On Revolutionary Ideology

A revolutionary is not just someone who picks up a gun. A revolutionary is not someone who engages in solely ‘practical’ activity, that is the quintessential AMERICAN ideology — pragmatism. A revolutionary must have a revolutionary theory because no revolution, no working class led or oppressed led revolution in the 20th century, the age of revolution, was made without revolutionary theory. This is why revisionist history like Stanley Nelson’s bullshit film “Vanguard of the Revolution” is dangerous shit. It gives the illusion that the Black Panther Party was “non-ideological” and were purely pragmatic. This is just completely false and leads the masses to believe that they must act without revolutionary theory as a guide.

If one opens a book written by almost any Black Panther we see that they were a very ideological organization, they understood that their survival programs were not just practical, they were ideological. The US government labeled the free breakfast program as dangerous not because the Panthers were simply feeding the people, but because they were transmitting revolutionary ideology. There is no such thing as being “outside of ideology.” That is not how ideology works. That is not how our past Black Revolutionaries worked or functioned. That is not how Amilcar Cabral, Assata Shakur, Safiya Bukhari, Kwame Nkrumah, and so on functioned or even what they taught. Even Cabral himself stated that this was the main WEAKNESS of the 20th century Black/National Liberation movement, the lack of ideology and ideological discipline.

Ideology is a tool, a weapon of warfare. It is similar to an immune system. It is a methodology not a dogma. The only revolutionary ideology that has actually led to revolutions, failed and continuing, is Marxism-Leninism. These are simple facts of history and are not subject to debate. In Cape Verde, Korea, Ghana, Vietnam, China, Grenada, Cuba, and here in the United States, revolutionaries all creatively applied Marxism-Leninism to their concrete conditions and actually seized power from the landlord class, comprador bourgeoisie, and the imperialists. This is what the Black Panther did, they creatively applied Marxism-Leninism to their concrete conditions based on the historical summation of the Black colony within the United States.

Here is David Hilliard speaking clearly and bluntly about the Black Panther Party and ideology. Quite clearly he states from the jump “The ideology of the Black Panther Party is the historical experiences of Black people in America translated through Marxism-Leninism. When we review the past history of Black people in this country, we realize that after 400 years we are victims of the oppressive machinery that gags, binds and chains Black men who speak out in defense of their alleged constitutional rights.” Look at how far the Panthers went in challenging the racist imperialist state. They posed a threat like so many other Black Revolutionaries because their ideas were dangerous. Black Panthers who are are alive today, like Dhoruba bin Wahad have clearly stated that the U.S. ruling class systematically eliminated all the revolutionary “ideologists” and left us with subjectivism, idealism, metaphysics, and mysticism. That is why Ron Karenga and cultural nationalists like Molefi K. Asante are still alive today and pose little to no threat to the state or capital. In fact they can absorb these political trends and grant some measure of “cultural autonomy” for the petty bourgeois to celebrate their culture at the expense of militant struggle against the state. The Panthers labeled these trends as “pork chop nationalism” because it only saw shared culture as the basis for liberation and was an anti-communist and was a political dead end in terms of leading a militant class struggle against imperialism.

Revolutionaries are not born and they do not fall from the sky, they are made. There must be a clear ideology, tools if you will, to deconstruct the world and see it as it really is. That means principally understanding what Capitalism is and The State. Our people are oppressed as a mass of people and not individually, so we can only be free as a mass of people. This means that we must scientifically assess our existence as a people, as a nation of colonized Afrikans within the settler colonial state that is the United States of America.

One of the best Black radical lyrics that came out of the historic Black Liberation Movement in the 20th century is:

One becomes a revolutionary when he

makes a pact with himself, and, then

with others

to do whatever is necessary to turn

over the soil and plant new seeds

It may be necessary to kill so that the

soil may be turned over.

It may be necessary to die so that the

soil may be turned over.

It may be necessary to give up

wife, husband, children, comfort,

everything,

because to make revolution demands

all

of the one who has been revolutionized.

And to be

revolutionized

is to

care so much, so intensely, so deeply,

that every second

of every day is

filled with the pain of seeing what is

and the pain of knowing

what isn’t

Therefore, to be a revolutionary is to

care so much

that one is willing

to die

doing his revolutionary duty

making the revolution

~The Movement, 1967

The gems of our past movement must be unearthed and used as the foundation for a new movement that is not entirely new, but a continuation. As our ancestor Julius Lester said clearly “Ultimately, correct ideology is the only way to insure an organization’s survival and effectiveness with agents in its midst. It is ideology that we lack at present. Too many are involved because of personal hang ups and not commitment. The winds of repression are blowing, however, and the wheat and the chaff will be separated. Those who have scorned the necessity for ideology will find themselves full of fear when the enemy forces us to decide which side we are on.”

In today’s political sphere of post-modern neo-anarchist semi-socialist times spontaneity is fetishized. The propaganda of the deed and confusing rebellion with revolution is the dominant hegemony of the day. From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, spontaneity is bowed to. We often respond and react to the moves of the enemy. In between the periods of open rebellion and the masses taking to the street in protest, political ideology, let alone revolutionary ideology is downplayed if even mentioned. However, the fundamental flaw of these practices, which in themselves reflect an ideological line stemming from petty bourgeois radicalism, is that relying on spontaneity is also liberalism and reproduces the liberalism that radicals are wont to critique today.

Reliance on spontaneity does not train the masses to be subjects of history and seize power from the ruling class but to be first responders. Without taking aim at capitalist-imperialism proper, this neo-reformism fails to analyze that moves to mollify certain forms of oppression can be tolerated. Capital, in its true amoeba form, can absorb specific calls for equality, justice before the (bourgeois) law, and recognition of piecemeal rights while still maintaining and reproducing relations of domination and exploitation.

It is no wonder why Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism, a methodology and not a dogma or rigid ideology, said that “the weapon of criticism cannot, of course replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” We must strive to popularize revolutionary ideology and make it accessible to the masses of people, especially the oppressed nations in the United States, simply because they are the future of this nation (if it is to have one).

To build a truly radical movement in the path of the historic Black Liberation Movement of which the Black Panthers were the vanguard and the apogee of, we must not abandon ideology. We must commit ourselves to disciplined study of concepts and ideology rather than personalities or subjectivism. Politics is war without bloodshed and war is politics with bloodshed. Currently there is an enormous amount of blood being shed. In addition, through the capitalist media millions are duped and brainwashed into dominant bourgeois ideology and subsequently fooled into supporting new projects of the bourgeoisie such as war, charter schools, gentrification, and other dangerous and innocuous projects. Without revolutionary ideology, without tools, a framework, and a methodology that is scientific and analytical we disarm ourselves in the middle of a war for hearts, minds, and survival. Our people want peace, an end to the madness that is life under actually existing capitalist-imperialism. Despite what some pacifists may say, we have to fight for peace, not because we want to, but because we are already in the fight and taking several hits — body blows and haymakers to the head if you will.

In the words of the eternal Chairman, Fred Hampton Sr. “peace to you, if you are willing to fight for it.”