Amiri Baraka at New College of California: March 2, 1977

Amiri Baraka reads from "parts of the introduction to a book called Hard Facts"(which "we put together ourselves, earlier, in 1976"), then poems from that book and other work.

He devotes the first 20 minutes to reading from that book's introduction, then reads "Poem for Watergate," "Third World Blues," "A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie," "Poem for Deep Thinkers," and "An American Oppress Story" ("for the  inauguration," that had taken place January 20, 1977, of Jimmy Carter as US President).

Baraka says he's working with young musicians in Newark, at a place called Sparky J's, and reads the poem "Sparky, Like, This Is What I Meant," and then a longer poem, "Malcolm Remembered, February '77." Noting "this is a poem for an acquaintance of mine who recently won the Ladies Home Journal Award," he reads "The Ho," then "Das Kapital," "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat," and closes with "A Reprise of One of AG's Best Poems" (riffing on Allen Ginsberg's poem "America"). 

"I'll answer a couple questions for the next couple minutes...." Baraka is asked from the audience about Stalin, whose writings he advocates, then Pasternak, and notes his preference is for Lu Xun, Mayakovsky, and Gorky, noting the difference between "disgust at a dying thing, and your support for a new thing coming into being." He advocates reading against the grain of "reactionary anthologies" and that Mark Twain and Jack London, among others, should be read for their revolutionary qualities. 

Asked about Frank O'Hara, he notes "I think Frank's great quality is that he rebeled against the dry academic bourgeois poetry...that we were given," and notes Samuel Beckett similarly "being sickened by society" and the difference between that and "a revolutionary who actually wants to change it." Asked about Stokely Carmichael ("an old friend of mine"), he critiques Carmichael's "incorrect ideology" as stuck in 60s eclecticism and an idealistic sense of return to Africa. 

"Do you think Marx ever said anything wrong?"

"I don't think that's possible, is it?" [laughter]

An audience member states his disappointment, as he'd wanted to regard Baraka "as the foremost American Black intellectual," yet he seems to advocate violence. This leads Baraka into a rejection of empathy without commitment and of Buddhism as a peaceable path: "Go to the Buddhist countries and see what the people are doing to get rid of oppression." The Soviet Union ("a social imperialist country...a social fascist country") and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Soviet dissident ("still a reactionary") are each in turn rejected, with Stalin's crimes set alongside historic US capitalist imperialism.

Asked "Would you assassinate a Carter or Nixon?" Baraka says "No no no... Carter's nobody...It is the system of monopoly capitalism that must be smashed...in realilty." He emphasizes political education, that needs to match "objective reality" in its application of Marxist theory.

In midst of a long comment from the audience, he criticizes Angela Davis for "belonging to a defective, traitorous party" (Communist Party USA) that sold out working people and pursues a reformist agenda. He advocates a "vanguard revolutionary" movement, and says he belongs to the Revolutionary Communist League ("there is no party").   

After noting these nation states are continually preparing for World War III, he says that Africa's greatest danger is "the two superpowers," the USA and the Soviet Union, and that the Soviets masquerade as advocates for anticolonial movements on the continent. "How can the Angolans have their independence" with the Soviets, and the Cubans, there?

Salvador Allende in Chile comes in for critique for following "the bankrupt line of the Soviet Union" and for believing socialism could be elected into reality: "Kissinger, Rockefeller, Nixon destroyed Allende." 

Baraka states as belief: "The world itself will become communist...and this particular primitive form of society will be abolished." 

He's asked whether American Indians can work with white communists, and recommends being wary of "chauvinist lines" that prefer integration over "self-determination and democratic rights." 

Asked about Uganda and Idi Amin, he points to the British-Israeli-West German overthrow of Amin's predescessor. He turns to South Africa and Rhodesia as the situation with which "we should not lose sight... which was the reason for putting Amin in." 

Baraka closes by pointing to revolutionary instances in US history, citing the labor movement of the working people as example.