Chapter I from The Little Teal Book
What is well known about the United States is that we are a system of many nations. Frequently, those nations are in opposition to and oppression of each other. Interestingly enough, this is quite a similar situation to what happens in many imperialized regions, but most notably on the continent of Africa. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that there are "several thousand different societies or ethnic groups in Africa." Similarly, it can be said that between the various indigenous peoples of the continent of America; the Cajuns and Creoles of Louisiana; the Chicanos of the Southwest; the descendants of enslaved Africans; even the Scotch-Irish of New England. The United States is an area of many nations that—like those in Africa—do not all have their material needs met or an equality of opportunity, because they cannot self-determine under this reactionary system known as the United States of America. These different societies of the United States, nor of the continent of Africa, have a governmental authority or sovereign state to protect their interests. Worth noting at this point is that we live in a competitive, capital-based society. That is: we live in a society where competition for what people or peoples can accumulate the largest amount of a finite resource (fuel, capital, land &c) as quickly, efficiently, and mercilessly as possible is necessary for success. In an entity such as the United States, or a continent such as Africa that is so wildly multinational, with hundreds or thousands of different societies all competing; the result is an increasing separation between groups A, B, and C. Especially considering a situation where group C, as a product of their one-hundred-year head start, is closest to the machinery of the system.
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Machinery of the System (n.) — The machinery of the system is the most powerful of any finite resources for which people may compete. It consists of all means by which society operates. These are the banks, governments, markets, land, factories, and all institutions that facilitate either (a) the transfer or lease of power, or (b) the production of commodities, the trade of which is the central tenet of our competitive society.
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In the United States, those people who at this moment are considered to be white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, or otherwise what may be considered archetypically "normal" are far and away the closest materially to the machinery of the system. The system was designed such that its creators, a bourgeois class of affluent, white Anglo-Saxon men, may profit off of it. This machinery was constructed by bulldozing existing societies on the continent of America. And therein lies the central contradiction of the United States: there are countless axes along which one can be distanced from the machinery of the system. Say, for the sake of argument, that there is a Black woman, whom we call B, and a white man, whom we call A. A's family is from New England and has been educated and land-owning going back to the late 18th century (c. 1790). The small plot of land that his ancestors appropriated from the people indigenous to Massachusetts Bay has continued to appreciate in value. It has never once entered his mind that he could be unable to do something in his professional life. For him, attaining a university degree was simply the natural state of affairs. Now take B; her family originates (to her knowledge) in Alabama and was enslaved until the mid-19th century (1865). They obviously had no way to acquire any sort of wealth or education, especially considering that they continued to be de facto enslaved as sharecroppers until 1950 when federal programs that allowed them to purchase their own farm became active. At this point, the idea of B's family being able to build wealth, or even approach the thought of getting an education, is within the span of a single human life. B's family began AS the machinery of the system themselves, and nearly 100 years following the emancipation of enslaved peoples, they are still only now in control of less than one-tenth of one percent of the potential machinery to which A has had access for generations. We will get into further detail about why A and B are so unequal based on their material conditions, and the conditions of the societies to which they belong, in later chapters. Their relationships to the machinery of power create a tiered system where power concentrates near those who, through no extra work, have found themselves in the predominant society.
So what is to be done? What is to be done is to create a unified nation to act in resistance to the hoarding of power, wealth, and control. In Africa, the hoarding of power was being done by European invaders who imposed their values, their armies, and their bloodshed, while extracting and raping the wealth of the African continent. They drew imaginary lines over these groups, dividing the resources amongst themselves. The consequence was chaos and division, because the boundaries of each ethnic group were entirely incongruent with the lines drawn by the Europeans. To the invaders, this had the benefit of preventing them from unifying against those who extracted power out of their bodies and from under their feet. The solution to this was then, and remains now, the creation of an all-African or Pan-African nation. The idea that a nation of these nations—a society of societies—could unite under a common goal and shared ambition threatened that reactionary class of power-hoarders. One notable thinker who took note of this idea was Libyan Revolutionary Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He had the idea for a nation of United African States—a singular African identity that, with the force of 1.5 billion people, could resist the few hoarders and return the wealth of Africa to the Africans. In his 1975 manifesto, The Green Book (namesake intentional), Col. Gaddafi reflects that:
"[A] nation, irrespective of blood bond, is formed through a sense of belonging and shared destiny"
Now do we want to belong to a nation that fights for our interests with the shared destiny of demos and kratikos—that power in the hands of the people? That is the American Nation that is theorized.
The American Nation was created the instant that colonialism began in America, before the revolution was even a thought in any person's mind. It was created instantaneously with the oppression, but nevertheless it needs to be fully realized. In the sense of an American Nation, this is not a nation of blind white supremacism or misogyny as is the "nation" that represents the reaction—that nation embodied by the United States of America. Our patriotism is of the nation of the Americans who hold not the machinery of the system, nor the cogs of power. Critics may paint "patriotism" as unambiguously reactionary and thereby not worth concerning oneself with; however, we can state that in a situation of these forces, there always exists a dualistic character that is—to borrow from another Pan-Africanist, Kwame Ture—"positive and negative at the same time, and under certain conditions the positive can become more dominant, or the negative can become more dominant." That is to say: under the exploitative conditions of the power-hoarding, reactionary nation—the nation of white purity, hyper-toxic masculinity, and above all, capital—patriotism and nationalism are threats. They communicate that the hoarders are proud of their theft. What they fail to comprehend is that our nation—those people of color, peoples dispossessed—those people whom the reaction has distanced from power, too, have pride and patriotism. Our nation has a shared destiny, as Col. Gaddafi would put it. We have the shared goals, values, and destiny to reclaim the power, the capital, the wealth, and those machines of the system that, if not for our nation of the dispossessed—our American Nation—our nation of workers and slaves, of Black and brown—without the labor of the laborers would not be worth the cost of its own scrap.
On the power * of Creolism
Creole (adj.) — a person of mixed ethnic ancestry, born in a country colonized by Europeans
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Creoles occupy a unique space in that they, in the colonial sense, are the literal synthesis of this contradiction between the society of thieves and the society of the robbed. Referring back to Ture's point—that everything is positive and negative simultaneously—this leaves open a possibility: that through the unity of oppressed and oppressive forces in one body, or in one nation, a balance can be struck. That balance produces a revolutionary zeal in the Creole, fueled by the fact that his body is democratization. His body is revolutionary. In his body is the emancipation of the colonized, for he now has a portion of the power and privilege of the colonizer in his body that has now been reappropriated. If an alternate example may be excused, if our nation is creolized, then it has the capacity to be the emancipation of the colonized and the dispossessor of the colonist. America was already a union of persons with all varied relations to the machinery of power. Excluding the entirely reactionary forces that serve only to hoard wealth, the American Nation has sets of people of varying distances from the institutions of power, yet who all have a shared material interest in the equitable distribution of it. In the same vein, all Creoles have a shared interest in the abolition of the system of racial violence. The American Nation is already creolized, for it is the synthesis of all societies existing on land that was colonized by Europeans, and as such retains elements of the revolutionary character of every marginalized group contained within it; the revolutionary zeal of the marginalized is the sword of the nation, and the multiplied elements of privilege that remain are the shield of the people. The American Nation, by its creolized character, is the synthesis of the contradiction between oppressor and and will defeat that contradiction.
