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, schoolandmedia. 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 counter-insurgency 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 21st 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 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 capitalist-imperialist 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 American-European 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 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 self-determination/national self-reliance of their captive/oppressed nationality, the Cultural Revolution would have to reflect the political ideology/line of revolutionary internationalism/scientific socialism.
(End of Part One)
Muhammad Ahmad
Originally printed in Vibration, Issue 75, April-May-June, 1983
Updated: 2008
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[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