The Importance of Defending Revolutionary History Against Revisionist Delusion
Lenin wrote long ago that the ruling class seeks to gut the people’s heroes of their essence after hounding them to death during their lifetime. This process applies particularly to the heroes of the New Afrikan Revolutionary struggle. We all can attest to how the colonizer so-called left whittles Fred Hampton down to “we ain’t gonna fight capitalism with racism”. If Fred Hampton were alive today and saw what various colonizer opportunists did to his words, using them as a cudgel against those of us who follow Robert F. Williams’ line that the primary contradiction is between the colonizer mother country and the oppressed nations, I guarantee that he would recant those words. We do not know what Fred Hampton would have to say, unfortunately, because he was murdered while the colonizer so-called Left watched and shook its head. For one, colonized people simply can not be racist. George Jackson said this himself. Our apprehension and mistrust of colonizers is a survival mechanism derived from 500 years of hard experience. The revolutionary makes a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, and concrete conditions have shown us that colonizers can not be trusted because their material conditions and way of life are directly linked to our exploitation and continued subjugation. People who are the ruling class or caste enjoy being such and will apply all methods to remain so. This is reality.
So, when we see our supposed colonizer “comrades” playing havoc with the image and words of our heroes, we must always remember that the colonizer Communist that has genuinely broken wholesale with the order that grants them privileges material and psychological is few and far between. Ideological remoulding is a lifelong process. We are used to seeing colonizer so-called revolutionaries talk freely and openly about violence in foreign countries yet shrinking from the prospect of revolutionary violence against their caste in the United States. We are used to seeing colonizer so-called revolutionaries intervening in our revolutionary struggles while failing to develop their own people past social fascism at best. The audacity of so-called Maoists of Gonzaloite tendency in well developed first world countries like Norway and Germany attempting to lecture Dr. Jose Maria Sison, the founder of the longest running Maoist insurgency in the world, is one example of this process at work. At the root of this phenomenon is typical arrogance and white chauvinism, along with a sense of guilt and nihilism at the failure of their people after decades of “Communist” harangue and appeals to the authority of the “great teachers”, to advance towards proletarian class consciousness. They see us rioting and storming the barricades, and then they look around at their own communities lagging behind at best and being outright counter-revolutionary at worst. The best that the colonizer bloc sent our way was John Brown, and he was a religious fanatic, not a Communist. The Communist movement would have been nothing in the United States without its attachment to the national liberation struggles of New Afrikan and other colonized peoples. If not for the fires of Ferguson, there would be no resurgence in the Communist movement. The primary contradiction is us. We must acknowledge this fact and be proud of it, and assert our leadership. We must defend our history as our own, and continue to make it.
I’ve often said that I can get along with fellow colonized people regardless of tendency. I have colleagues and comrades who identify as anarkata (Afrikan anarchist), Marxist-Leninist, Nkrumaist-Toureist, Trotskyist, revolutionary nationalist and many more tendencies. The habit of splitting and burning bridges over ideological debates is a habit of colonizers. We colonized people share a common history of struggle. We all would have followed Harriet Tubman, raised hell behind Dessalines and Prophet Nat Turner, and shot it out with the Klan regardless of tendency. Our unity is derived from struggle. Colonizers do not have this history, that’s why they are always denouncing and quarreling with each other. This is why they traffic in our struggles and seek to appropriate them for their own purposes, regardless of tendency. Colonizer Trotskyists love to point out that CLR James thought Trotsky was correct, but ignore his historical work on the Haitian Revolution because they know that in such a revolution they’d have been driven out of the island. Colonizer “MLs” consistently bring up Harry Haywood’s membership in the CPUSA for most of his political life, but ignore the fact that he led the break from that revisionist formation because of white chauvinism and the liquidation of the national liberation line he developed with other comrades from the US and abroad during the heady days of the 1920s. Colonizers traffic in Fanon’s “Concerning Violence” but ignore the work of his mentor and long-time colleague, Aime Cesaire, who told them that they all have a little Hitler in their head. Colonizer Maoists fetishize Robert F. Williams for writing Negroes with Guns and hanging out with Mao but have never read the Crusader where he mentioned, constantly, that entrusting colonized workers to the tender mercies and “solidarity” of the colonized “working class” was akin to the sheep trusting his well-being and tender care of the wolf, or the Jews in Germany trusting their continued existence as a people to the tender care of the German working class who by and large followed the NSDAP. They have Du Bois’ paean to Stalin memorized, yet gloss over the African Roots of War, Black Reconstruction, and other pieces in which Du Bois’ castigated them and theirs for what they were. Were Du Bois alive today, they’d call him an identity opportunist for mocking their way of life, their subcultures calling themselves “Parties”, their simpleminded notions that only the unrepentant children of a nation of thieves and murders can hold, and even their physical appearance.
To them, our heroes and ideological forebears are hollow symbols to be used to lecture and denounce we who follow their example and life’s work. Regardless of how many Fred Hampton speeches they memorize, they will never, ever, understand Fred Hampton. Regardless of how many Lead Belly songs they listen to and try to copy, they will never, ever, understand our blues. They gave it to us in the first place, how can they understand?
