ON CULTURAL, POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION AND REVOLUTION
PART TWO
Developing a Revolutionary African American Scientific Mass Culture
Culture is based on learned traditions and acquired customs that serve a people’s spiritual
life or morale. Culture serves as the esprit de corps that motivates a people to continue to
pursue the economic activity of social life. From cultural practice one is socialized in the
ABCs of what the people consider are right and wrong, good and bad, and the reasons
why.
A people’s culture comes from a people’s history. It is a people’s movement to change or
improve their economic relations of the material base of production and what makes their
traditions relevant to their future development or not.
A revolutionary (scientific socialist) African American mass culture has been developing
slowly during the last 40 years of the African American liberation struggle. “Everything
now comes from the forge of hard and bitter struggle. This is also true of the new
culture.”1
The question of a revolutionary scientific mass culture is very crucial for the African
American liberation struggle because African Americans are a “captive oppressed
nationality” held in colonial (domestic) bondage within the world’s strongest imperialist
state. They have been more “mentally” colonized (oppression psychosis) than most other
nations in the world by being subjugated to national, race and class (triple) oppression.
This oppression has been reinforced over a three hundred year period to become the
“national ethos” or “things as usual” of the imperialist government of the United States.
At the same time, African Americans living in the U.S. are victims of increasing
repression due to the stagnation of the capitalist economy and general deterioration of the
social fiber of the society in general.
Because imperialism is in decline the U.S. is unable to hide the contradictions of the
racist, capitalist system. It can no longer provide economic benefits to its population,
expansion for its population, and must increasingly reap more profits from its own
working class. African Americans, Chicanos (Hispanics), Native Americans and other
oppressed nationalities, the most exploited sector of the working class, catch the brunt of
this increased internal rip-off (extraction of greater surplus value for labor time). As a
result, if they are working, they work longer hours for less pay and unemployment hits
them first.
Several other factors also come into play. The U.S. government has engaged in chemical
war (drug) with the oppressed, captive African American nationality. This war has
claimed many casualties and has altered the value system. The war in Vietnam, now the
1
Mao Tse Tung, “On New Democracy,” Selected Works, Vol. II [Peking: 1965] p. 369
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the racist, illegal system either killed off or
incarcerated millions of African American men. There has essentially been a complete
deterioration of the social fiber in the community. This has provided the backdrop for the
crisis in male-female relations and threatens the total destruction of the community.
These are some of the realities that must be addressed by the African American
Democratic Socialists in building a revolutionary culture for the community.
Scientific revolutionary African American culture opposes capitalist/imperialist
oppression. It upholds the right of self-determination of the oppressed African American
nationality. Revolutionary scientific African American culture reflects the will to build a
new, equalitarian, socialist America. It is also a proletarian culture representing the
interests of the working class/street force that makes up the overwhelming majority of the
community. At the same time it links up with the socialist and new democratic cultures of
all nations, relating in such a way that they can help each other to develop, forming a new
world culture, never linking with any reactionary imperialist culture.
Democratic Socialist ideology plays the guiding role in the orientation of revolutionary
national culture. African Americans should work hard to disseminate both the “we will
win” paradigm and the Democratic Socialist Movement to the working class/street force
and educate other sections of the people step by step. They must, however, understand
the “uniqueness” and the “universality” of their situation to be able to properly integrate
the universal truth of Democratic Socialism with concrete practice. In other words, for
Democratic Socialism to be meaningful for the African American masses, and become
their ideology, it must be combined with the specific national characteristics and acquire
a definite African American form.
While it is incorrect to think that existing African American culture should be socialist in
its entirety, it is correct to demystify the present culture and struggle against reactionary
ideas. The struggle is to establish a revolutionary scientific African American culture and
to resolve some of the internal social contradictions in the community. The African
American cultural/political revolution will be based on scientific fact, what is true
objective reality, not myth or what one wishes to believe. It looks for truth from facts
seeking for objective truth coming from the unity of theory and practice; or all theory
either verified or nullified from practice.
It is the premise of this writer that the present internal social crisis in the African
American community, male-female relationships, parent-child relationships, male-male
interaction, are essentially due to our domestic colonization. It is important for African
American Democratic Socialists to understand that African Americans are colonized by
the U.S. imperialist state and suffer from all the negative “self-destructive” aspects that
colonization produces that Fanon talked about. He described in Wretched of the Earth as
the social conditions become ripe for colonial revolt and colonial cultural institutions of
the native create social lag (resistance to revolution) and the men of the colony back away
-2-
from revolution, internal “self-destructive” behavior increases internally in the colony,
i.e. black-on-black crime, etc.2
For the most part, when the imperialist government attacked the revolutionary sector of
the BLM in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it broke the “political will” of African
Americans to resist the state. It was done by rewarding the accommodationists (Uncle
Tom sell-out artists) with jobs, money and women, and was reinforced through the mass
media (cultural political socializing instrument) using Pavlovian conditioning reflexes,
and subliminal suggestion, symbolic manipulation. African Americans no longer saw
their “objective relation” to the system and to the world but turned to bourgeois
individualism and other idealism.
The importance of culture is that it institutionalizes the political ideology of the BLM and
transmits it to all sectors of the population and prepares the next generation for active
leadership in the struggle. But revolutionary culture cannot do this without a clear
scientific political ideology to guide it. The failure in the past has been the confusion of
African American Democratic Socialists of seeing the real dialectics of national
liberation of the African American nationality and the coming socialist revolution in
America and throughout the world. This ideological confusion and mis-education by
them has led to a “defeatist attitude” among African Americans and set them back
psychologically into self-destructive behavior.
Addressing the question of internal social crisis and revolutionary culture, we must also
address a new African American Political Paradigm (worldview). Simply stated, what is
the African Americans’ relationship to the socialist revolution (overthrowing the
imperialist state)? Why must we address this question?
In order to alter self-destructive behavior we must provide a positive “goal” orientation.
Goal orientation provides the basis for socialization, particularly for subcultures or
oppressed nationalities. Therefore a collective political “vision” (paradigm) is essential
for the political socialization of African Americans.
No matter what classes, parties or individuals in an oppressed nation join
the revolution, and no matter whether they themselves are conscious of the
point or understand it, so long as they oppose imperialism, their revolution
becomes part of the proletarian-socialist world revolution and they
become its allies.3
It is important that the political paradigm draws upon the fact that the African American
National Liberation Revolution is an integral part of the world socialist revolution. At the
same time, it is the center of the world socialist revolution. Why? Because African
Americans constitute the largest, most oppressed sector of the multinational proletariat in
the U.S., being the colonized oppressed nationality with the longest, continuous,
consistent history of struggle against the state. Their struggles “spark” struggles between
2
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth [New York: Dial Press, 1970]
3
Op. cit., pps. 346, 347
-3-
other oppressed nationalities and the proletariat of the oppressor nation (U.S./North
America).
The African American liberation struggle, therefore, has objective historical allies, both
externally and internally, of the U.S. imperialist state. Because of the strategic location of
African American workers in the labor market they are doubly oppressed (race and class)
as marginal semi-skilled workers in industry and the superstructure. They can help
paralyze the U.S. capitalist economy by going on a general political strike, thereby
causing an international crisis for world capitalism/imperialism.
The struggle of national liberation to free the colonized captive African American
nationality would cause economic and political shock waves of the magnitude that are
occurring in the Azanian, Namibian, Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador,
Venezuela) and other international communities. It is only by providing a creative
political paradigm that draws on all the resources of African Americans that present a
goal orientation that “We Will Win,” can develop a scientific African American
revolutionary culture.
African American Democratic Socialists fully developing the We Will Win By Any Means
Necessary paradigm into a structured theoretical framework would be institutionalized
through the mobilization of various sectors of the population to challenge the existing
avenues of political socialization, church, school, home, media, street, prison and
movement.
Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad
masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the
revolution comes and is an important, indeed essential, fighting front in
the general revolutionary front during the revolution.4
The question of culture, therefore, becomes very important in dealing with the political
socialization of African Americans and preparing the next generation to repel the military
assault of the counterrevolution that is attacking them and is moving the U.S. imperialist
state towards declared fascism.
Muhammad Ahmad
April 2, 1982
Updated: 2008
4
Op. cit., p. 382
-4-