A Revolutionary Love Letter
January 10, 2022
Dear fellow beings,
I am writing this to remind you how great you are. During our short stay on this glorious planet we all have been collectively dehumanized and reduced to political talking points — Black, white, liberal, conservative, Christian, criminal, boss, worker, activist, etc. We have been educated to use our minds narrowly and forced to identify ourselves with roles that trap us in a collective perpetual state of anxiety.
We have forgotten how harmonious this thing called life is and have fallen victim to a vicious circle of pain and suffering.
Many of our friends are suffering from a deep feeling of alienation. They have accepted the belief that we live on this little planet in a solar system on the edge of a galaxy — a minor galaxy — and concede, “Ah, well — we really are unimportant after all. God isn’t there and he doesn’t love us, our government doesn’t love us, our neighbor doesn’t love us and nature doesn’t give a damn.”*
Our sick, manipulated brethren will weaponize common sense and tell us to “face to facts” — as if facts are something outside of us as if life were something we encounter as foreigners*. They will tell us that communism and collectivism has never and will never work and refuse to even explore these “childish” (or inferior) ideas.
Admittedly, some ideas and feelings are difficult to understand — not because they are intellectually complicated, but because they are unfamiliar or estranged. We simply have not been brought up to accommodate them.*
Likewise, the biggest lie we tell ourselves is that serious adults do not play the games of children such as hide and seek*. The sobering reality is that both juveniles and older people are playing a lifelong game of hide and seek where we all try to avoid sinning, getting shot, or getting locked up — a game where you must avoid hell, jail, and the graveyard at all costs.
Our situation is one of political warfare and for many of our friends, politics on this land has meant nothing but confronting the violent tools of racist bullies and sick killers who view the world as a system of mutual exploitation and maximal selfishness. Out of this negative conception, we, the people, yearn to create new rules for our grown-up game.
While we can redefine politics as the desire of individuals and groups to satisfy their basic needs first: food, shelter and clothing, and security for themselves and their loved ones — some of our so-called Black leaders endorse a tactic of confrontation reducible to simply voting for Democrats and holding political offices. As Huey Newton puts it, “The Black leaders have led the community to believe that brutality and force could be ended by subjecting the people to this very force of self-sacrificing demonstrations.”
By expecting someone else to take full responsibility for our liberation, these reactionary so-called Black leaders are committing an act of political suicide. The revolutionary consciousness of the masses must understand that the struggle against the negative forces of genocide and fascism will not end at the ballot box of the ruling class. Attempting to get within one of the two major parties has caused our leaders to become co-opted with their interests shunted to the background. They have become expendable.
Kwame Ture writes: “Perhaps there was an additional naive assumption that all that was needed was to elect a few powerful and talented black mayors, appoint some black police chiefs and heads of school districts, and by all means register and vote. Surely, this process of playing by the rules would lead to improvement, not decline in status. Surely, such efforts would yield more than negligible benefit. But this has proved not to be the case: Now, in 1992, there is abundant evidence that blacks are more alienated and frustrated than two decades ago.”
Further, Newton again reminds us, “A spiritual death has been the experience of millions of Black people in the United States. This death is found everywhere today in the Black community. Its victims have ceased to fight the forms of oppression that drink their blood. The common attitude has long been: What’s the use? If a man rises up against a power as great as the United States, he will not survive. Believing this, many Blacks have been driven to a death of the spirit rather than of the flesh, lapsing into lives of quiet desperation. Yet all the while, in the heart of every Black, there is the hope that life will somehow change in the future.”
As dialectical materialists, we do not believe that life will somehow change in the future, but rather we objectively understand that life is always in a constant state of change, transformation, and flux. Accepting this premise, we move in the present moment to rid ourselves of outdated programs and modalities that lead to our self-destruction and begin to help the massesdefine their needs, realize their strength, and go into action along a variety of lines which they must choose for themselves.
Before I close, I invite you to read the closing remarks of Newton’s Resolutions and Declarations:
“There can be no real freedom until the imperialist-world-enemy-number-one-has been stripped of his power and put in his rightful place as one of the people rather than
the ruler of the people. Then and only then will unity and harmony truly prevail. So we resolve to liberate our communities in order that we might serve the true interests of the community.
We who are gathered here by our presence do indicate that we believe that every community has the right to define, determine and control institutions so that they reflect the integrity of the community.
Therefore we declare that all communities of the world have the freedom to determine their own destinies. We declare that all communities, by their very existence, have the power to specify what institutions will be set up within them and what cultural values will be propagated through them. We declare that all communities have the right to determine what laws will govern their territories and what officials will be placed in leadership.
We who are gathered here do declare by our presence that the physical and social characteristics of the people of our communities shall never be used as a basis for exclusion from any aspect of life in our communities.
We declare that our goal is to destroy all elements of the oppression. We pledge ourselves to end imperialism and distribute the wealth of the world to all the people of the world. We foresee a system of true communism where all people produce according to their abilities and all receive according to their needs.
Recognizing the possibility of a cultural lag between the destruction of the oppression and the erection of a new world based on that which makes us human, we call for all people in the communities throughout the world to participate and be represented in decision making in direct proportion to their presence in the population under consideration. Whether on an intercommunal level, a regional level, or on a local level, we hold that all people have the right to proportional representation within the framework of revolutionary intercommunalism and communism.
We are here gathered for the solemn purpose of formulating a new constitution for a new world. We must become even more conscious of who we are and why we are in these circumstances. Then we must change these circumstances and construct a new world which makes use of all the technology and knowledge we have accumulated. When we have developed a system that functions in the true interests of the people and established it in full, then the word “work” will be redefined as meaningful play. We will have eliminated the cause of all our problems and can live according to a Constitution of Revolutionary People.”
My call to action is simple. Voting and petitioning will not be sufficient for our liberation, but in the current moment it will be strategically used to reach the masses. I do not want to speak of a long road ahead of us because no such road exists. We are already here and it begins with you. Secure your number amongst the billion and commit yourself to win a new world side by side with a united left front. “From all according to ability.” Radicalize your natural environment, organize the people around you, and watch our numbers grow.
All Power To The People,
Quintez Brown
