People’s Media: Looking Backward to Move Forward

https://www.newsghana.com.gh/peoples-media-looking-backward-to-move-forward/

Assessing the Pan-African News Wire, http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/, and other electronic media outlets within a historical and contemporary context

Note: This paper was prepared and delivered in part to a panel at the Union for Democratic Communications (UDC) national conference which was held at Wayne State University in Detroit during the weekend of September 30-October 1, 2016. Other panelists in this roundtable were Zenobia Jeffries of Yes! Magazine; Prof. Charles Simmons, retired from Eastern Michigan University and a former senior correspondent for the Muhammad Speaks newspaper in the 1960s and 1970s; Peter Werbe of the Fifth Estate and radio broadcaster in the city for years; and Reginald Carter, former managing editor of the South End and editor staff member of the Inner City Voice.

“…This is why the discipline of organization remains a necessity. In our view the intellectual and ideological methodology of Marxism cannot be severed from the Leninist view of revolutionary organization deriving from a clear understanding as it relates to the role of the capitalist state.

Management theorist Peter Drucker in his book of two decades ago, the Post-Capitalist Society, falsely claims that class divisions are on the wane due to the appearance of an “information age.” However, this “information age” since the 1990s has witnessed the elimination of millions of jobs, houses and housing complexes, an expanding militarization both internationally and domestically, a displacement of people not witnessed since the conclusion of World War II, the deepening of class differences within capitalist societies even in North America and the further impoverishment of the nationally oppressed, women and the working class as a whole.

Therefore, the acquisition of information and knowledge does not preclude the necessity of revolutionary social change. This task requires the direct intervention of people operating in an organized fashion with the capacity of disrupting the normal functioning of the exploitative system and the harnessing of this state and its transformation in the interests of the majority of people within society.”

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire, http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/