This essay celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Henry Winston’s Strategy for a Black Agenda: A Critique of New Theories of Liberation in the United States and Africa, a classic in the scientific investigation of the Black and working class struggles in the United States. Along with its companion work Race, Class and Black Liberation, we have his core scientific works. Winston writes as a committed Marxist-Leninist and chairman of the Communist Party of the United States. For him, Marxism-Leninism was a science of sciences (in a similar way that Hegel saw philosophy as a science of sciences). Therefore, this tribute is more than a 50th anniversary celebration of Strategy; it is, in the end, an investigation of the intellect and scientific mind that produced it.
Strategy is a work of creative Marxism. It is grounded in the works of Marx, Lenin, and the scientific discoveries of W.E.B. Du Bois. I explore Winston’s scientific method both through Winston’s writings and my almost 15 years of working very closely with him. Strategy is his working out of complicated questions of philosophical methods, the relationships between the general theoretical and the concrete and specific, how theory and practice interconnect, and how all of this is paramount to understanding his methods of thought. For him, making science practical and applying it to the struggles of working people and oppressed groups gives it a human and revolutionary essence. Connecting science to the struggles of working people would help build unity among them. In the end, this is a first attempt to probe the deep structure of Winston’s mind—and to investigate the generative power of his thinking.
Winston was an extraordinary figure in the revolutionary and communist history of the United States. He was also an important figure in the world communist, anti-colonial, and peace movements. His commitment to materialism and dialectics was joined to his lifeworld.
Being brought up under Jim Crow laws and the sharecropping economy produced an imaginary that connected his life to the Black proletariat, producing what I’m calling a Black Proletariat Imaginary. This Black Proletariat Imaginary anchored and enriched the scientific apparatus that informed his engagement with the objective world. This imaginary drove his quest to know the world and increasingly drove him to Marxism-Leninism. Winston sought to know the world and how to change it through knowledge and purposeful, revolutionary action, engaging regions of thought which included epistemology, ideology, dialectical logic, political science, political economy, and sociology. He rejected the dogmatism inherent to purely abstract thinking and the general and nebulous phrases that accompany it. He was predisposed to a creativity and intuitiveness, similar to what might be found in musicians like Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra or John Coltrane, or writers like James Baldwin, or artists like Jacob Lawrence, Beauford Delaney, Barbara Bullock, and Serafina Harris.
Winston was born in 1911 in Hattiesburg, in the Black Belt of Mississippi. Mississippi was among the poorest and most repressive states in the nation. He grew up around former slaves; the scourge of racial terror visited his family, as an uncle was lynched. He knew suffocating poverty that was so intense he breathed, smelled, and literally tasted it; he felt it in his bones. The Great Depression of the 1930s only deepened an already calamitous situation, produced by the super-exploitation of the Black proletariat. His family moved to Kansas City, Kansas, seeking to escape these harsh conditions.
The collapse of the world capitalist system was catastrophic for Black folk and the entire working class. He joined the unemployed councils in Kansas City. Side-by-side with youth who were in a similar situation to his and who wished to change the world through struggle, he sought to figure out what produced the economic depression. He met members of the Young Communist League, and began discussing why the capitalist system worldwide had collapsed, what the future was for young people, and whether there was even a future under capitalism. He concluded a new socialist economic system was the answer to the capitalist collapse. He joined the Young Communist League and quickly rose to become its organizational secretary. He fought in WWII against fascism, for democracy, and to defend the Soviet Union. After WWII he was arrested and convicted by the U.S. government for his speech and thoughts and his daring to publicly proclaim them and debate them. He served six years of an eight-year sentence in Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary. Because of intentional prison neglect, Winston lost his sight in prison.
Released from prison in 1961, he proclaimed he had lost his sight but not his vision. This was his declaration that he would continue the fight against the rule of monopoly capitalism and for democracy. He had not changed. However, he resumed his leadership of the Communist Party at the moment when the Black Freedom Movement was reshaping the nation. A third American Revolution was underway. Strategy for a Black Agenda was a defense of this revolution and its main leaders, in particular Martin Luther King Jr.
Science’s Indispensability to Struggle
Understanding that Winston sought to discover the truth scientifically helps to locate his theorizing and how he lays the groundwork for a larger, yet incomplete, theory of the specifics of the U.S. class, democratic, and anti-racist struggles. His work elevates the theory of revolutionary change to more complex—and at the same time more concrete—levels. In Winston’s work, rather than empty theory which predisposes thought to dogmatism, he seeks to know concrete reality and to enrich theory through understanding the concrete and the actual. As such, his work seeks to achieve greater understanding of working people. His work focuses upon the emerging concrete, the new, and seeks out the revolutionary possibilities inherent to the new.
For Winston, science was indispensable to revolutionary theory and change. He referred regularly to Marxism-Leninism as revolutionary science. For him, the foundation of Marxism-Leninism was dialectical materialism and thus it was the core of Winston’s approach to knowing the world. He viewed it, moreover, as a method that generalized the achievements of natural and social science. He viewed science as more than an observational enterprise but as an active engagement with the world; active in two ways, first the connections to the actions and agency of working people and the racially and nationally oppressed, but also in the constant development of and generalization upon the most advanced discoveries of knowledge.
The engine of the patterns of social and historical movement is contradiction, which is inherent in all things. He recognized that the material world is the foundation of the unity and interconnection of all things. The mode of the existence of the world is dialectical, which is to say all things, including human socio-historical relationships and consciousness, exist in a state of movement and development. These interconnections and these developments, these laws are what Winston tirelessly sought to understand.
An example of this is how he went about explaining the dual, yet interconnected, systems of capitalist exploitation and racial oppression in the U.S. To illustrate their unity, he references Marx and Frederick Douglass during the anti-slavery struggle, and Lenin and Du Bois during the state monopoly and imperialist stage of capitalism. Each, Winston argued, pursued scientific approaches based upon materialism. He saw in their theorizing and scientific practices a way of thinking about the two systems. For him, understanding the interconnectedness of these thinkers is a way to explain the interconnectedness of the systems of the exploitation of labor and the racist system. Winston saw that the two systems together make up the capitalist mode of production. There was another aspect to this type of thinking: how to solve the problem of uniting the class struggle, broadly conceived, with the Black struggle. And how the unity of these struggles was critical to uniting all working people for their rights, ultimately giving rise to a new system.
In acknowledging the dual systems, Winston logically asserts the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation to the class struggle and the struggles for democracy and socialism. The concept of the centrality of Black liberation is important and an advancement upon revolutionary social science and theory. He sees a special role of Black folk in the development of capitalism in the U.S. and to the liberation of the working class from exploitation. Yet, more specifically he viewed this centrality to ultimately be the centrality of the Black proletariat. However, the centrality of the Black proletariat operated as an objective gravitational pull attracting the white and Black workers towards one another. That which interrupts this mutual pull of gravity is bourgeois ideology and the inadequacy of class and anti-racist consciousness among white working people. At another level, it is apparent that if the general theory of capitalist development exists as reflected in, for instance, Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, then it is Du Bois and Douglass who manifest the special or specific theory of capitalist development in the context of the United States. The special theory gives anchorage and application and concreteness to the general theory. In this regard we see in the thinking of Winston what Marx called the ascension to the concrete. In the end, Winston saw this centrality as a law of the development of the specifics of the class struggle in the U.S. Though not stated in his work, it seems its logic suggests that in the throes of the systemic mix of race and class, there was emerging not just an oppressed racial group and nationality, but a civilization in potentiality. This civilization of working people could become the basis of a new American civilization of freedom, based upon working people. Their music, art, philosophical and religious ideas, their moral aspirations, could become the foundations of a new American civilization rooted in the Black proletariat. A new American people and a new American civilization thus becomes possible.
The Trialectic of Science, the Black Proletariat, and Revolution
Winston agreed with Frederick Engels (the co-founder with Marx of scientific socialism and the modern communist movement) that freedom (agency and action) is the recognition of necessity. In other words, science is not confined to observation, but a creative and messy enterprise that seeks the truth. Freedom is tied to discovering scientific truths. Yet, science must, he reasoned, recognize the laws of motion of reality, especially of society. This acknowledgement liberates science from static dogmas and pure abstraction. Winston, moreover, sought to apply science to the day-to-day issues of tactics and strategy, always connecting it to the struggle for unity against the monopoly capitalist class and their ideology. Winston’s practice and method of science and theory is organized within a dialectical triad, composed of three aspects; first, the scientific/rational and empirical; second, the Black Proletariat Imaginary and intuition; and third, the revolutionary and moral imperative.
The Scientific/Rational Dimension
Arguing that the revolutionary process must be connected to a scientific outlook—which must grasp the logic and trajectory of history and society, including in its most concrete terms—Winston understood that the rational dimension of thought is a critical apparatus. This dimension operates through reason, setting boundaries such as space/time, the materiality of the world, and dialectical logic. He rejects the positivist construal of science and the pragmatist rejection of science as a method to achieve truth.
The Black Proletariat Imaginary
There is, however, a second, and as it turns out, as significant dimension, the imaginary/intuitive dimension. It sometimes appears to be, and perhaps is, the opposite to the scientific and rational. It is the non-rational and is the artistic and imaginative dimension of knowing and discovery. It produces leaps in theory, challenging previous theoretic formulations with new, often novel constructions. These leaps can come off as eruptions and disruptions of normal assumptions; they are produced by taking epistemic stances far removed from normal thinking. It is like going to the margins of thought and science to come up with new theoretical syntheses to explain new conditions. Albert Einstein understood the intuitive as essential to new insights and new knowledge. He insisted that “without sinning against reason we could never arrive at any conclusions.” In Einstein’s debate with theorists of quantum physics, he said what they lacked was an imaginary and intuitiveness. In Winston’s case, the Black Proletariat Imaginary is driven by the necessity to understand new concrete realities of Black folk and the Black proletariat, and hence the urge to rise to the level of concrete knowledge.
An example is Du Bois’s discovery of the Black proletariat as a social and historically constituted class category; different from, yet not separated from the working class as a whole. When he wrote Black Reconstruction in America, the idea of the Black proletariat as a proletariat, albeit enslaved, shattered most images of the working class and the believed logic of the class struggle. Applying Marxist theories to U.S. history, Du Bois discovers a new social/class category, the Black proletariat, that explained both the concrete complexities of the class struggle in the U.S. and developed radical theorizing concerning revolutionary change. Du Bois also introduces racial oppression as necessary to understanding the capitalist mode of production and the logic of class struggle. These discoveries challenged what was considered normal science concerning the class struggle.
Du Bois’s thinking carried tremendous weight for Winston. Based upon it he could see the central role of the Black proletariat to the class and democratic struggles and to the logics of revolutionary change. For Du Bois to arrive at this new understanding of the working class in the U.S. meant going beyond normal scientific and rational assumptions and assertions. It was an intuitive/imaginative leap; a new social category was thus discovered; scientific knowledge was advanced.
Winston’s Deployment of the Black Proletariat Imaginary
Winston, in essence, bends Marxist categories, deploying Du Bois’s scientific categories and empirical studies to achieve a new scientific synthesis, which I call a Du Bois/Lenin synthesis. In particular this is necessary to explain the special oppression of Black people, the special super-exploitation of Black labor, and how all this fits into the struggle against U.S. imperialism. The extraordinary thing about Winston’s method is that the imaginary is organic to who he was. He bends science to a special empathy for working people and their suffering. This imagination arises from the lifeworld of the Black proletariat and slavery. Winston knew this world and found in it a source of knowledge and creativity.
Winston’s Black Proletariat Imaginary had the effect of unsettling and challenging what turned out to be dogmatic Marxist assumptions about class and race, especially as they related to the Black struggle. This is the existential and lived world dimension of scientific practice. Winston’s being a Black man—a person who grew up in the shadow of slavery under conditions of inhuman poverty and degradation, seeing unimaginable suffering—frames the human essence of his approach to knowledge and science. In other words, the totality of knowledge and his approach to theory, philosophy, and science are filtered through his Black proletariat lifeworld. This life experience, part of the deep structure of his mind and his thinking, became the imaginative and intuitive filter for knowing. It must be emphasized that this gave to his thinking a creativity and an urge to understand concrete social reality in creative ways. In Winston, we see the fact that the Black Proletariat Imaginary is a necessary and indispensable part of revolutionary science. Ultimately, this more holistic approach to scientific knowledge forces it away from positivism and dogmatism. This dimension unsettles purely rational construals of science—it upsets what is believed to be normal; yet properly deployed, it produces the possibility of new knowledge.
The Revolutionary and Moral Imperatives
The third dimension is the revolutionary and moral imperative as part of scientific knowledge. That higher purpose of science for Winston is revolutionary change, which compels the scientist away from the status quo towards the moral imperative to act, and not for one’s own interests but in the interests of humanity. Moreover, the revolutionary is not merely bound to theory, science, and philosophy in order to know the world, but to a revolutionary and moral imperative to change the world, to transform it and bring into being a new world. The Black Proletariat Imaginary, along with the Revolutionary and Moral Imperatives, further pushes science and the Scientific/Rational towards the purpose for which science and knowledge must exist: humanity.
Time, History, and Black Proletarian Agency
Finally, a word about history. It cannot be said enough, Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America is a great and transgressive historical work, designed as a study of socio-historical time. Time is a measure of movement; historical time is a measure of the velocity of social and historical change, rooted in the struggles of human beings. The Black proletariat and its consciousness are a major part of determining social time; in essence, measuring movement and its speed. In this respect it can be viewed as a measure of the maturity of human agency and consciousness. Time is concrete, and therefore, embedded in human social relationships. Understanding time in this concrete way informs our understanding of the architecture of struggle and what are appropriate strategies and tactics.
In a nuanced critique of Huey P. Newton’s (a co-founder of the Black Panther Party) understanding of the relationship of time to revolutionary tactics, Winston introduces a scientific understanding of time and revolutionary agency. With Newton and Winston, we have opposing theories of time, tactics, and when the people will be ready for revolutionary action. Winston says that Newton’s idea that certain tactics must await the future, or the right time, is a way of saying we must passively wait for time. Which is to say that time is disconnected from actual material relationships of classes and oppressed groups. For Winston, time is part of the material world and thus a part of human relationships. Thus, the actions of human beings and of classes determine social time. Humans can both make time through their actions, and we can know time through scientific observation. Human social relations have Time embedded in them, yet human agency determines Time, especially its velocity. At the end, Winston concludes that Newton’s notion of Time and the future time of revolutionary action is rooted in a fantasy, a fiction, about when and how to act, leading to the justification of political passivity and forms of Black capitalism in the name of waiting for a revolutionary time for revolutionary activism. For Winston, this is a distorted understanding of current time and the future.
Neo-colonialism and the Scientific Understanding of Imperialism
Africa, for Winston, is central to explaining the modern world, both the rise of capitalism as a system and the imperialist, or general crisis stage, of capitalism. Hence in the imperialist stage and after the independence of most African nations in the 1960s, neo-colonialism plays a strategic function in the consolidation of capitalism as a world system. He recognized the fundamental role of Africa’s national liberation struggles to the class and anti-racist struggles in the U.S. He believed that the U.S. working class, and the Black proletariat in particular, could move forward to the extent that they politically understood Africa’s positioning in the world. This understanding elevates class consciousness among U.S. workers to anti-imperialist and anti-racist consciousness. A high level of political and ideological clarity.
However, imperialism is reproduced to the extent that the labor and mineral wealth of Africa remains in the grip of the West. In other words, there is hardly an anti-imperialist struggle that is not equally a struggle against neo-colonialism in Africa. Winston concludes that Maoism (the political and theoretical ideas of Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Party of China) and neo-Pan-Africanism (a capture of the Pan-African Movement for aims completely different from Du Bois’s) ideologically and politically operate to justify and uphold neo-colonialism. Maoism and neo-Pan-Africanism—by claiming that the Soviet Union, a vital ally to African nations and liberation movements, was an imperialist nation and thus anti-African—provided ideological aid and comfort to actual imperialist nations and to their system of neo-colonialism, which was fortified by financial, economic, political, and military institutions of the West. He notes that Maoism and neo-Pan-Africanism deploy what he calls a “skin strategy,” a “strategy” which says allies and enemies are defined by their skin color. Skin strategy thinking and analysis, rather than undermining neo-colonialism, fragment and disunite the anti-imperialist movements and fortify and reinscribe the color line on a world scale. Winston insists that Maoism and neo-Pan-Africanism are enemies of the oppressed.
Du Bois-Lenin Synthesis, A New Region of Science
An extraordinary part of Winston’s theorizing was his suggestion that Lenin and Du Bois thought along parallel lines. Winston, in a sense, opens up a new region of thought; a possible Du Bois/Lenin synthesis, which links the categories and assumptions of Du Bois’s work with Lenin’s. This synthesis creates a new region of scientific thought. It joins in unique ways the more general scientific achievements of Lenin’s and Marx’s theorizing with the special theories and categories discovered by Du Bois, especially concerning the class struggle and the class/race dialectic in the U.S. However, Du Bois foresaw a new Afro-Asiatic world configuration, replacing the imperialist alliance based on Western domination. Du Bois saw a large revolutionary role in the movements of Asian and African civilizations to communism. This new region of thought, though not fully developed in Winston’s work, is part of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy & Black Liberation’s theoretical work. Du Bois thought anew about communism and located its immediate possibilities in Asia. The rise of Asia and Africa would occur in the context of the crisis of the West, especially the United States, and the consequent crisis of neo-colonialism.
The prerequisites for communism were, Du Bois theorized, more readily grounded in the values of ancient Asian civilizations, especially ones that had had socialist revolutions and established the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat. Du Bois thought creatively about questions such as forms of state power, including the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state of the entire people, and what is today called the civilization state. He thought in new, unprecedented ways about a new type of communism based on a new way of thinking (“a different kind of communism,” he called it), and forms of state power and people’s democracy rooted in Asian civilizational values. He creatively synthesized several modalities of social scientific, philosophical and historical investigation, comparing civilizations and their possibilities to achieve communism.
These interrogations have meaning in the 21st century; a century where Asia will overtake the West, and Africa not being far behind, when the U.S. is confronted with domestic political instability and a rising crisis of government and bourgeois class rule. Du Bois’s conclusions concerning communism reflected his characteristic optimism, in spite of the Cold War and domestic police state repression, and even as he was being indicted as an agent of a foreign nation. Winston looked increasingly to the East and Africa, the so-called Global South, to carry the weight of humanity in toppling Western and U.S. imperialism.
Henry Winston for a New Epoch
This moment in history is very different from the moment in which Henry Winston produced Strategy for A Black Agenda and other works. The crisis of the West and significantly the crisis for the U.S. ruling elite are existential. The ruling elite are unable to rule in the ways they are most accustomed to, and the people are not willing to be ruled in old ways. That having been said, Winston’s work and his method of thought carries significance for this time. Especially important is his commitment to science as indispensable to revolutionary change. Winston’s contribution to scientific thinking and method—by joining three levels of thinking, the Rational/Scientific, the Black Proletariat Imaginary, and the Revolutionary and Moral Imperative—has enduring value. His rethinking of science, and how it is done; his rejection of positivism and other counter-revolutionary movements within science are all important as we go forward. Winston shows that strategy and tactics of struggle demand scientific analyses of the objective world, and that the objective of science joined to strategy and tactics is a way to answer questions such as what is to be done. Winston’s commitment was to unite working people and all of the peace, democratic, and socialist forces on a world scale.
Yet humanity is on the cusp of a new epoch of human liberation from imperialism, racism, and exploitation. Called popularly the rise of the Global South, what in actuality is occurring is the emergence of an Afro-Asian reconfiguration of the planet; a movement from the Age of Europe to the Age of Humanity. This new epoch will require the development of new sciences and new methods of scientific investigation. As such the purpose of science will be redefined, and counter-revolutionary ideas within science and about science will have to be overturned. As our people struggle to make and secure their future, Winston is deeply important. His message for children and youth is, There is a sky. There is a future worth fighting for; tomorrow is today, what must be will be decided now. We must recognize the fierce urgency of now, which means we must struggle hard to know the world and learn methods of scientific research and understanding. At last, because he was a scientist and a revolutionary, we celebrate him and Strategy for a Black Agenda on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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