To be a revolutionary is to care about, and love people. Revolutionary ideas have to be grounded in the conditions and reality of the masses of people, and history. The question of class and race is purposefully separated from one another in political discourse today. Yet, there are inherent truths that cannot be ignored because they are uncomfortable or go against the popular political narrative. For instance, America is imperialist, because this is where capitalism has grown to continue to profit off of war, and neocolonialism. Though imperialism is hidden by the miseducation of people, the class conflict is still evident, because poverty is evident. In Philadelphia, this problem can be seen if one were to commit to a 20 minute walk from 34th and Walnut where the company combine called the University of Pennsylvania is located to Mantua, and the same 34th street, where the median income is $17,172.00, 68% of the population are renters and the poverty rate reads as 49.32% in a recent report from the Inquirer.
In America, there is a basic universal assumption about ownership and individuality. As the West declines, beauty and search for the soul decreases, because there is an assault on one’s intelligence, and an attempt to erase the history that ultimately shows us the way one could struggle toward the truth. Our way of life itself is simultaneous with becoming rich. The problems of poverty, and one’s own skin, are taken advantage of by opportunists who claim to be radical, who sell it on social media and ultimately lie to people by way of imposing new standards of living, language and behavior. They do not show concern for people. This is an attempt to fool people, but it in fact, only fools the opportunists into aligning with reactionary forces. The Black Panther Party had struggled against the ideology implemented by the CIA that the Weather Underground and SDF adopted. Fred Hampton would point this out. He said that these aforementioned groups are;
“anarchistic, opportunistic, individualistic, chauvinistic — its custerific,and that’s the bad part about about it in that its leaders take people into situations where the people can be taken to be massacred and they call it revolution but that’s nothing, that’s child’s play, folly, and criminal, because people can be hurt.”
Another fact is the reality of violence, instigated by current art and culture, poverty, lack of education and the American model of manhood, which was pointed out by W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction. As the slave was freed by Northern industry and capital to conquer the South during the Civil War, Du bois writes;
“How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded, he was humble; he protected the women of the South and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!”
In a city like Philadelphia, where there is basically a crime a night, and is a majority black city, race is the dividing line between, for example, education and a nonfunctional school building, decent housing and the threat of eviction by college campuses and unfair city taxes with inadequate jobs, and regularized civil service and inadequate city clean ups, inconvenient construction notices and working sites, hard drug use and so on. Finding one’s way for the youth in this country, and shown in this city, is often sidetracked by the need to escape, into the gang, the video games, the university, in search of love and safety and calm amidst the storm. Finding one’s sense of self can be stopped by a stray bullet, or a mistaken hit and run. In my city there has been a increase in gun violence before the summer has even started to heat up, and a 15 year old can say that; “The reason I can cope with it is because I’ve been hurt so many times and so many people died that there’s nothing left in me. I don’t even know how to react anymore. I’m just living. But I feel dead.”
What experiences has this child had, how is it possible that this country allows for people to suffer and “… feel empty. And I can’t do anything but keep motivating me to keep getting my grades straight and get out of Philadelphia and get into a good college and have a good job.” She deserves a guaranteed job: why doesn’t this country offer this at a bare minimum? What are the options for people in this country today when 71% of spending in 1950 was on the military budget, and military spending is the second-largest item in the federal budget at $934 billion today ? Why isn’t there anything more for her life than to “..do anything but keep motivating me to keep getting my grades straight and get out of Philadelphia and get into a good college and have a good job,”? What meaning will her life become and how will she define it, and find it?
Another fact is the reality of war, fought by poor people. Additionally, a warring mindset is continued by the experiment and development of technology and science both of which to some extent are distrusted by people, and nullify the hearts and minds of everyday life. As Martin Luther King said in an ABC News interview
“When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war it loses its social perspective, and programs of social uplift suffer. This is a fact of history. We do face more difficulties because of the war, its more difficult to arouse the concious during a time of war, I noticed a time of war— I noticed the other day a Negro was shot down in Chicago and it was clear case of police brutality, that was on page 30 of the paper but on page 1 at the top, was 781 Vietcong killed.”
The answer for what to do about the problems faced by working and non-working poor black people has nothing to do with the hand-out model so called-radicals claim to copy from the Black Panther’s example and more to deal with education geared to the empowerment of peoples natural strivings and inclinations.
Fred Hampton would also point this out. The inherent purpose of striving towards a revolution is to be able to reconcile the means with the ends, or how the revolutionary process develops and turns out. What is required out of a person who claims to contribute to the forward development of civilization is to know what constitutes a revolution and to take responsibility for it. For example, Hampton said that if people “don’t have education they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, you might get caught up in an emotional movement, you understand, or they’re poor and they want something, and they will want more and before you know it we will have negro imperialists.”
And this is what we have today, where pseudo revolutionaries “of color” who do not study nor do they know the lives people lead. They claim blackness and queerness and turn to victimhood to escape standing for principle and taking responsibility for the future. A city like Philadelphia has immense potential for a futuristic renewal of humanity, yet it is disconnected and fragmented from the past in order for forces of facism and imperialism to construct the future and negate humanity, eased by the progressive look of BLM and liberals “of color.”
A man was on the bus with his two kids, talking with another who asked how he had to take care for them. The man with the kids shook his head and said how times have changed, that there is something wrong with them, something off, but he is not sure what.
Who is this man, besides from whom ” a great song arose.. it was a new song and its deep and plaintive beauty its great cadences and wild appeal wailed, throbbed and thundered on the worlds ears with a message seldom voiced by man; always it grew and swelled and lived and it sits today at the right hand of God as Americas one real gift to beauty; as slaverys on redemption, distilled from the dross of its dung” as the slave stood upon their freedom from Lincolns’ stroke of a pen, the slave who chose their freedom without bloodshed? Who will be the children that will continue to sing if isolated from knowledge, and deliberately separated from their neighbors, and ultimately, the white working class? Fear and anger become propaganda rather than stories to understand issues of human beings. But, if the class question is considered (capital itself, by the way, being developed by slavery), and added to the problem of race as a framework of understanding the needs of the ordinary man, what would hinder the wannabe revolutionary from becoming an actual force for change? What would hinder the relation of human beings as a force working against what oppresses them all?
People have agency and power to control their destiny. Thus hope lies in the future which is guided by the traditions of the people. These traditions will mold and synthesize the question of social organization, and how the state is formed. But as changes to our current political moment develops, the choice to honest and practical freedom is carried by the results of thinking people.
Herein lies the foremost issue, because people do think, but what are they thinking about? The student, for example, can think for profit, and could be in turn, used for state interests instead of interests for the people. Henry Winston saw the issue of the black student, discussing Martin Kilsons article “the Black Experience at Harvard” when Kilson attempts to bring on middle class black youth instead of ghetto youth students into colleges, and discourage the unity amongst the races, as well as between the students and their community; “The Black students, in their attempt to create Black solidarity, even when this mistakenly assumes a seperatist form, are seeking to maintain their ties with the Black masses. Their aim is to use their education to advance Black Liberation instead of pursuing individual ‘success solution’ that monopoly capital – trying to contain the pressure of the Black Masses – permit for token Blacks. Kilson, striving to make the Black university students regard themselves as elite”.
Black students today, however, though attempting to do good for the black neighborhood and situation they are from, get swept in counterrevolutionary ideas implemented in university classrooms. From the classroom stem so-called activist groups that do not listen to people nor struggle with them. People then, are left without power and knowledge to determine themselves, for the students who graduate into better paid positions, more often than not, try to mislead people and do not effectively help change the conditions and reality of the masses of people nor connect people to a broader understanding of the world and allow for the agency of people to develop science,theory, culture, and the world as such.
What this also means is that there is a problem of the active energy and agency of youth — who are supposed to reignite and develop ideas, continue to take forward the ways of life and science of this country — and their energy is instead directed and puppeteered by oppressive forces that have a total affect on society in controlling what is produced which specifically, and to note, is what people see, like films and art, or what people hear, like music and language. And a “revolutionary”, like “blackness”, can be sold by these mediums and constitute a nationalist non-struggle agenda that continues the conditions of divisiveness wherein thought becomes static and immobile since it is not embodied for the people and by the reality and weight of the strivings of people. What does this mean when struggling for the truth and humanity? That reality, the truth, has to be used to forward the present.
References:
School, shootings
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-military-budget-components-challenges-growth-3306320
http://data.philly.com/philly/crime/?nType=crime&dNeigh=Mantua&from=&to=&
Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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