Positional Coherence of Coloniality by Eldridge Cleaver

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#19, MARCH-MAY/2016

The dynamics of the struggle for national liberation are vastly different from the dynamics of a struggle of revolution within a country. So that the way that the white revolutionaries have to function, they have to function in terms of the class struggle or using that somehow in their rhetoric. They have to function with that in terms of the power structure within which they live. Well, we have to understand that, at the same time we have to understand our separate situation. So we need machinery that can comprehend that, and move in those two directions. This is the thinking behind the coalition that we made with the Peace and Freedom Party. We found that the analysis is correct enough to allow for concrete action to take place.

Now, the basic analysis that the Black Panther Party has made, is making an analogy between the way that the occupying army functions in a purely colonial situation, where the Mother Country is separated from the colony by either land or water. Now it was very difficult at first to apply this colonial analogy to this domestic colonial situation. Because the lines of conflict, the identity of the various elements of the colonial regime were not too clear, the names were different, we had been taught to conceive of the various branches of the apparatus in different terms. So it wasn’t too clear.

But, when Huey Newton studied the works of Frantz Fanon, see after having studied the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao and other revolutionaries, it was not until studying the works of Frantz Fanon, and studying the Algerian situation, that he was able to clearly identify the local police departments as the counterpart to the occupying army of the French. And it was clear from analyzing the experience in Algeria that the colonial regime, the colonial administration was without any power, without any force to compel the Algerian people to submit to its dictates. But it was because these administrators were backed up by the organized guns and the force of the French Army that the administrators were able to get away with what they’re doing.

So that in transposing that perspective to our own situation here in the Black community, we see that the Black community has also been turned into a market, that it has also been turned into a source of cheap labor. That it has the same three elements, it has an indigenous class, the Black bourgeoisie that works hand in hand with the imperialists that we have to deal with. We cannot just deal with the same terminology, that they use say to describe the situation in Algeria, we have to talk about community imperialism, ethnic imperialism, whereby those in the white community exercise a form of imperialism, imperialistic control over the Black community. That we have the three classes of evil; we call them the avaricious businessmen, the demagogic politicians, and the strong arm trooper, the Gestapo, or the local police. And they work hand in hand with the Black bourgeoisie; the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the professional people who belong to the political parties of the Mother Country, and who carry out the political programs of these Mother Country parties in the colonies.

dialogue transcribed from One P.M., a collaborative film project between Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker from 1968 and released in 1972.