Then and Now: Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dub Poem “Mi Revalueshanary Fren”
We highly recommend playing this record first on youtube.com Then read the commentary. And then play the song again as many more times as it takes to over-stand the profound ideas while you enjoy the riddims. You might re-valuate your values…
Conflicting tendencies in Caribbean political thought are returning to the surface of the region. Linton Kwesi Johnson’s classic dub poetry of the late 1980s, “Mi Revalueshanary Fren” prepares us to address the ongoing debate about Russia and Eastern Europe. LKJ’s friend was none other than the Caribbean anti-Stalinist and independent socialist CLR James. And as the Soviet Union was collapsing, Eastern Europe was throwing off its colonial occupation and Russian sponsored dictatorships, and as Apartheid South Africa was in its death agony, CLR, the radical dialectician, was mentoring LKJ.
It is remarkable that smoldering under the surface, how Caribbean people think about Russia and Eastern Europe (today Ukraine) continues to reveal how many think about power politics in the Caribbean. This was so for many in the 1970s culminating in the collapse of the Grenada Revolution, the basis of which many Caribbean political activists still do not grasp. Yet this song is about 35 years old. This was crafted at a turning point where the big questions started to be clarified among the treachery of deep political experience.
“Mi Revalueshanary Fren”
Linton Kwesi Johnson, the famous reggae dub poet of Jamaican descent based in Britain, has been a voice of the UK Black Panther movement and the Brixton rebellion of 1981. CLR James was Johnson’s interlocutor in the famous song “Mi Revalueshanary Fren.” This song’s chorus, with some variation, calls out the Stalinist Eastern European dictators.
“Kadar, he had to go; Schwikow, he had to go; Husak, he had to go, Honnecker, he had to go, Ceausescu, he had to go, just like Apartheid will have to go.” With the emerging collapse of the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to stop its demise by calling for “perestroika” and “glasnost.” This appeared to mean greater openness and transparency of government, a look to market forces instead of state planning, an apparent move to democracy (more open elections) and critique of one-party state bureaucracy.
Johnson articulated that in such an environment it was getting harder everyday to have clear ideological and political foundations to evaluate world events. The Cold War told us Russia represented “communism” and the United States represented “democracy” and the “free market.” Now everybody was “claiming they were democratic, and that was problematic.” In fact, most politicos had a very very restricted sense of democracy. In order to have a democracy we must oppose the minority who wishes to rule above society. That is a genuine measure for world politics.
The political “landscape” was shifting quickly. The meaning of the struggle for and seizure of power was unclear. Apparent “progressive” forces can have the upper hand but working class “strata” can “bubble up below” against these regimes and like a “volcano” explode at their expense.
“Mi revalueshanary friend shook his head, and him sigh, this was his reply.” James in frustration negated what Johnson articulated. He had the same mistaken view Walter Rodney held in the 1960s and early 1970s. Johnson had been influenced by the notion that socialism or communism was ”progressive” where a one-party state or a welfare state plans the economy from above society. The chorus continued to chant the former leaders of Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania down — “they had to go.” Knowing little about the history of these countries, not shaped by Cold War propaganda from superpowers on both sides, this proposition had a certain resonance.
Gorbachev, Stalinism, and Pandora’s Box
Johnson responded that this critique of bureaucracy by Gorbachev perhaps was a challenge to Stalinism, as he understood it, but it still opened up “a pandora’s box.” It most certainly did. How do revolutionaries really think about power and arranging a new society? How many are still trying to seize state power above society while they make appeals to the “masses” as an amorphous blob that they don’t expect will direct any aspect of the future they are otherwise asked to fight for?
The deeper the political criticism the more evils in the world are exposed but also the more questions are raised about political power and that can paralyze us — but whose political agendas are being paralyzed?
It can make it harder to know the “wolves” from the “sheep.” Johnson inquires is this what his “fren” calls the “dialectic?” CLR “paused a while and he smiled.” Dialectic does not just mean contradiction. It means one speculates about the next rupture with hierarchy and domination, and searches for the radical political thought and strategies that flow from that.
Johnson (or at least his personality as a character in the dialogic song) was not doing this. Though, and this is crucial, the lyrics of his dub poetry posed the questions to be resolved by his audience. Johnson, the artist, gave his audience a chance to think for themselves. We can listen and resolve the dramatization of the issues.
The chorus continued. But Johnson admits CLR in their first meeting “did not have time to elaborate, as it was getting kinda late.” After all, CLR was in his eighties and was getting tired. They would meet and discuss again. Johnson confesses he lacked “understanding” at the time, his “reasoning” was limited.
The trouble was Johnson’s song articulated a framework, like most global observers, that the meanings of communism and capitalism had something to do with the differences between the East and the West, the nation-states and blocs of capital that appeared to represent their sectors of the world. These demarcations were not just geographic. They were associated with “systems” of arranging society that claimed to be fundamentally different.
But they were not fundamentally different as James, and his independent socialist circles clarified and gave evidence based on the political and economic conditions of the working class in the late 1940s and 1950s, not the productivity of national development measured in growth or state capital.
CLR had clarified this before the Age of Third World national liberation and just as the Cold War was getting started. Both what America and Russia represented (later China) was militant hostility to working people arriving on their own authority. But half the Caribbean Left in the 1970s was looking not for the future self-directed socialist society but models for national sovereignty of peripheral states in the world.
Hungary and South Africa
CLR James’s Facing Reality, a phrase LKJ often peppers his dub poems with, famously said in response to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, “the whole world lives in the shadow of state power.” Mao Zedong famously said in his “Can bad things be turned into good things?” that the rebellion of the Hungarian Revolution was a “bad thing” but these “contradictions among the people” allowed the Soviet Union to repress the Hungarian workers and learn from the experience. How many Black and colonized people all over the world learned about “contradictions” in this manner? How many see the China and Russia of today as “progressive” no matter how they treat commoners?
“Mi Revalueshenary Fren” is pregnant with possibility as a learning text where it is a song that places Russia and Eastern Europe in conversation with the coming demise of Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union arrived just as Nelson Mandela was leading South Africa to “independence.”
Johnson articulates in the song “a reservation” as James’s dialectical analysis may be applied to the “consequences and implications” “especially for Black liberation.” Yes, that is what many concerns are with. People want punches pulled from too sharp a critique of Russia in the Ukraine war or China today. Why?
Activists for the government and communists for capitalism, whether in the Caribbean or elsewhere in the world, do not wish to live by any theory that calls into question the grab for Black Power. And for most the ethics and terms of order under that rubric don’t matter so long as they or their close associates have the power.
If we can call into question the very legitimacy of apparently “progressive” regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe, or China then and now, on what basis can we support the Black political class in Africa and the Caribbean? If they are exploiting Black toilers, we cannot — and all are without exception.
A Process of Increased Agreement? Reasoning Together
Johnson’s song implies that he was in the process of increasing agreement with CLR, but a larger unity was foreshadowed in the music but perhaps never fully clarified for the historical record. The brilliance of the song is it is left to the audience to show its discernment.
Stalinism was not simply a description of a one-party state dictatorship led by a Russian personality with a bushy moustache. It was an outlook that redefined freedom as anti-imperialist and for peaceful coexistence — how can we be at peace and war with empire? This viewpoint talked socialist but was pro-capitalist, where led by state planners. In this way Black and former colonized people above society could be heroic in how they pursued capital accumulation for national development — a code word for subordination of the toilers and unemployed.
The Workers as a Popular Self-Governing Force Does Not Matter?
Embracing Stalinism meant ignoring Russia’s own imperialism, thinking this was American propaganda. It also accepted that where American foreign policy declared state planning was socialism and a threat to American power in the world, that the character and destiny of the working class as a popular self-governing force did not matter.
Johnson, like many, was anxious about not simply what James’s dialectic said about Russia and Eastern Europe, but what it said about how most people of African descent and people of color in the world defined socialism and anti-imperialism.
“Non-alignment,” “black power,” or even an ethnically plural democracy under capitalism was a veil for not caring to organize for a future socialist society as marked by direct democracy and workers self-management. If Black united fronts or coalitions gathered factions of elite representative government, and trade union hierarchy, Moscow oriented communist activists with factions of Black capitalists and multi-national capital, Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Libya, and finally the United States, what would this mean for post-Apartheid South Africa?
Loyalty to Friends and Principles? Who are Caribbean Radicals’ Friends and What Are Our Principles?
The opinion makers of Wall Street in the early 1990s understood that Nelson Mandela would not be implementing any of the “socialist” planks (however restricted these were in fact) of the African National Congress platform or as expressed in his previous speeches. Yet Mandela toured the globe under the premise of being loyal to “friends” and “principles” even to those regimes despised by the American empire.
James’s Hungary, and later Poland, were part of a global discussion of the content of socialism. The Russia/Ukraine war seems far from that today. But how people take sides in that war, just as how people identify with Russia, China, and Brazil, only to zig zag in response to their role or silences in suppressing Haiti with the United States and United Nations, reveals contradictions that cannot be ignored. We must speculate about what they mean, so we can politically adjust our liberation strategies.
Many, regardless of race or nationality, have imposed thought crimes on themselves. Yes, “Apartheid would have to go.” But the political content of the ability to stand up to Stalinist Russia did not only pose questions about the challenge of American empire. It created anxieties about the terms of post-colonial Black Power, the South African Revolution — that is what people were talking about in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was a substantial veil of why most socialist critics could not stand up to the betrayal of Mandela’s transitional government that partnered with global capital. The whole world was not simply in the shadow of East and West, but the colonized, black and white, was in the shadow of state power.
Oppose Creeping Stalinism in the Caribbean (and the US Empire)
The Clash! collective does not mind saying that we have been working hard to contain if not expose and embarrass the creeping Stalinism being sponsored in the region under the premise of “Caribbean Dialogue” and talking “one zone of peace” while afraid to denounce consistently any authoritarian rulers in the region. By now, the Caribbean should have gathered enough historical experience to reject the activists who wish to advise the government, those communists for capital accumulation.
The Caribbean has always been a global community and those expressing solidarity on both sides of this debate are marshalling resources to strengthen their friends. While those who openly work for Russia and China are involved, talking the burdens of “the poorer nations” and passing money around, the American empire are not funding the perspective that wishes to preserve the Caribbean tradition of labor’s self-emancipation. In fact Stalinist professors and cultural workers have found work in every nation-state on both sides of the new Cold War. They are not underground. They are for the peace of the graveyard.
The current Russia/Ukraine war in the shadow of American empire and those cheering on China, despite the fact that their greatest advocates in the world can’t credibly say where China is going, really shows that in the name of building a movement, many Caribbean people will be attracted to barbarism. Such “secular” views stridently stand in judgment of Islamic politics. But this is just one other way reconciliation happens in the back channels of the new Cold War.
If the US empire does this, than “we” can… Who the hell is “We”?
For these activists for hierarchical government, communists for capitalism, will identify with any power above society that appears to compete with the U.S. (even though both have state capitalist economies that are fully integrated). Russia in its arrogance says well if in the name of national security, the U.S. can patrol the entire world than “we” a country trying to protect its national sovereignty can invade Ukraine. (Now Venezuela is getting into the act, turning against Guyana, a Caribbean territory.) And many peripheral Caribbean nationalists respond “damn, right.” Damn wrong. Who the hell is this “we” that fears the self-organization of Caribbean toilers before and after their counter-revolutionary friends have a piece of state power pursued under any and all barbaric terms?
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is not one nation-state above others — though we agree that the U.S. is the most powerful military force at this time. Rather, it is equally any hierarchical regime that hides behind “progressive” or “socialist” ideas that ordinary people can be suppressed, and their impending confrontations with the state denied and discarded. This disposition is found all over the world. Caribbean ordinary people should want the type of solidarity that the common people of every nation need amidst imperialist wars, civil wars, and wars to bring a new society closer. All other ideas, and the rulers they prop up, “have to go.” “Just like” the post-colonial Caribbean rulers “will have to go.”
If today, this poem by LKJ is paradoxically published between hard covers as “a modern classic,” Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems, in increasingly multi-cultural Britain, when the racism of the British schools when he was a youth saw those who spoke patwah as “subnormal,” we must remember that two things can be true at the same time. Inglan is still a bitch. And having kulcha means reasonin for ourselves.
