We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s May 13, 2023 session on the Afro-Asiatic Reconstitution of the World. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube.
Good morning to everybody. I just want to talk a little bit about the end of World War II and the moment that we’re living in. I hope I don’t go too long, I’m going to try to read quickly. On May 9th, 1945, the government of the Soviet Union announced that the Red Army, that is the Soviet Army, had captured the seat of government of Germany and of the Nazi regime, thus declaring the complete defeat of Germany. In the most profound sense this victory belonged to the Red Army, the Soviet government, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and most significantly the Soviet people. We must get this clear. There was not shared sacrifice or shared commitment in the fight against Nazism as we are so often told by American propaganda.
The Soviet people sacrificed 27 million people killed. The war was fought essentially in the Soviet Union. The German army called its operations in the Soviet Union, “Plan Barbarossa.” Over two-thirds of the German divisions fought in the Soviet Union. In the end this was a war as conceived by the German government and politicians in Western nations, especially in the United States and Great Britain. This was conceived as a war against communism to bring down the government of the Soviet Union, its Communist party, and to bring socialism in the Soviet Union to an end and ultimately dismantle the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union was a union of 15 republics and over 100 nations, nationalities, ethnic groups, and tribes, and over 25 languages. This was the first experiment in human history of this type of union.
However, the end to Nazi Germany and its war machine was the culmination of a 31-year systemic crisis of world imperialism and world capitalism, the deepest crisis of the almost 500 year history of modern capitalism. I wish to return to that. The main events of this crisis, and I’d like to just name them – this 31-year crisis – first, World War I, which lasted 1914 to 1918. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which was in large measure what brought the war between European powers to an end. I wish to repeat that.
Germany was not so much defeated on the battlefield, as much as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 convinced leading politicians in all of the belligerent countries that unless there was a unity to bring this Bolshevik Revolution to an end, it could spell catastrophe for the entire West. However the manner that World War I came to an end created a profound political crisis in Germany itself, resulting again from the terms that the war was ended upon. And Germany in the 1920s was a very divided nation because of the disputes about whether the war should have ended, whether Germany was defeated, or whether Germany and the German Army were betrayed. If you listen closely, that is precisely the platform upon which the Nazi party rose. That Germany was betrayed, that the German Army was stabbed in the back, and that the terms of the treaty ending the war were so negative for Germany in terms of its territory and in terms of its economy that the Nazis would always claim that Germany was sold out. And indeed there is some reason to believe that – sold out in the sense that German politicians along with other Western politicians said that we cannot continue to fight a war while revolution occurred in Russia, this vast Eurasian landmass.
The financial collapse of 1929 leading to the depression of 1930 and 1940. Again, I’m listing the elements, or the main features of this great 31-year crisis. The causes of the financial collapse and the consequent Great Depression are many. I however believe that the causes of the financial collapse and the Great Depression were political and hence what are called externalities – that is, events and factors external to the purely economic or financial situation. I hope that makes sense.
The greatest depression in the history of capitalism was not the result of only the economic contradictions of capitalism and the economic contradictions between capitalist nations, but in fact I am arguing that the major causes were political. Hence what we call externalities, factors external to purely economic and financial causes. If I were to list these externalities, I would list them: First, the Russian Revolution, which removed a large part of the Eurasian landmass, its resources and populations from the capitalist market and the capitalist financial system. That could only be seen as a blow. Secondly, the severe Western sanctions imposed upon the Soviet Union after the revolution, which did as much damage to the West and the sanctioning nations as to the Soviet economy.
Third, the terms of the peace agreement undermined the German economy, the largest and fastest growing economy in Europe, removing its robust manufacturing base, its vast market for consumer goods from the capitalist market. Not removing it completely, but shrinking it. Four, rampant inflation in Germany and other countries as a mechanism to offset the weakening capitalist market in Europe and globally. The capitalist market again was shrunk because of the removal of Russia from it, and then the sanctions imposed upon Russia and the peace agreement which ended World War II, which severely undermined the German economy, its great manufacturing base and a good part of its consuming population. Five, a crisis in the colonial nations characterized by strikes, protests, national independence movements, demands throughout the Afro Asian and Latin American global south.
Let us recall that the dynastic system in China collapsed in 1911, and led by the Kuomintang party and Sun Yat Sen, China was trying to find a path towards a new republic and a new democracy. In 1921 in Shanghai, the Communist Party of China was formed which gave another and very profound aspect to the independence and democratic struggles of the Chinese people.
In India the growing consolidation of the independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and the founding of the Communist Party of India. All of these were political factors which created the conditions for the financial collapse and ultimately the Great Depression of the 1930s. Officially, World War II began on September 1st, 1939 (and I say officially) when Germany invades Poland, which was a red line for Britain and France. They therefore declared war on Germany, but not actual war because they had no intentions of going to war with Germany because they wished to encourage Germany to move to the East and towards the Soviet Union.
In fact, you know, the war declared by Britain and France, they called it a sitting war. It was a war in name, but not actually. In fact, the governments and key people in the governments of the West, including France and Britain and the United States, saw the Nazi regime in Germany as a strike force on behalf of world imperialism against socialism and for the re-establishment of the of the Western control of the Eurasian landmass stretching from China through Berlin and London.
The significant point that I want to make here is that World War I and World War II differ in a major dimension. World War I was what we call a war of colonial redivision. In 1884, there was a conference in Berlin where Africa was partitioned and split up among the colonial nations in Europe. I do not think that any part of the world has ever suffered that kind of ruthless division of its land and its resources and parceled out to various European colonial nations.
World War II was a war to bring down socialism in the Soviet Union. And Hitler and the Nazi regime acted as what we call a strike force for world imperialism, a vanguard for world imperialism in this objective. In June of 1941, German forces begin the war in the Soviet Union which in fact begins World War II in Europe, which was the main center of the fight at any rate.
The victory four years later of the Soviet Union was an ideological, political, and military victory, but not just for the Soviet Union – for the democratic and peace forces and forces fighting for socialism all over the world. That victory elevated the moral, political and ideological stature of communist parties everywhere in the world, and of the world communist and working-class forces generally. That is why it was necessary, especially in the United States, to break the back, to undermine this new respect that communist parties and left wing movements had among masses of people because of their role in the anti-Hitler struggle. So we come out of World War II with a whole different political architecture and a whole new situation of human consciousness. I’ll come back to that.
What is seldom spoken of, but perhaps I think is the most important outcome of the defeat of Nazism – and again, Nazism as the strike force of world imperialism – the defeat of Hitler’s Germany is also, in a certain sense, an ideological defeat for the imperialist and colonialist nations themselves. But what was of great importance was the emancipation of human consciousness in ways that it had never been emancipated. That human beings for instance who lived in villages in India or China or Vietnam or Senegal or Mozambique, or the Congo, whose lifeworld was no different than the lifeworld of their grandparents, their great-grandparents, their great-great-grandparents – all they knew of the world was their ancestors, their family, their extended family, their tribe and the place where they lived and where their ancestors had lived.
A vast change began to take place. This field of study of human consciousness might be called the history of human consciousness. A new ideological moment emerges with the defeat of Nazism. Before, you know, trying to flesh all of this out, I think it would be useful to take a step backward to the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, and of course Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America. And again, you know, we cannot say it enough. This is one of the greatest scientific achievements of modernity. The insights in it and what can be drawn from it are enormous. And of course, you know, we’re reading it all the time in the Free School and I have to say, we’ve only just begun to probe the depth of this great work. But let us recall that Du Bois argues that between 1860 and 1880, the Black proletariat was the most advanced part of the world’s working masses. I wish to repeat that. This is an extraordinary, singularly important, not asserted anywhere else except in Black Reconstruction. And I’m often wondering, you know, all of these very smart people who claim to have read Black Reconstruction in America seemingly have no idea of this point.
Du Bois argues, and here we’re talking about the 19th century, most of humanity lived in darkness. They were not a part of, in a conscious sense, of the conscious movement of world history. They knew that they were not governing themselves, but as a conscious force in history, they were not that. Except, the Black proletariat represented the most advanced contingent of world humanity in the period 1860 to 1880.
Du Bois insisted that the resistance of the enslaved proletariat in the United States was as advanced, if not more so, than the uprising of European workers across Europe in 1848. And more advanced, and he says this in Black Reconstruction, than the brief period where the workers of Paris assume something close to state power, if not a dual power, in what is called the Paris Commune of 1871.
Hence the defeat and dismantling of reconstruction and the possibility for the consolidation at least in part of the South, the former slave-owning South, of a dictatorship of the black proletariat – this was a defeat of world historic importance. Ultimately, for Du Bois, to understand World War I and World War II, you have to understand the undermining and defeat of democracy in the U.S. South during Reconstruction.
This defeat and depriving world humanity of a radical democratic base of working-class power in the U.S. South – this defeat was a defeat for working people all over the world, hence opening up the possibility for a renewed imperialist colonialist onslaught against Africa and Asia. Most significantly, it came literally on the heels of the defeat of reconstruction approximately in 1876, came the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 which partitioned Africa, dividing it among several European nations.
The importance of going back to 1860 to 1880 à la Du Bois: In the Du Boisian sense, what we are doing is what is today known as long-wave historical analysis. This method is associated with the Russian historian [Nikolai] Kondratiev. We call this Kondratiev long-wave history historical analysis. Du Bois was always doing long-wave historical analysis. Kondratiev says that the period most revealing and appropriate for understanding any historical phenomenon is a 75-year period. In other words – for events to play out, for processes to crystallize, they have to be understood over a 75-year period.
Sometimes I think Du Bois had a longer range, something close to 100 years, but this is what we call long-wave historical analysis. Hence the setback occasioned by the defeat of reconstruction and democracy in the United States was decisive – and Du Bois makes this point – to the consolidation of U.S. imperialism and world imperialism. It furthermore was the basis of the foundation for the contradiction among imperialist nations that were to evidence themselves ultimately in World War I, beginning in 1914. In other words, if you link the defeat of reconstruction, the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 and the start of World War I, you can see in a Du Boisian sense a single set of events. And the defeat of reconstruction clarifies, I think, the Berlin Conference; and the Berlin Conference clarifies World War I; and World War I was a war to overturn the Berlin Conference partitioning of Africa. And it was Germany’s way of saying to its capitalist partners that the partition of Africa was unfair, and Germany, the fastest growing economy and the most industrial economy in Europe, deserved to have a bigger part of the colonial spoils. Du Bois would write an article in 1916 entitled “The African Roots of War,” about the African roots of World War I.
We could say more about this, this connection ideologically between the defeat of reconstruction, the rise of the ideology of white supremacy in new ways, and Nazi ideology; where the Nazis said openly that they draw upon the American experience and American ideas to give form to their racial supremacist ideas.
In the wake of Germany’s defeat and its weakening as a consequence, Germany’s economic political weakening and of two world wars and a profound economic collapse, the European colonial powers found it difficult, if not impossible, as a result of this 31-year crisis to resist the movements for liberation from colonialism. In 1947, India achieves independence. In 1949, the Chinese Revolution occurs. In 1954, the Vietnamese forces defeat the French colonial army in Vietnam.
But here’s the point I wish to get to. What we are living today is a direct result, both of a defeat of Nazism and the weakening of world imperialism only held up by the United States, which was pretty much untouched by either World War I or World War II, whereas Europe was devastated. But this weakening of world imperialism has led to a new global consciousness that we in the 21st century are now living out. Where before, peasants were isolated, a good part of the working class lived and worked in semi-slave conditions under colonialism. Their knowledge of the world was pretty much their village, their tribe and extended family, their ancestors. And that’s why they worship ancestors – by the way, nothing wrong with that – but if you do not know the world, except for your small corner of it, your consciousness and your knowledge of the world and of your place in it is limited. Almost to a point where you are not even a factor in history. And that of course is the role, or the function, of colonialism. To keep colonial people backwards in terms of their knowledge and consciousness of the world. India is emancipated, and what does that lead to ultimately? It leads to all of these people in the Free School who, had India not received independence, you all would be in your villages in India.
Similarly with China. China at the time of liberation was the poorest nation, if not, maybe the second poorest nation in the world. The peasantry of China, although they fought in many instances against unjust autocracies and foreign interference in their country. They fought and often after fighting and often being defeated, they returned to the previous way of life. But after the Chinese Revolution, the Chinese people not only win, but they move forward. And hence all of these Chinese intellectuals and scholars in all of the countries of the world are a direct product of the emancipation of China from imperialism and from autocracy. And I wish to underline this, the achievement of a people’s democracy.
Emancipating people from backwardness – and by backwardness we’re not making a claim about the people themselves, we’re making a claim about the conditions under which they were forced to live – where they could not see a future, they could only see a past. And the present was not connected to a future; the present was only connected to the past. Once the present is connected to a future, one can see oneself in making a future, and that one’s present is not permanent but a part of an unfolding process of consciousness and greater democracy and liberation.
Our world is a world where close to eight billion people see themselves as part of humanity and a part of making a world where all people have an opportunity to live democratically and their children and grandchildren have the opportunity to advance and learn and grow beyond where they are. I wish to underline this again, I don’t know whether I’m making it clear. We are not living in the world that existed in 1945 at the end of World War II. The world is qualitatively different because people, vast numbers of people, have been liberated from colonial backwardness. And it has not just been, or not essentially been the liberation of the physical but more than that, the liberating of consciousness from the backwardness of the past. This is throughout the Afro-Asiatic and Latin American worlds. When we talk about an Afro-Asiatic reconfiguration of humanity, we are talking about a conscious process where billions of people participate in inventing a new world. That billions of people have an imaginary, a futuristic outlook – anywhere you go in the world, people think in terms of the future. No matter how bad things can get in the present, people think futuristically.
This reality is vastly different from the conditions that led to the revolutionary processes in the 20th century. Future revolutions will not consist of a few revolutionaries storming the barricades, or for that matter the Winter Palace. It will be a process where billions of people participate democratically in remaking the world where – and this is what is so beautiful and encouraging – where people in Asia, let us say India, can see themselves in Afro-America. And Afro-America can see themselves in India, and India can see itself in Africa, and Afro-America can see itself in China. It is what Neha [Chivukula, in her essay on Paul Robeson’s view of culture], called the human universal, such a wonderful concept. The human universal, not the human as a thing in himself or herself, not an abstraction that could be expressed in religious feelings, in religious narrative, but now a human universal that the oneness of humanity is universalized through the actions of humanity itself.
Hence when people look at a future, what they are saying is that we are not, when we talk about freedom, we’re not talking about freedom from, we’re talking about freedom to. This is obvious everywhere. I mean, it’s just amazing. However, the ruling elite especially of the United States have not given up. And hence through their attempt to command, to seize the commanding heights of culture and ideas, to take over the universities and turn them into centers of anti-people, anti-working class ideas. To take culture and say for example, the cultural icon is not the Paul Robeson or Harry Belafonte or Nina Simone or Lorraine Hansberry, who would say that “I am a cultural figure because culture is the fight for the people.” And they all said, “I’m not singing, I am not writing, I am not reciting poetry, I’m not writing novels – in the case of Baldwin let us say – for the sake of getting rich. I’m a cultural artist for the sake of uplifting humanity.”
To me all of this is so beautiful because it is so in line with what we think and do in Free School. Our practice is anchored first to a deep and profound respect for, and belief in, people. We get that from Robeson, from Du Bois, you know from, this great tradition – Gandhi, Mao. We respect and love people. But that respect is not empty and shallow. It is respect based upon our understanding of the capacity of people. And that is not an unscientific, or if you will, metaphysical thing. Empirical evidence, scientific study and evaluation, demonstrates that the human capacity is greater now than ever in human history. There is no revolutionary theorizing which negates or belittles human capacity.
Yesterday I was with [Free School members] Purba and Sambarta and Santanu. And I was trying to take them around, and showing them some of the sites of deindustrialization. And, you know, something that is not well-known or even acknowledged is that in the United States, one of the greatest organizations of modern industry took place. A lot of people try to say, “Well this is the result of very bright engineers who knew how to set up industrial organization.”
Well, you can’t deny scientific engineering and that type of thing, but if you want to be real about it, the invention of the great manufacturing system in the United States was the envy of the world; Lenin, Mao, Gandhi, Indira Gandhi – they all looked to this system. But this was not the result of engineers alone. This was the American working class that engineered from the bottom up the system of industrial production in the United States. And if you read any revolution or anywhere in the world, one thing – they had great admiration for the system of manufacturing and industrial production, the greatest manufacturing system yet produced. Even given the greatness of the Chinese system as it emerges, even given the greatness of the German system, this was by far the greatest manufacturing system ever produced. But in admiring this system, all revolutionaries, all people who had an interest in the scientific organization of production, admired the U.S. working class. Its intelligence, its discipline, its work ethic and so on. No way to get around it.
And you know, when I took Santanu and Sambarta and Purba around, I was trying to indicate to them just about the Philadelphia working class and my own experience and my parents and so on. Highly disciplined, highly organized, highly intelligent, very conscious of the world that they lived in. And then came deindustrialization. It was one of the most ruthless assaults upon a working class, perhaps ever in history. One could say that deindustrialization could be compared to the defeat and overturning of reconstruction in 1876. Deindustrialization was to render the American working class weak, disorganized, and in a lot of ways anxious and depressed, not seeing a future out of the crisis.
There’s much we could say about this. That is why it is so disturbing when in this “postmodern”, “post-industrial” moment – I put quotes because I don’t think we’re any of that, but academics and scholars will use it as a way to frame what they’re doing. To attack working people when they are down is inexcusable. To refer to the American working class as ‘settlers’ and ‘white supremacists’ and ‘Nazis’ is unacceptable given the magnificent history of the American working class as a whole. To kick them while they’re down is to give aid and comfort to the very forces that were defeated by the Soviet people in World War II. I don’t have the words, it’s very emotional.
This is not the working class of the industrial period – organized, unionized, conscious of itself as a class, seeing its interconnections to world humanity, building institutions; I often talk about the Black church. The Black church is in decline because the Black working class is in decline. Black workers financed and supported these churches, I know that from my own family’s experience. Take the working class out of the church that I went to, you couldn’t finance that church. We were not getting money from philanthropists and nonprofits and that type of thing. It came out of the pockets of the working people who were the members of that church. Working people built civic societies, be they sports clubs or political organizations.
The environment that we see in the United States is a result of the ruthless policies of deindustrialization. You want to know why a young male, black, white, Latino will go out and kill randomly? He is not attacking, first and foremost, the individuals that he kills. This is an attack upon society itself. What leads a young 19 or 20 year-old or 22 year-old to pick up an AR-15 and go to a shopping mall and just kill randomly? He is attacking a society which has attacked him, which gives him no future.
All of this must be traced back to the ruthlessness of this ruling class. Just one other thing – once they dismantled the industrial base, then they went about infusing society with anti-working class values, anti-people values. And they’re the same – anti-people, anti-working class because most people are part of the working class. But then, and I saw this, and I think if you study it you will be able to see – a culture that became preoccupied with money, and as they say the bling-bling, rather than human values. As the financial oligarchy became more powerful, and by the financial, you know I don’t separate Wall Street from Silicon Valley – they function in the same network of finance and technology and ideological assault. The values, the commodification of the human being, the valuing of human beings based upon money and material things. Sports becoming a venue not for sports or even sports people, but to sell things.
This transformation of society from values that are created by working people, to values created by financial oligarchy – why should I accept the values of a Silicon Valley person talking about AI? Why should I accept them over the values of our ancestors, of a Paul Robeson? Is this guy, co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, should I listen to him more than to Du Bois, or to Robeson, or to Martin Luther King? Are his values more important? And so they turn society out, they undermine public education, they govern in a way that punishes ordinary people through tax policies, through giving all kinds of sweetheart deals to gentrifiers and these no good university administrators and hospitals.
But humanity moves on, because the values of this tiny group that rules so much of our society are at odds with the consciousness of billions of people throughout the world and growing millions in the United States. At first protest, which is a negative thing of “we’re against,” but ultimately a positive “freedom to.” Freedom to act, freedom to be a conscious agent of a remaking of a life for me and my children.
And this is where we are. And this is why finally, you know people say, “Well y’all celebrating Paul Robeson and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, how do you put them two together?” To me it’s very easy and very apparent. Look at their values. They both stood for human values, to recover those; and no one did it better, or does it better than the Nation of Islam, believe me. To recover those whom the society had consciously destroyed. And Paul Robeson, you know, the same thing, “I will speak for those who are the colonized, the oppressed, the working classes.”
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
Leave a comment