#5- The People's Summit for Democracy 2022
I attended the People’s Summit for Democracy from Wednesday June 8th through Friday June 10th in Los Angeles, California. The People’s Summit was a response to and rejection of Joseph R. Biden’s Summit of the Americas that, in addition to re-asserting U.S. hegemony in the guise of cooperation throughout the Americas, denied invitations to Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. As the refusal of countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Grenada to participate demonstrated, a summit that barred nations simply because of their political orientations could not truly represent the interests of the Americas. Relatedly, the People’s Summit conveyed that a meeting of states that did not include the people—women, labor, Black and indigenous peoples, social organizations, etc.—could not possibly take seriously issues like progress, peace, and prosperity. More than that, the United States is the greatest threat to these the latter, given its imperial, neocolonial, and warmongering policy and practice. As such, any summit with the U.S. at the helm is doomed to perpetuate the exploitation, oppression, and repression of the majority.
By contrast, the People’s Summit boasted a dizzying array of dedicated organizations, organizers, activists, and leaders from throughout the Americas who came together to discuss and debate, agitate and organize for, democracy, self-determination, workers’ power, and the interests of the people. Panel topics spanned solidarity beyond borders, let Cuba live, ending patriarchy, and workers run the world. Outside, manifold organizations, including Black Alliance for Peace, Empire Files, BYP 100, People’s Forum, and CodePink set up tables to share information about their campaigns, disseminate literature, and ground with attendees. There were also several rallies, actions, and marches to highlight the solidarity that undergirds Nuestras Americas and to forcefully oppose Biden’s sham summit.
On Friday June 10th, I had the opportunity to participate on a powerful panel titled “Who’s Streets?” that included remarks from organizers and intellectuals from Cuba, Colombia, and the United States. I reprint my remarks in full below.
Thank you to the People’s Summit for this kind invitation to speak amongst distinguished comrades and colleagues. I want to raise five points in the short time I have here that might provide insight into what is to be done:
1. It’s imperative for us to understand entities like the Africa Command (AFRICOM) and the Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), as strategic partners of warmongering, imperialist, antiradical alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. I emphasize antiradicalism here because we know that NATO was formed shortly after World War II not only as an anticommunist bloc, but also to challenge Non-Aligned, national liberation, and other counterhegemonic movements. Their sole purpose is to maintain western domination generally, and United States hegemony particularly—irrespective of rhetoric about human rights, democracy, women’s rights, etc. And we must understand that domestic police forces, and their militarization through programs like the 1033 program, are merely localized manifestations of the warmongering, anti-human imperatives of AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, NATO, etc.
To quote from the U.S. Out of Africa Network’s most recent AFRICOM Watch Bulletin, which everyone committed to African liberation should read : “Both SOUTHCOM and AFRICOM are extensions of NATO and the militarized assault on the democratic and human rights of Africans by the U.S. with the support of neocolonial forces, as well as an attack on the self-determination of African peoples and nations in the Americas, the African continent, and the world. Domestic and international repression by the U.S. security state are linked. Our oppression crosses borders; so must our solutions. All who support the right of the people to authentic democracy and human rights should stand in solidarity against neo-colonial rule and the imperialism that it protects.”
2. If the imperialists are internationalists, we must be also. If we take the idea of Nuestra America seriously, then when we ask “who’s streets,” we have to move beyond the United States to include, for example, favelas in Brazil, Garrisons in Jamaica, African and indigenous Territorios in Colombia, and so-called slums in Haiti. Internationalist consciousness and solidarity, in tandem with community and grassroots organizing and mutual aid, provides us with an expansive vision of politics that, in the U.S., is too often reduced to voting for one or the other faction of the ruling party. As Julius Nyerere put it, “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”
3. The militarization of borders on stolen land and the brutalization of peoples who largely come from countries the United States has been integral to plundering and destabilizing, who are seeking reprieve in the United States under extreme duress, this is inextricable from the ways police operate as occupying forces is racialized and poor communities. The recent deportation of Haitian immigrants from the United States brings into sharp relief the relationship between the violence of borders and imperialism. In May of this year Haitians made up only 6% of the peoples attempting to cross into the United States, but 60% of the deportation flights were to Haiti. This is intimately linked to the fact the US, UN, and Core Group continue to occupy Haiti, abrogating the country’s sovereignty and continuing the immiseration of the population.
Police forces facilitate gentrification—settler colonialism in another form—and act as the stormtroopers for the warehousing of so-called redundant labor; activists and organizers who contest these brutal conditions; and radicals whose envisioning of and agitation for economic and political democracy is treated as subversion. Speaking of subversion, do not be distracted by the empty rhetoric of the January 6 committee and its ostensible opposition to fascism and white supremacy—because this administration is arming, valorizing, and installing these very elements abroad.
4. The streets belong to the people, period. Everything we do must follow from that fact. Politicians, or as I like to call them, elected influencers will not save us—not even the “progressive” faves. The comprador and petit bourgeois classes will not save us. Celebritized activists who position themselves in front of or above the people will not save us. Academics, least of all those who have not committed, in word and deed, to being guerilla intellectuals, will not save us. In fact, in his text Groundings with my Brothers, Walter Rodney states: “The black intellectual, the black academic, must attach himself to the activity of the black masses… Black intellectuals, all of us are enemies to the people until we prove otherwise.” We need to cultivate more comrades, not so-called leaders appointed by God knows who with accountability to nothing and no one but getting the bag.
This also means that we must not only join organizations, but help to build those organizations, and model the ethical ways of relating to ourselves, our comrades, and our responsibilities in those organizations. When we trust the people and question those who purport to represent them with the same force that we currently fear the people and elevate those who purport to represent them, the basis for a building a new society can be actualized.
5. May our battle cries—El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido; land back; Forward Ever, Backward Never; Free ‘em all; brick by brick, wall by wall, we’re gonna free Mumia Abu-Jamal); From the River to the Sea; By any means necessary; Cuba si, Bloqueo no; I can’t breath; US out of everywhere; No Compromise, No Retreat—sustain us in organized action and international solidarity against the overwhelming intersections of exploitation, oppression, and repression. Because we can defeat capitalism, imperialism, (neo-)colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, warmongering, and environmental degradation, in their extraordinary and quotidian manifestations. And I believe we will win.
Thank you.