revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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Part of the ABB's program was
organizing black workers into labor
unions which would work for the betterment of
their economic conditions
and would act
in close cooperation with class-conscious white workers on
common issues . The ABB also proposed establishing co-operatives as an
economic srategy . On alliances, the ABB saw a coalition with the Third
World and radicalized white workers in the United States .
There can be only one sort of alliance with other peoples and
that is an alliance to fight our enemies, in which case our
allies must have the same purpose as we have . Our allies may
be actual or potential, just as our enemies may be actual or
potential . The small oppressed nations who are struggling
against the capitalist exploiters and oppressors must be considered
as actual allies . The class-conscious white workers
who have spoken out in favor of African liberation and have a
willingness to back with action their expressed sentiments,
must also be considered as actual allies and their friendship
cultivated . 14
The ABB and The Crusader were supporters of the Russian Revolution
and saw socialist revolution as the answer to black liberation .
Briggs were definitely a revolutionary nationalist ; that is,
he saw the solution of the "race problem" in the establishment
of independent Black nation-states in Africa, the
Caribbean and the United States . In America, he felt this
could be achieved only through revolutionizing the whole
country . This means he saw revolutionary white workers as
allies . 15
Briggs raised the question of a
self governing Black state in the
United States in an editorial as editor of the Amsterdam News in 1917 .
This idea of a Black Republic in the United States, was to re-occur often
in the 1920's and at an UNIA convention in the early part of the decade,
the question of a Black Republic in the south was raised but the
14Programme of the African Blood Brotherhood ."
Vol . 2, No . 6, April, 1922, pp . 453-454 .
The Communist Review,_
15Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik (Chicago, Ill . : Liberation Press,
1978), p . 124 .