard to unify Black people around a revolutionary self-determined political program.

Building a Black Survival Program.

The racial oppression of Black people is glaringly manifested in economic deprivation: massive unemployment and poverty. Therefore we must address economic survival in addition to providing new cultural role models. It is in the area of socioeconomic development where the Black-Commune, a network of community organizations and institutions assumes its greatest importance.

We must build a political socioeconomic infrastructure to intervene in every area of Black life: food and housing cooperatives, Black Liberation schools, people's banks and community mutual aid funds, medical clinics and hospitals, rodent control and pest extermination programs, cooperative factories, community cultural and entertainment centers, the establishment of an intercommunal electronic communications network, land and building reclamation projects, public works volunteer brigades to rebuild the cities, youth projects, drug clinics, and many other such programs.