It is vital to all like-minded African-American activists to discuss the building of a Left Pole in the again-revived National Liberation movement, with a focus on these functions:
- Entering into a sharp dialogue around ideological questions with all tendencies that fail to express the interests of the African-American masses;
- As this dialogue goes on, exploring all means for entering into alliances with any forces around specific issues that concretely advance the movement, ensuring, however, that alliances do not require the sacrifice of one’s own principles or perspective, nor require the watering down of the projection of those principles to the masses;
- Challenging the Euro-centrism and middle-class bias of important segments of the “White Left,” and their unspoken leadership assumptions. This challenge should be made on the basis of understanding that the masses of white working people and all whites with a democratic and progressive agenda are crucially damaged by the system of white supremacy.
- Given that the true national liberation movement is intimately linked with fundamental social transformation (revolution), and that such transformation will require the joint efforts of all oppressed and exploited peoples in the US, then an alliance between the African-American people and those workers in closest condition to them is essential.
- That while mobilizing and raising the political consciousness of the African-American masses is the priority task, taking steps to forge cross-ethnic and national alliances cannot be put off but is an important means of helping to ensure a working-class perspective both in the African-American liberation movement as well as a means of fighting the narrow, petty-bourgeois nationalism of other communities. Of course, building such alliances requires the work of progressive activists in other communities to the particularly insidious and vicious nature of anti-Black racism, as well as the significance historically as well as in the future. Again, forging such alliances does not demand a perfect understanding of the above centralities, but if the alliances are to deepen and to be up to their ultimate responsibilities of changing society, then there must be a progressive deepening of consciousness in this regard.
