ON CULTURE, POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION AND REVOLUTION
Part One
When discussing the question of culture and revolution we have to begin to talk about a
political African American culture. Political culture is a proletarian culture, which is a
culture of the working class/peasantry of whatever nation engaged in
revolution/liberation. So, in our situation, we are talking about developing a scientific
African American political culture. Political culture also seeks to demystify many of the
masses’ “folk” beliefs, to retain what is good and progressive and eliminate what is bad
or bourgeoisie in the old and initiate the new. The movement for liberation synthesizes
the old and the new, producing a new culture, and a new “way of life” for African
Americans.
Revolutionary culture poses as an alternative to the social institutions that create the
social lag that reinforces the old way of life in the oppressive society. In this case, leaving
out the home which, in many cases, can fall into this category, our emphasis will be on
the three main institutions that reinforce African American’s traditional relationship to
the state: church, school and media. The other influences that impact them are: home,
street, prison and movement. There are seven areas of influence; some are
traditional/institutional, while others are para-institutional. Before we move on to analyze
these, let us deal with the cultural, political socialization, and revolution in regard to the
African American liberation movement in the United States.
Most African American revolutionaries have failed to grasp the significance of counterinsurgency of the state in its most subtle forms. The state traditionally utilizes the class
contradictions between the African American petty bourgeoisie (potential intelligentsia)
and the proletariat. The state also misdirects (usurps) the budding “intellectual
proletariat” in each period of mass movement (upsurge of the Black Liberation
Movement).
In the period after the Civil War, to the turn of the century (1865-1885) when the cry of
the masses of African Americans was one of land re-distribution, forty acres and a mule,
the petty bourgeoisie sought the ballot (political office) and education. During the 1920s,
the Negro Renaissance movement centered in Harlem was financed and propagated
basically to counter-pose the Garvey movement. Many leftists attacked Garvey for being
utopian and bourgeois. Garvey made mistakes, and was unclear on some points in his
political theory, but much of what he said has come true. It was to be the constructive
basis for a social philosophy for African Americans in the 1980s, 1990s, and into the 21 st
century.
One point Garvey emphasized, which is rarely concentrated on, was the training of the
youth—the next generation. In the 1920s, he said that we should consciously program our
youth to master the physical “hard” sciences. He said that whoever mastered the technical
sciences would be a force in world politics at the end of the 20th century. The system
counteracted this by programming African Americans into the social sciences, athletics
and aesthetics (arts).
In the 1960s, when African American revolutionaries who represented the “new guard”
(political leadership) emerged calling for armed struggle, this political tendency (which
shook the state to its foundations) was counter-posed with the petty bourgeoisie line that
culture determines everything (African American arts). They, whose class mentality had
not totally identified with the working class, were projected as the new leadership. Their
emphasis was on aesthetics and electoral politics as counter-posed to the revolutionary
vanguard of armed struggle and guerilla warfare. The revolution and vanguard had
developed a mass military culture among the youth. Thus in the 1960s, like the 1920s, a
petty bourgeois “culture” movement was propagated to counteract the revolutionary
scientific political/military cultural movement.
In the 1980s, in an era of the decline of U.S. imperialism and the resurgence of the BLM,
the question of revolutionary scientific culture was raised, what it is, what form it should
take and how it should be carried out.
THE NEED FOR A NEW AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION
African American culture is rich and can become very revolutionary if properly
politicized. Culture provides the people with continuity and is a part of the superstructure
of any society, which is an institution within itself. Culture is the mass transmitter of
ideas and provides the people with the “esprit de corps” necessary to wage a protracted
struggle for national liberation. Being subjugated and oppressed by neo-imperialism, we
as a people suffer cultural imperialism, which is the systematic crushing, manipulating,
deluding and controlling of our culture to the benefit of the western, capitalist world.
They project their version of our culture to propagate the cultural ideas of a capitalist
mentality and lifestyle.
African culture was suppressed by many colonial slave regimes in the last 500 years of
our enslavement. It was only allowed to flourish when its content reinforced the
psychological conditioning of our enslavement. This meant that content was turned
inward, playing to the negative aspects of our destructive mentality and social
disillusionment with one another, without (of course) explaining the root cause—
capitalist colonialist exploitation by the racist state. Whenever message culture
developed, it was suppressed, so message content had to be well covered, which often
became lost over a period of years. In the west this resulted in the formation of a “Blues
Culture” which has grown into a new rhythm and blues culture. For the most part, our
culture is still bourgeois even though there is a conscious movement among African
artists to transform it.
The impact of invasion by Europeans upon Africa in the late 15th and early 16th century
led to the most traumatic era our planet has ever known. We are still in that traumatic era
and it will not be over for some time to come, long after emancipation. It is becoming
obvious to many third world revolutionaries that there is a cultural contradiction in the
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world, based on historical development in a race, class and gender analysis. Cultural
contradictions historically have been between European and third world people, and that
continues to this day. So (in the case of African Americans) cultural genocide
(imperialism) was the thesis that the European colonialist presented to African people,
particularly those prisoners of war taken to foreign lands.
Resistance, the maintaining of the basic African psyche way of life in African
communities was the antithesis to cultural genocide. The westernization of African
people held in colonial bondage became inevitable, as much as it is denied. The synthesis
is the combination of African and African American historical resistance to the European
experience and the positive aspects of their learned experience while under the
domination of Europeans.
The essence of African Cultural Revolution is to purge the negative aspects of the
European, capitalist, bourgeoisie and deal with the objective reality that there are positive
aspects of their learned experience, which can be used to the benefit of building a positive
New World.
What is the Cultural Revolution and what were the shortcomings of the last revolution?
Since everything is political, culture, like everything else, represents a class view, stand
or outlook. We are talking about changing the African American way of life to achieve a
political objective. Culture covers not just music, art, poetry, literature, and religion, but
also includes family values and lifestyle in general. Understanding values is one of the
keys to understanding the revolutionary process.
What are we talking about?
We are referring to the values that were implanted while living under the capitalistimperialist system. While African American culture is constantly attacked and controlled,
it must be understood that much of that which is mass-produced is slave culture. African
culture that was produced in America has its foundations in slavery. During the time of
slavery, there were two political tendencies, accommodation with the system, or
resistance to overthrow the system.
After the Emancipation Proclamation African American culture, like political life,
underwent a period of readjustment. With the overthrow of Reconstruction, culture
reflected accommodation because political resistance had been crushed. Middle-class
(capitalist) standards became reinforced during this period. The African American
middle-class imitated their white counterparts, trying to assimilate into the AmericanEuropean mainstream. African Americans carbon-copied the values of white capitalist
America because they did not have the means to achieve real capital, property and other
means of material success. However, cultural resistance was a basic underlying factor of
the African American working class.
E. Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie, often talked about conspicuous consumption—
keeping up with the Joneses—being in on the latest happenings, fashionable dress, the
latest model car, is a counterrevolutionary or bourgeoisie cultural value. Hundreds of
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thousands of ‘bloods’ have gone to the market in the 1970s to get the latest ‘Superfly’
‘Mack’ outfits and gone out to sporting events to out-flash one another. At the same time
‘bloods’ were riding around in ‘Superfly cars with mobile phones—not to speak of the
California curls for men and 1940s hairstyles (frying the hair again) for women.1
What does this represent?
The main reason African Americans can be culturally manipulated and oppressed is
because of their identification with the capitalist system. The Black Liberation Movement
must further develop its struggle if it intends to transmit the Black Radical tradition to the
next generation. In this mass media society mass bourgeois cultural class ideas are
constantly bombarded through television, radio, movies, the Internet and other forms of
mass communication. Revolutionary African American organizations disintegrate
because of repression by the state, but also because of the lack of well-developed
comprehensive ideology that develops a protracted paradigm (worldview).
Culture is part of the superstructure of a society and therefore reflects the historical
economic and political system of the state or the traditional relationship of the masses to
the state. The state (government) came into existence when human society developed
classes and class struggle emerged. The state’s role is to mediate, pacify or hide the class
contradictions between the oppressed class and the oppressor class. The state, and its
ruling class use religion, law, social ideas, ideology and culture to justify its dominance
of power within class society.
Culture served to institutionalize the people’s relation to the base (economic system) and
maintain the political relations of the state, informally transmitting to the people values
that keep them in support of the state. There are two forms of culture, bourgeoisie (class
culture) and revolutionary (proletarian classless) culture. “A given culture is the
ideological reflection of the politics and economics of a given society.”2
It is important that African Americans look at the question of developing a revolutionary
scientific
culture
and
reinitiate
a
revolutionary
African
American
Internationalist/Socialist cultural revolution that heightens the national and class
consciousness of their working class/street force. Because of the period of crisis in the
world/capitalism/imperialism, increased repression and the internal decay inside of the
African American community, it is essential for their survival.
“A cultural revolution is the ideological reflection of the political and economic
revolution and is in their service.”3 So if African Americans were to move to selfdetermination/national self-reliance of their captive/oppressed nationality, the Cultural
Revolution would have to reflect the political ideology/line of revolutionary
internationalism/scientific socialism.
1
Muhammad Ahmad, “The Politicalization of African Culture,” Contrast, Vol. No. 1972
2
Mao Tse Tung, “On New Democracy,” Selected Works, Volume II, [Peking: 1965], p. 369
3
Ibid., p. 373
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(End of Part One)
Muhammad Ahmad
Originally printed in Vibration, Issue 75, April-May-June, 1983
Updated: 2008
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