The Black Prophetic Tradition and the Revolutionary Struggle for Democracy

We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s July 22, 2023 session on The Black Prophetic Tradition and the Revolutionary Struggle for Democracy. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube.

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What we’re going to talk about, or what I’m going to try to talk about is the revolutionary struggle for democracy and the Black Prophetic Tradition. I guess, you know, what I should say first is that at this stage of human civilizational development and of the crisis of the U.S. ruling elite, the struggle for democracy takes on a revolutionary essence—which is to say that the struggle for democracy is a struggle at this time for the power of the people against the power of this oligarchic plutocracy where a very, very few people, a tiny part of society and of humanity have almost total control over this society. Therefore, to replace this rule with the rule of the people is the revolutionary essence of democracy.

Therefore, people who talk in these high-sounding phrases about socialism, do not understand that without the power of the people—which is democracy in its full meaning—socialism cannot be achieved. You know there’s always this debate—and I know [Free School member] Emily is working on and researching an essay on Trotskyism and neo-Trotskyism.

And there are certain things that distinguish Trotskyism and have throughout its history—and that is this assumption of leaping over the struggle for democracy and going directly to socialism, the struggle for socialism. Well first of all, the masses of working people and the masses of people don’t look at it that way. They see the immediate crisis calling out for answers that address this crisis. And in its largest understanding, it is the struggle for democracy, and we have to work further on developing what that means and explaining it to people and so on.

And this is all the more urgent because as is now apparent to everyone, the ruling elite of this country are in panic mode. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen them so out of sorts as it were, so panicky, so desperate as they are now. You listen to them and you read what they say—many of them have already acknowledged that Trump is going to win the election, and it looks that way, and the polling data shows it. 

And Trump is absolutely right when he says the passions and anger are greater now than they were in 2016 or 2020. And so the ruling class now understands or is coming to understand that they can’t rule in the old way and the people are not willing to accept their rule—and that’s what this election is going to be about. And I think even a conservative count would say that something like 150 million of the 330 million Americans are in almost complete and irreversible rejection of the ruling elite. We have never seen anything like this. I think it is fair to say that this is perhaps the greatest political crisis in the history of the United States, and I don’t see how people can proceed in any other way except with this understanding, and the crisis is not whether a “fascist movement and a fascist will take power,” but whether or not the people in their names can begin the process of assuming power, i.e. creating a new democracy at this time and thus dislodging the ruling elite from power.

This is going to be a difficult long process and it will require understanding and getting closer to an understanding of the way the broad masses of working people—and in our case in particular—[the way] the black worker, the black proletariat thinks about the world and thinks about going forward.

Now along with the huge political crisis is another crisis, and we talk about this all the time: this rise in poverty. And I think we have to make a distinction between poverty in terms of people who fall below a certain income level, which is poverty of course, and structural poverty—that is to say where individuals, families, communities are not only poor, but will never get out of poverty. There are more Americans today whose children will not only not do better than them, but will do worse than them. This is what we call structural poverty; this is the situation that African Americans have lived in for almost 20 generations.

The poverty you see among black people didn’t just begin with this recession or the other recession, or moving to the city, or not having enough education. The poverty that you see among African Americans is intergenerational, going back to enslavement. The majority of black folk have known nothing but poverty, poverty is our normality. And now this form of poverty is affecting the entire working class and in particular large parts, in fact the majority of white working people. And you know when we look at places like Kensington, and we can never stop looking at Kensington—it is not just a geography, it is more than that. In other words it’s not just a place in Philadelphia—it is a representation of and a crystallization of long-standing social-economic processes.

[A process] which, with deindustrialization and automation, has begun the process of the destruction of large parts of the most stable working class and the evisceration of all of their hopes of the American dream and upward mobility. That is why Kensington is so significant—in fact as a counter-narrative to all of the propaganda about Bidenomics, and “the economy is doing good, and unemployment is lower than it’s ever been,” and you know we’re about ready to enter La-La-Land. All that stuff—no. To know what is going on, you have to understand Kensington and you have to understand that Kensington represents something qualitatively new in the social history of the United States.

One would have readily expected and found it normal if Kensington were 80 or 90% African Americans. You expect it—intergenerational poverty, lack of opportunity, despair. All of those things that affect the oppressed and the impoverished, you would expect it. We’ve seen it before: the heroin epidemic, the crack epidemic, we saw how they engulfed large parts of the black community. But when you go to Kensington, 75 to 80% of all those on the street shooting drugs, a mixture of the most potent drugs ever known—fentanyl and heroin mixed together with some horse tranquilizer—and you see and you look at them and you know. They are white people from what they call the middle class, the middle-income, the stable working class, whose class is being destroyed and undermined.

And when people don’t have a belief system—for many white people, for a good number of black people, the belief system was the American dream: “My children will do better than me.” And those young white people that heard that, “You will do better than your parents. Go to college, get a degree, go to technical school, it won’t be hard for you.” You know, and then it all falls apart and you do not have a belief system to replace it with, and so you see, really, what is the tragedy of the undoing of the most stable part of the white working class.

So Kensington is not just a place, it is a symbol, it is a representation of the future of the working people of this country, that’s what it is. So Kensington has something to teach this entire nation, and by the way there are no Kensington’s anywhere else in the world except in the United States. In the poorest countries, be they in Africa, or Asia, or South America, they might be poor but they ain’t got no Kensington—and we have to further study what that means. You know that’s why on the other side, we talk about this all the time: economic categories are not adequate to explain what is going on. You need advanced and sophisticated sociology, we need to find ways to get closer to the poor to understand better in order to explain a way out of it.

And the revolution in technology, which is coming on top of the deindustrialization—now I want to get certain things straight. A lot of people will say, “Well most of the job losses, 80% of them were due to automation and not to deindustrialization,” i.e. sending entire industries overseas. I don’t think those arguments are correct because the deindustrialization begins in the 70s, and this movement of plants and capital to the areas of cheapest labor is kind of a post-World War II phenomenon, but really it takes off in the late 70s and 80s, and has continued until the present. 

And we see it in Philadelphia—for example, if I could just give an example—cause you know one of the things that we’ve been, as you know, we’ve been studying this deindustrialization of Philadelphia. You know, take the area of Kensington, for people who don’t know, that was an area of manufacturing industry. If you look at the homes, if you look at the streets with stores where people shopped—and all of that has gone down—but the people would walk to factories where they lived, walk home, walk to the corner, a supermarket, there was the barbershop, the beauty parlor, all of that was a part of a manufacturing ecosystem. Communities emerge out of that. 

Today you go to the same place where this vibrant working class manufacturing ecosystem existed, today all of those factories are shut down and you see them, all of the factories, all of the stores along Kensington Avenue for the most part are boarded up. Abandonment is everywhere, and it is populated by, in the majority, young white people living on the street and living there because of the easy access to fentanyl and heroin. Living like that and such. Of course now Kensington as a place is more integrated, more black people I see these days, but it’s still in the majority young white people, and you look at them and you can see that they’re not from a poor background. Just look at their phenotype, the physical structure you know, especially look at their legs, but your body is battered because of drugs.

You look at that area—I have taken people on tours of the garment factories in this area, all are gone. And that was not because of automation, that was because they first moved to the [U.S] south and then they moved outside of the country. To Asia and some to South America for the cheapest labor. Take the shipbuilding industry, we don’t build ships here anymore, it’s not because of automation, it’s because shipbuilding was moved to other countries. And that can be shown across Philadelphia, it can be shown across Michigan, and Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Birmingham, Alabama and other centers of industry.

The deindustrialization of the auto and steel industry, of the garment industry, of shipbuilding, and of transportation—this occurred before the revolution of robots and AI. This revolution in technology comes on top of that already gutting-out of industry. So two and a half to three generations of that have eventuated in Kensington, and what you see in LA, and what you see—what used to be called the most beautiful city in the country—San Francisco, Chicago, etc. And what we have seen, and this goes against government statistics and narratives, that in the last 25 years, wealth has been further concentrated in fewer hands, and poverty has spread throughout the working class. Some data show that half, over half of the working class lives in or near poverty, I would say even more.

Now with artificial intelligence and robotics, now you are getting the technology that will attack those who used to do mental and technical labor. The office will never be the same, more people will work from home, and digitally. Fewer people will work, in hospitals and universities, in the clerical and and other areas you know of secretarial work and administrative work, fewer people will work for the city government, and even the physical labor like trash collection will be automated and robots will pick up your trash. Some studies suggest that in a decade, 50% of existing jobs will disappear. 

If you want to understand the anger of working people across the country, this is the foundation of it. There is no future; our children are being consumed in fentanyl and other drugs; culture is demeaning and sexualizing and anti-children—and this is a big thing for a lot of people, this anti-child pop culture. And people can’t quite figure out, where did this come from and how did it get insinuated into my child’s elementary school? You see what I mean, these are real questions that people have and you can’t dismiss them with claims that they are “a settler group”, or that they are “homophobic”, and “transphobic”, and “fascist”. You can’t dismiss, you can’t trivialize this crisis of the people in that way.

The other thing in this, you know all of this kind of comes together, is the geostrategic shift. I just saw that [Free School member] Jeremiah posted this very good article about China and its expansion of its economic and political model to the—what they call the Global South—and how in effect there is literally what they could call a new Cold War. But in the [first] Cold War the West tried to make the nations of Africa and Asia choose either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, and that led to the war in Korea, that led to the war in Vietnam, that led to multiple coups inAfrica and Asia, and on and on and on. If you didn’t choose the United States, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and military would come in and overthrow you.

 Well today we’re looking at a new situation. Where a country of, and I use this language because it’s popular, of the Global South, i.e. China, that is not that far removed in time from the poverty that most of the countries of the Global South are now experiencing. And everybody in the Global South knows that China was once like we are, and knows that China’s economy did not grow based upon neo-colonial exploitation of African and Asian nations, so China comes already having a certain goodwill from the other nations of the South. And people know that the Chinese experienced racism, and white supremacy, and European occupation. They know that what the Chinese have achieved, they achieved because they struggled and fought for it, so there’s a certain goodwill. 

This geostrategic shift, this Afro-Asiatic reconfiguration of the world is a great democratic movement—perhaps the greatest democratic movement in human history. And this is what is so positive and exciting about it. And again you know talking about Cornel West, a good friend, a kind person, a good person–to in the face of this, continue to refer to China as a dictatorship, as an authoritarian almost gangster regime, using the language of the neocons and Joe Biden, the war language. A nation that has lifted its people out of deep poverty—that’s democracy—a nation where 84-85 % of people say they are satisfied with their government.

This new moment of course has to be celebrated, when you put all of this together, the domestic crisis, the economic crisis of poverty and impoverishment of the majority—almost an entire working class lives somewhere in poverty or close to it. This is an unknown to Americans, believe me. Sure, black people, but the entire working class, so it can’t be explained as “black people don’t want to work” or “black people are lazy”, something that blames the victim. You can’t—well maybe you can do it, but it does not resonate with the majority of white working people who are themselves falling into deeper and deeper poverty with no way out. Go to rural Michigan and those people—you know, I saw an interview with a woman, a white woman whose husband is a truck driver. Unable to pay a medical expense for her child, had to go into her child’s savings to get money to pay for a prescription of some medical care that her child needed. The woman broke down crying, and that’s all across this country.

So we are right to define what we see as a political rebellion, and this election as an election where the ruling class will try to defuse the rebellion to divide the people who are united in their poverty and misery. And say, for example, to a black person who looks at a poor white person, and we’re supposed to say we’re not the same because, “You are settler, your people colonized us and so we have nothing in common.” Well for some people it might work, but I think increasingly people are seeing the commonality of misery, precarity, and suffering. 

Now you know this brings us the question of not just the objective conditions, but the subjective reality. That is, human beings. This situation was created by human beings who have a certain class interest, who are ruthless in pursuing their class interest, who have brought death and despair upon the world’s people and now upon their own people, the people of this country. A ruling class that, irrespective of the race, color, or creed of the victims, could give less than a damn and see them as throwaways, dispensable—and then have academics and public intellectuals speak of the situation in ways that condemned the victims. 

But it is created by humans and it will be solved by humans. The ruling class keeps saying, “Well AI is here, robots are here, you can’t do nothing about it. We might offer you some scholarships to retrain yourself in AI,” whatever that means. Where you end up making less than you ever made in your life but you’re retrained. They keep saying over and over and over again to the people, “You can’t do anything about this, automation is here, you’re going to lose your job, you’re going to lose your income,” and on and on and on. But in the back of their minds, people know there is something that can be done, and so that is a subjective side of the crisis: the people and how they think. And this is what is very important, the categories through which the masses of people understand and explain the world and how they will change it.

Seldom do philosophers, or theorists, or commentators talk about how the masses of people think and understand the world. Not what the elite say, not what Kant, or Hegel, or Nietzsche, or Sartre, any other philosopher theorized back in their time. Sure, the various philosophical explorations of thinking and categories of thinking are very, very important. However, how all of that is filtered through the experiences and minds of the masses of working people is another thing. Hence the Black Prophetic Tradition.

First of all let me say, white leftists and liberals, and so-called pro-black political forces look upon black people as a childish, infantile people. We are dismissed, of course we are patronized when they need our votes, our geniuses to the extent that they can be—especially in art and music—appropriated and say it is theirs and they’re responsible for it. They don’t see us as very much, and so they would say, “Well look, their class consciousness can only go so far because they’re weighted down by their religious beliefs, you’re always going to church, to always following a religious leader.” You know that’s what they say, and that’s what they see because really they don’t see us and really have no understanding of who we are. And that’s part of the great problem of the Left, you know they’re good at sloganizing and generalizing and broad phrases and phrase-mongering, and they can talk you to death. But when it comes to understanding the people, and certainly understanding black people—you know, one of the things I’ve been aware of a long time, that most white leftists—they see us as infantile and exotic, you know. And they basically want a black person or two around to say, “See we got a black person that says what we’re saying, so we’re not racist.” They never think that a black person will say, “Well that black person you got is only capitulating to your racism.” He sold out or she sold out, so to speak. 

You know it was never more clearly stated than by Noam Chomsky who, when asked about Martin Luther King said, I’m quoting him, he said, “I can’t stand to listen to [King] talk, because all he is doing is appealing to emotions.” And he didn’t say this, but this is what he is suggesting, that King is incapable of making reasonable or rational arguments. And so Noam Chomsky, if he went to a black church, you know he couldn’t last too long in there because of the way black people conduct church, he would be forced to run out screaming, be driven crazy so to speak. He’s so turned off to black people. Or you know I listen again to Chris Hedges as another example, and the more I hear him talk the better I understand that he doesn’t know very much about the people and certainly not about black people. 

Now why is this such a problem? Because of the historic role of the black working class in the struggle for democracy. In a real, profound sense, one could easily make the case that the Civil Rights or the Black Freedom Movement of the 50s and 60s was a working class movement for democracy. To deepen and broaden democracy for all working people. As an indication of that fact, hardly ever stated or acknowledged, but as an indicator of that as the Civil Rights Movement grew, labor organizing grew. But here is the real thing, especially in the South, that area of the country that corporations ran because it was the most anti-labor organizing part of the country—with the Civil Rights Movement, a spike, a qualitative change in the organizing of labor, and in particular of the organizing labor in the South where there were hardly any unions to begin with. My question is, why was that never acknowledged by all of you all who claim to be speaking for the working class?

But the democratic struggle of black people, led by black people, was a revolutionary struggle for democracy of and for the working people of this country. RFK Jr doesn’t get it, Cornel doesn’t get it. This is a very important part of the whole thing if we are to understand what is to be done today and how does the revolutionary struggle for democracy get reignited, get refocused, and how will that happen. Now, that part of the working class, which throughout the history of the United States has behaved more like a proletariat—by which I’m saying, a high level of consciousness, of class consciousness. Constantly throughout its history, showing its willingness to unite and build the unity of the working class and the people—always the black working people.

Take Chicago where [Free School member] Meghna is. You look at the history of labor in Chicago—take the meat packing industry, two of the great labor leaders of the modern post-World War II period come out of meat packing. Charlie Hayes and Addie Wyatt in Chicago. The movement of Harold Washington [for mayor]—it was not just to elect a black man, it was a movement of the working class, the most advanced forces grounded in the black proletariat. But black working people, black people in general have a narrative rooted in what we call the Black Prophetic Tradition. Is it an irony, a contradiction to class consciousness and class action? Or does it explain it in ways specific and unique to an oppressed people who were formerly enslaved? When [black people] say or suggest in their narrative that, “We are the people of the book,” it’s poetic to me, I don’t find it at all trivial, I mean I find it so beautiful. What they are saying is, “We are the people that the prophets spoke about. We are the people of prophecy—that our 400 year sojourn in this country, it is for a reason and there is an end goal.”

The Black Prophetic Tradition is not literal, it is allegorical. An oppressed people can and do speak allegorically and poetically. That explains the great music, the great art, the great poetry, because we are so attuned and so familiar with allegorical poetic ways of thinking. I want to come back, ‘cause I want to show you because that does not complete it. So you know you hear it all, “One day we’ll all be free,” that kind of singing, that kind of language, the emphasis upon the mother. Marvin Gaye, the first words of “What’s Going On”: “Mother, mother”—that is so rooted in us, a mother. It’s so important, it reflects the reality, because you know under slavery we could not marry and so you knew what your genealogy was not through the father but through the mother. Because rape was legal, a woman could have children by several men, including slave owners and such. And so how was one child to know that she or he was the brother or sibling of another? It was through the mother. And that is why feminist discourse doesn’t fit black people at all, it’s absurd when it comes to us. And so Marvin Gaye—“Mother, mother”—first words, why? Because of what Du Bois called the African mother ideal. 

But the idea that “We are the people the prophets were talking about thousands of years ago,” and we can relate our struggle and our condition to what they were talking about. And so when we talk about the children of Israel, the 12 tribes of Moses, and all of that—we see it in relationship to today. When in the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad said that God came to him, [it’s] another way of saying prophecy came to him. A prophecy of a future fulfillment, if we did certain things. For a Noam Chomsky, it’s just gibberish and foolishness and so on and so forth. To tens of millions of proletariat it is meaningful—it means something, it means there is a future if we unite and stand up. So the Black Prophetic Tradition is futuristic and activist. It is a prophecy of resistance, and that is where Martin Luther King and Elijah Muhammad and all of this comes together. It’s basically the same narrative. And if you know anything about the Nation of Islam—[its] philosophy, teachings, are mainly through the King James Version of the Bible, more than even the Quran. And the use of the imagery of a Christ, a christened one, an Angelic one is so very much a part of our imaginary. And so when you go to a church, and if you don’t know what you’re saying and hearing it can be very confusing. But if you know what is going on—one, that most of the people here feel that they are the people that the prophets of old were talking about; two, that all of this suffering which has been long and bitter has not been in vain; and three, there is a future where we will be free—bottom line. 

Now what we’re talking about is the categories, you could even say metaphors through which an oppressed people explain the world. They are not doing what post-World War II existential philosophers did, which is to announce a dead end, that there is no way out. Or Samuel Beckett, waiting for Godot, waiting for God. That is not the Black Prophetic Tradition—acting in the framework of prophecy to realize a fulfillment which is freedom. I can tell you black people have never abandoned the category freedom as central to their notion of the world. If we were an infantile people, we could not understand that concept. And thus for us, freedom means democracy, democracy means freedom, etc. This category, this central category motivates resistance. Now you know black people as a whole have a high respect for truth, and you hear it so much in our leaders. You know, King, “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.” You know, always citing the New Testament, “Know the truth and the truth will make you free.” This connecting of freedom and the truth, and these are repeated—you know it off the top of your head, even if you don’t know the Bible, it’s repeated so much and so often.

[Free School member] Serafina and I this past week met to do brainstorming about the Year of Baldwin, so it’s always nice when we get together, eat tempeh sandwiches and have ice cream and bananas and strawberries. But we were talking about the Year of Baldwin, so we were thinking about it, the pedagogy. This will be a year we have to have a really good, fine-tuned pedagogy that we can concretely carry out and organize throughout this region. But we had to—what do we say about Baldwin, at least as a philosopher? And what we realized is how well and how brilliantly he connected what seemingly are two unconnected ways of thinking: the prophetic thinking and the rational thinking. The oppressed proletariat and the categories of thought—appropriated though they may be by the ruling elite—of the European enlightenment. In other words, the allegorical and the rational, and the way that James Baldwin, and Meghna I’m certain, James Lawson when he comes to Chicago, I’m certain he’s going to give a demonstration of it in many ways.

Martin Luther King, allegorical and the rational. What is called “religion”—and I put quotes because what the Lawsons and the Kings and the Baldwins do is not religion—it is the allegorical, it is the poetic. It is in some ways what the Bengali poet Tagore recognized, that in art and poetry deeper knowledge is possible than even in the scientific rationale or analytical modes. That at least when it comes to be human, the allegorical and the poetic perhaps explains more than the rational. And so it is the black proletariat, and their complex ways of thinking about the world, that as Du Bois said it—Emily reminded me of this—that in the last chapter of The Souls of Black Folk: nothing of beauty has been produced in this country save sorrow songs, save the poetry, and it is true. And I’m not [just] saying that because I’m black and I’m proud, [though] I am black and proud. 

But it is so true, and hence as the American working class under these conditions spirals into greater poverty and precarity and desperation and drug addiction and mental illness and everything else—the question is, what for humanity is the way out? And thus for the working class, it is not a group of elites, this or the other, telling them what to do. It is them embracing ways of thought that are organic to them, and that will begin with the Black Prophetic Tradition. It is accurate: Martin Luther King is the father of new America. The black prophetic, poetic, allegorical tradition is the framing of the new human being, it really is, it is. It is the way that a new people’s democracy will be conceptualized. Not through the rational arguments of let us say a John Stuart Mill, a John Locke, or any of that. But through poetry, through prophecy, democracy as in the Black Prophetic Tradition as a fulfillment of the human being. And so as I think about it, and this is me I know other people say other things—I mean these days you got a whole army of recently minted “Marxist-Leninists” and “Trotskyists” and “radicals” of every sort—will, you know, say what they have to say. No problem with that. But to know the people and to know that central and dynamic part of the proletariat and of the working class, you have to understand this poetry as a way of understanding the way it sees itself, its future, and humanity.