Galveston Texas June 19, 1865, General Orders
No. 3. The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere. – By order of Major General Granger

This order freeing the very last Afrikan people held in chattel slavery in the United States was issued 161 years ago today. Juneteenth has been celebrated every 19th of June in commemoration. In the very same state in which it was issued, a Black youth, Karmelo Anthony, sits in prison for defending himself. The right to self-defense is, supposedly, a right guaranteed to all people. This same state has a massive prison population, of which 40,000, or 33%, are Black/New Afrikan, despite Black people representing only 18% of the state. Another 33% are Latino, mostly descendants of the Mexican people from which the state of Texas was stolen by Texian-American slaveowners. Inmates in Texas, like all states of the United States, can be compelled to work for free, which is, in lay terms, slavery. Why does this continue? What will it take to have a real jubilee in this country and this world?

The United States is an empire that is built on stolen land and stolen people. These are the primary contradictions, the main issues, around which affairs in this country revolve. There is no understanding of the United States without understanding this basic thesis. This is why our Oglala comrades on Pine Ridge live in poverty and misery. This is why a one year old Black child, Kohen Wiley, was shot to death in a vehicle in Senatobia, MS by a pig, who was then placed on administrative leave. This is why ICE pigs round up and torture people up and down this land. This is why the federal government is waging lawfare against comrades and the masses who stand in solidarity against these crimes, rigging up phony cases and kangaroo courts. This is why illegal war is made across the world, from Iran (ever victorious) to Palestine (ever victorious). This is why this country continues to strangle Cuba, clutches at Bolivia, and meddles in the Congo. A movement which fails to grasp the continued need of imperialism for blood and treasure extracted from internal colonies and the entire working class at home and abroad will remain, regardless of how well meaning, a fundamentally reformist one, incapable of addressing the root cause of all these problems. As this country sinks ever and ever further into a uniquely American form of fascism, delusions of this nature, well meaning or otherwise, do an ever increasing disservice to the masses, who in increasing numbers are vomiting up reformist solutions and demanding moves towards actual, fundamental change.

Jubilee is freedom. The ancestors realized a fleeting moment, during Reconstruction, which can accurately be termed as a failed attempt to wage bourgeois democratic revolution. Black people entered, for the very first time, the halls of the United States Congress and state legislatures, and material gains were made for both Black freedpeople, and poor whites as well. For the first time, schools and polls were open to both. However, the science of revolution teaches us that if you don’t ruthlessly and thoroughly uproot the old oppressors, they will return, along with new ones engendered from the soil of the new order. This was the case in the South. The old cliques of cotton and tobacco planters formed violent, proto-fascist armed groups to violently oppose Reconstruction and terrorize Black people and progressive whites. Poor whites were severed from the Black vanguard through appeals to longstanding race prejudice and the insidious solidarity of “whiteness”, a concept which developed alongside the settler-colony.

Reconstruction was eventually thoroughly buried in 1877 with the “Compromise” that withdrew the troops necessary to help defend the gains made after the Civil War. The price of this white men’s compromise was oceans of Black blood. Jubilee was a fleeting promise, and the South was overrun by triumphant Northern capital. The remaining free Indigenous nations were driven onto reservations by 1900, leaving the West wide open for the expansion of settler capital. Imperialist expansion ramped up in the 1890s, with Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines being snatched from the decrepit Spanish Empire in an inter-imperialist war, and Hawaii being seized by a coup d’etat. Latin America became a playground for American capital, with Haiti, Nicaragua, and countless other countries being invaded and occupied during the so-called “Progressive Era”. The country which denied freedom to Black and Indigenous people went on to snatch it from many other people around the world. This is what settler-colonialism and imperialism do. That is what the United States is. Regardless of the myths they tell us in school, or the lies that the social-democratic so-called left tells itself, the USA is plunder, slavery, and death, and cannot be made to be anything else.

Black, Indigenous, and Latine people in the United States will continue to suffer and be denied jubilee until these contradictions are resolved. American imperialism is a wounded, staggering giant, clutching at and destroying whatever it can. It is not in the interests of this country’s ruling class to fully address the contradictions that have produced such misery and suffering the world over. These contradictions can only be fixed through revolution. Revolution means a fundamental overturning of the existing order of things. As the freed Afrikans said: the bottom rail comes to the top. Those who are on top, the exploiters, fall to the bottom, and must either yield to the new order, the order of colonized people and the working class, or shuffle off the coil of history. This is the only definition that matters, and it is an historic law. A Communist revolution is one which unmakes the existing order, one of 75 year old Chicana and New Afrikan women scrubbing toilets and stocking shelves at Wal-Mart, and puts them and their class in the drivers’ seat. Fundamental to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the realization of the truth that the masses make history. There are no inherently great men of history, only those who have been elevated by the masses. The vanguard develops through struggle and is recognized by the masses through leadership in this struggle. The vanguard of struggle in the United States has historically been, and remains, the colonized proletariat, namely, Latine, Indigenous, and New Afrikan. On this Juneteenth, we salute them, and call on deeper unity between the socialist movement and the working class. For the socialist movement to be truly effective and capable of resolving the primary contradictions, it must have hundreds of thousands of cadres derived from the lowest and deepest ranks of the fighting proletariat.

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

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