ON BLACK ECONOMICS
To the Editor:
It was with deep shock and dismay that my brother and I, representing the Republic of New Africa, returned to Detroit from conferences in East Africa with black freedom fighters to find that black leaders here, some of whom had identified with the Black Revolution, had joined with the white exploiter in a new approach to exploitation of black people.
We refer to the formation of the profit-making corporation called “ACCORD”, in which black people hold all the offices except several seats on the Board of Directors and in which Lynn Townsend, whose corporation, Chrysler, invests several hundred millions in South Africa’s racism every year, serves as “adviser.” Accord, Inc., emphasizing its plan to build co-op housing in its press releases, is designed by its own admission “to promote stores and other enterprises.” It is designed, in other words, to reestablish the vulture’s grip which the white man has held too long over black economic life and which was being loosened by black self consciousness, indeed: by black burning, and by black revolutionary determination to be free.
‘The difference between Accord, Inc. and the old way is that now the white exploiter is willing to allow a handful of black people to share in the exploitation with him.
To us, the masses of black people, the result is the same. We are no nearer freedom because the class exploiting us is now to have a few blacks up front.
Those who Join in this nefarious undertaking—at this juncture in our history — have deserted the “Black Revolution. They have been sold the fallacious notion that a genuine black bourgeoisie— a genuine class of black business people—must grow up before the rest of us can enjoy the wealth of society, the fruit of our labor, the mature nectar of opportunity. We can not wait.
Our consciousness of our lack of opportunity and our exploitation will not permit the luxury of the slow growth —or even the accelerated growth—of a black bourgeoisie before we have freedom and power. The creation of a class of black businessmen cannot, in any case, meet the essential economic’ problems which we black people, as a people and as individuals, face—and which we must solve through our revolution.
And what are these essential economic problems? They are: 1) economic power and control, as a people, and 2) jobs, full employment in creative tasks.
The solution to these economic problems lies only in separation and creation of an independent, powerful, black nation: the route already embarked upon by those who join the Republic of New Africa. This, the Republic, throughout this land, is the present course of the Black Revolution. The only course. If a black business class in America—indeed, if any business class in America— could solve the economic problems of black people, these problems would already have been solved. The white business class, acting in conjunction with the federal government, has attacked unemployment for years.
Since 1946 the United States has had a Full Employment Act. Since 1949 the federal government has directed specific programs at “hard-core” unemployment. Since 1961, federal-business crash programs like the Manpower Development and Training Act and the Area Redevelopment Act have addressed black unemployment. And since 1964 the Poverty Program has marshaled the vast resources of government and private industry.
But the latest U.S. Labor department statistics show the failure of these two decades of effort by the most powerful private business community the world has ever known, Not only is black unemployment throughout the nation still twice as high as white (two out of every 25 black persons seeking work are unemployed, nationally), but there are two-and-a-third million WHITE people unemployed. Worse, more than one fourth of those black teenagers seeking work are unemployed, and fully more than a third of all black families in America—one out of every three black families is, according to the Labor Department, earning and living below the poverty level. This is a staggering failure, If the white business community, acting with and through the federal government, has failed to end either of our essential economic problems, and especially jobs, there is no hope that a new black business community, set up within and’ subordinate to the white business community, smaller and far less powerful than the white business community, and offering nothing new, can solve these problems.
The prospect offers us only the consolation of being exploited by an integrated team-rather than an all-white team. That is no consolation. It is no solution.
The Republic of New Africa has in its Declaration of Independence that “the major means of production and trade (shall be held) in the trust of the state to assure the benefits of this earth and man’s genius and labor to society and all its members.”
This means that we can not wait—indeed, we will not wait, for the creation of a black middle-class of businessmen through which, by a trickle-down , process we, the masses, will free ourselves of the curse of want, of deprivation, of disease and poverty. We are working for an independent nation which will use all the resources of the government, of the people, necessary to make jobs for all and wealth.
The quarter-billion dollars which New York uses each year for welfare, for instance, would not be doled out in ridiculously small driplets to individual families, as is done now, but would be used to create nurseries, training schools and factories, mills, plants. It would be used to make jobs, at good wages, for everyone able to work, including mothers who could only work part-time. That quarter-billion dollars alone, in one year, could be used to open ten fully equipped hospitals, 1,200 fine brick schools, 5 electric power plants, each serving a community of 60,000 two steel mills, two pair of automated cement plants, and 500 miles of concrete highway. This use of what is now “welfare” money would create more wealth, more jobs, and more productive people, in one year, than-welfare has done throughout its history.
This is because the approach is different. It involves the use of tax money to open businesses, to create industries, owned by the people as a whole. This approach is quite different from the approach of building a black bourgeoisie, a black middle class of businessmen. What Accord, Inc. proposes is more. of the same thing: more of the refusal of government to use tax money to open industries, owned by the people, to give the people jobs and good income; more of the favoring of the businessman over the worker; more of the trickle-down theory, and more of the failure to make jobs, at good pay, for everyone—a failure which has persisted through 20 years of U.S. government programs to end unemployment and poverty.
The way of the Republic of New Africa is the way of hope: the use of tax money, of the resources of the people and the state, to open industries, owned by the people as a whole. This is. the economic side of the Black Revolution. The Republic is the Revolution. It meets not only our essential economic need of jobs for everyone but the need of black control.
Black “control” such as that proposed by Accord, Inc. and the so-called “Black Bank Group” is no control at. all, because both the housing financing and the stores of Accord would be subordinate to white financial companies, and the bank would be simply one small institution, subject to larger white banks and financial institutions including the white-controlled US. central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank.
Further, the Black Bank would be controlled by a small group of private investors, black and white, and not the people. Neither Accord nor the black bank could affect—and definitely not control—the policies and operations of the Federal Reserve system.
Neither could compel wholesalers or other middlemen to extend to black businesses, trying to grow and compete with big white chains, the so-called “‘trade credit” (30 to 90 day grace in paying for your supply) without which small business cannot compete. (And when you cannot compete, in the
