The Afrikan Frontline Network(AFN) is a "not for profit collective of communicators working to utilize today's resources to provide accurate, timely, and uncensored information to tomorrow's leaders." Full color, interactive and graphical, the AFN site is hard to access without a 28,800 baud modem or other high-speed Internet connection. If you can get such access, it is well worth a visit for up to date information on important struggles of the Black nation.
The page has a strong collection of Black anti-imperialist articles, cultural reviews and statements from organizations like the Malcolm X Grassroots Coalition and MOVE. Frontline news articles denounce police brutality and the expansion of the prison system, among other things.
African symbolism and a large photograph of Marcus Garvey decorate the red, green and yellow homepage- putting cultural nationalism out front. Garvey's enduring appeal as a symbol of Black nationalism is his success in mobilizing, by some counts, millions of Blacks to build institutions and economic independence from white Amerika. But as a communist Party supporting revolutionary nationalism, MIM struggles to move forward with the most advanced examples of activism which supersede Garvey. MIM takes its lessons from the Maoist vanguard of the Black nation of the 1960s-the Black Panther Party, not the capitalist Garvey.
The AFN's electronic newsletter, Dread Times, is updated weekly. The issue we review here included an article about the July Mumia events (see MIM Notes 119 for our coverage), the formation of the Los Angeles Coalition Against Racist Child Experimentation (LACCARE)-which is confronting a research study in which oppressed nation children were injected with deadly experimental measles vaccines. Other articles encourage people to participate in protests against the Olympics which take place in a city with a high homeless population, massive policy brutality and in a region with growing prison populations, low wages and disproportionate infant mortality. Dread Times is a current and informative resource that includes important agitation material.
A portion of the site is dedicated to efforts around the defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, including announcements of upcoming activist events and reports on recent legal news. This aspect of the site shows most clearly the coalition approach of the AFN-which enthusiastically reports the participation of "Pan Afrikanists, Animal Rightists, Ecologists, Liberals, Friends, Social Reformers, etc." in the pro-Mumia camp. The site also provides a link to Amnesty International with no criticism of that organization. Maoists believe in uniting all who can be united against imperialism, and we welcome the participation of liberals around clearly defined goals, but leadership means asserting the most correct path, which means criticizing the pro-imperialist aspects of Amnesty's work.
The AFN also provides information about the cases of and activist efforts around Eddie Conway, Khalfani Khaldun, Leonard Peltier and Sundiata Acoli "because we have to save the lives of our warriors." MIM agrees wholeheartedly with proletarian defense of revolutionary warriors in prison-but not to the exclusion of the important work of organizing all prisoners. We do not agree with the AFN, for example, that there are only about 150 political prisoners in the United Snakes. We see more than one million and growing, since we see that all prisoners, no matter what the crime they've been convicted of, are political prisoners of imperialism.(Order MIM Theory 11, "Amerikkkan Prisons on Trial" from MIM Distributors, PO Box 3576, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-3576)
There are other resources for prisoners in general, such as the proposal from the Prison Issues Desk calling for the formation of the New Afrikan Prisoners Militia Network (NAPMN). The NAPMN proposes to monitor legislation and protest anti-prisoner bills-with the reformist aim of ridding the criminal injustice system of specific individuals who draft and vote for repressive legislation. The injustice system cannot be reformed. Small victories can and should be fought for, but we cannot settle for anything less than revolution to bring justice to Amerikkka's imprisoned. MIM builds public opinion and independent power on the outside and organizes support among prisoners to smash imperialism and its prison system altogether.