We are publishing the transcript of remarks given by Anthony Monteiro on November 11, 2023 at the Saturday Free School’s Symposium “Science & Revolution: Celebrating 50 Years of Henry Winston’s Strategy for a Black Agenda” in Philadelphia. These remarks followed a documentary screening on Henry Winston’s life:
Thank you very much. I too would like to thank Emile, Purba, Santanu, and Sambarta and others for putting this documentary together, drawing upon a four-hour interview where unfortunately the interviewer sought to obscure the beauty which they brought forward through their editing and their humanism. What you saw was an extraordinarily beautiful human being. And what you saw was exactly who he was.
Let me just say a little bit about the meter and texture of the way he spoke. First of all as he said he was from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was a man of the Black South. This is very important because you have to understand what he heard as a child growing up. The way his mother and father talked, the way his uncles talked; that is the language of the Black proletariat. That way of talking, in and of itself is discriminated against. You’ll often get Black folk who will attempt and do everything they can not to sound “too Black.” Because to sound too Black means that in school you’ll be marginalized as not intelligent. You stand up in a court and you talk too much like a Black person and a Black Southerner—you’re discriminated against.
So the Black voice is discriminated against even up to today. So Winston spoke as a Black man. And he never tried to be anything other than what he was. But if you listen to his voice—and that is the way he spoke—there is a poetic meter there. At some time it would be useful for us just to study the poetics of his voice. But then it is the poetics—it’s very emotional—of the Sorrow Songs. And you’ll notice that he never forgets the enslaved. He never forgets the special and cruel oppression of Black folk. And it’s not just in this interview. Because when he talks about the [Communist] Party, which is a mass organization of people coming from many backgrounds; many immigrants, many native to America. And they had been brought up not like Winston had been brought up. Their way of thinking was pretty much grounded in the influences of white supremacy in the dominant ideology of the nation.
But what Winston said—and this was true in his life, I saw it myself—that people had to be ideologically remade. And that would occur through a combination of study—he believed in study and education of the people—and action. He always emphasized these two things. The other thing that is so impressive, and this was the way he was, I know when we would have meetings—and that was all the time—he would plan and he would operate at the highest level of collectivity. He considered this to be the essence of democracy, what he would call inner-party democracy. And those standards he felt should apply to unions, to churches, to community organizations; that democracy was the involvement of everyone, irrespective of whether they were highly educated or uneducated. They should be involved.
One of the things that stood out about him was this idea to encourage people who had very little education to speak up, to learn to speak, not be afraid to speak, not be ashamed of yourself if you are Black and don’t speak like white people talk. And most Black people don’t, by the way. But to encourage them to speak, because he felt that there could not be democracy without the people, without the working people, without the Black proletariat.
He believed in the party as an instrument of the political struggle of the people. As he said, he did not conspire to do anything. A conspiracy is something underground. He believed in democracy, so he believed in the airing of all views, of the political struggle. One of the things that he did not like about what we call bourgeois or capitalist democracy is that thought is for sale; speech is for sale. That if you have money or if you’re connected to people with money or power, you have speech. But if you don’t have it you’re silenced. So he believed in the fullest development of democracy as a condition for the people achieving power. The people must know, the people must debate, the people must be given the opportunity to think and to know. And that is a condition of democracy. And that’s why we would always make a difference between bourgeois democracy and democracy of the people. Bourgeois democracy is the democracy of a few; rights for the rich, rights for those who are educated. But for the great mass of people: “Do what you’re told. We set up the voting time, you come and vote.” You don’t have anything to say about who the candidates are. The candidates can tell you anything and there is no accountability. That is not democracy.
So he was not a conspirator, at all. He was the very opposite of it. And of course, you know, in a Communist Party, there are many people who will take on the stereotype that they’ve been given. So a lot of people I know in my generation would join the Communist Party and the vision that they had of what they were joining, in many instances, was that which had been given to them by the enemies of the Communist Party. So the hard work of learning what it is and what it means to be a Communist. Many people thought they could leap over that. Many people felt that all they had to do was read a work by Marx or Lenin and be smarter than everybody else in the room, and that made them “the best Communist.” The very opposite was the case.
Now, I guess a couple other things I’d like to say about Winston. This question of the Black question. You have many people, then and now, who would say, “Well, Henry Winston wrote a book Strategy for a Black Agenda.” And they said, “Well, why didn’t he write a book Strategy for a Class Agenda?” But you see, if you unravel it, what does that reveal—then, and today?
Because there are many Communists who never read the book, were not interested in the book. And while they didn’t say it openly, [they] felt that Henry Winston was not talking about the class struggle. Had they read the book, they would have understood his expansive nature, or understanding, of the class struggle. And this is a big problem, because most people including most leftists, most liberals even, would say that the class struggle is pretty much identical to the trade union struggle. That the class struggle is about the majority of the working class, who are white. You can hear that today; I’m not going to give the examples of it, maybe you can ask me a question.
What Winston understood; and this is the concept of the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation. I want to underline that: the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation. Which in essence meant the centrality of the Black proletariat. If you don’t get that right, there is no class struggle. There will be strikes, and there will be victories, temporary though they be. But never the full political development of the class struggle and the political realignment of the nation away from monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and racism, towards a new democracy.
Now, Winston assumes the chairmanship of the Communist Party in 1966. As you saw, he was blinded in prison. I will tell you up front, he never talked about himself. Even if you look at the documentary, he was asked the question, and that’s why he addressed it. There was a purposeful, willful, intentional neglect of his health. He went blind in one eye, and they allowed the tumor to persist, and he went blind in the other eye. He was eventually released after six years of an eight-year prison in Terre Haute in Indiana Federal Penitentiary. And I didn’t remember that he did his time in prison alongside the great Communist Ben Davis, the Black Communist. They did their time together.
But, he went blind. But I never heard him talk about himself and his own situation in terms of his sight. And he had this thing that he said, “I’ve lost my sight but not my vision.” And that was real. He continued to think, continued to struggle. And when I say struggle, I’m not just talking about the external forces, but the struggle within the party itself. This is hugely important. Because if there can’t be an ideologically advanced contingent of the people, it makes it very difficult for the people to fight. That doesn’t mean that the “Communist Party” dictates or becomes this performative agency where “I’m going to show the rest of the Left that I’m the most advanced in the Left.” Have you ever experienced that? That’s the type of stereotypical “Communism” usually associated with Trotskyism and other ultra-leftists.
Because what Winston believed, that in order for the great political realignment to occur, there had to be the united front of the people; the coalition of the people. And he felt, and I think it is accurate, that the two pillars were the Black liberation struggle; the struggle of a people against national, racial and class oppression. This people—uniquely situated in the history of this country, with a unique and special understanding of this country—was a vital necessity for progress. But on the other side you needed the working class as a whole. It is that alliance, that unity, that he saw as the bedrock of the defeat of chattel slavery and would be the foundation of the defeat of monopoly capitalism. And he writes this essay called “From the Anti-Slavery to the Anti-Monopoly Coalition” where he says that in effect, that what Marx saw could only be practical if combined with what Frederick Douglass saw.
Of course for many—you’ve gone too far now; how can you take a former slave, brilliant though he was, and put him on the same level of a PhD in philosophy who had written a great text on political economy, Das Kapital? How could you say that Frederick Douglass was the equal of Karl Marx? Or that W.E.B. Du Bois was the equal of Lenin?
And Winston said both. Because he understood that science did not end with theory; it required a practice guide by concrete conditions of the anti-slavery struggle, which was an epic struggle. An epic struggle without which democracy in Europe—and the anti-colonial struggle which was to follow—could not occur. This is misunderstood. This was not just a question of freeing slaves in the United States. This was a question of world historic significance. Thus Frederick Douglass is a figure of world historic significance. One could even go further; the Russian Revolution and the freeing of the Russian peasantry from czarist oppression owes a great debt to Black folk and the anti-slavery struggle. And that is the case also for Du Bois and the anti-imperialist struggle of the 20th century.
You know, it is easy to dismiss a Henry Winston. And if you look at the four hours of that [original] documentary, what the interviewer is doing is in effect trying to dismiss him and trivialize him. Well that’s the color line. Winston knew the color line in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He knew it in Kansas City, Kansas. He knew it in New York. He knew it in the Communist Party—different form.
The color line associated with who knows and who doesn’t know. Who has a complex, sophisticated understanding—and who is just talking, as they often say about Black folk, from their “gut experience.” We cannot know things on a higher theoretical, philosophical level. But now 50 years later—and we are very fortunate to have in the city of Philadelphia a Saturday Free School, which we fight very hard to maintain and develop. Made up mainly of young people. It wasn’t always this way. The median age, if you go back a few years, was about 40 or 43. And many of them got old and went into retirement—maybe they were already in retirement. But, a new generation, and this is kind of what you see here, came to the fore and decided that there was a fierce urgency of right now. That it was not just about reading books and talking; that ideas had to become a political, material factor in the lives of the people of Philadelphia. That what we know, what we study, what we believe is of value far beyond ourselves. And we believe that.
But, I dare say there’s not an organization in the city of Philadelphia, probably within the United States, which would have so honored this great man. Not going to find it. And I have to say, even for what goes for the Communist Party. And I will say to them, you trivialize and make Henry Winston invisible—at your own peril. Winston said at the end—and Santanu asked that I address this—and you can ask me some questions. Henry Winston said the Communist Party would always exist; it would exist as long as the working class exists.
This is a complex thought. And it should not be taken merely literally. What is Henry Winston saying? He is saying that the ideas that will lead to the liberation of working people—in the first instance, the Black proletariat who were enslaved—as long as that exploitation and oppression exists, there will be a resistance to it. And in the era of the great crisis of the system of capitalism, in the stronghold of world capitalism, the United States—which is in the greatest crisis of its history—the ideas of the liberation of the people and of the working class will take hold among younger generations.
What Winston was saying is made manifest by what we are doing today. The fact that the ruling class could not destroy him testifies to the truth of what he was saying. This interview was done in the early 1980s; as you know, he died in 1986. And it’s almost as though he were talking to us right now.
You see his kindness. You see his generosity. He was a man not just of commitment at the level of the intellect, but the commitment of the heart. A lot of people say, “You’re just born with that empathy.” Perhaps, in a certain way you might be just born with it. But you have to nurture it. You have to develop it. And the development of the heart is as important as the development of the head. And those people who want to be “super intellectuals”—I would suggest to them that you confine yourself to the academy. Because the people need people who not only know, but feel. And that’s what he was.
He was a good man. A great man that never stopped being good. A great man that never stopped being good. He didn’t have what you could call a Napoleonic complex; that is, that “I’m great and I can do whatever I want to do. That there are no boundaries, moral or otherwise.” Henry Winston always adhered to moral boundaries. That to be a revolutionary meant to be moral. To care about people. To care about the small things in people’s lives, such as your health. And even though he was suffering with this growth that blinded him, that would ultimately kill him, he never talked about it. I didn’t know what had happened—I was a little shy to ask, you know, ‘cause I’m young and they’re older.
But, he was always concerned about everybody else’s self. When Angela Davis was imprisoned—and he, let’s be real, was the political mastermind of the movement to Free Angela Davis both in this country and internationally. It was Henry Winston.
Just a small thing—I remember hearing about a debate within the top political body of the Communist Party when Angela was arrested. And one comrade said, “We must defend Angela Davis as a Communist.” Sounds really revolutionary, doesn’t it? That would have gotten her killed. Winston said, emphatically, “We will not.” That’s kind of the way he talks; his declarative voice at this point, “We will not. We will defend as a Black woman Communist.” That small nuance made all the difference in the world. Because whether the person who made the statement about, “We’re going to defend her as a Communist and this is so-called ‘revolutionary,’” and a lot of people say, “Well this is going back to the 1930s and George Dimitrov” who stood up to the Nazi trial and all of that—but Winston knew this was not the 1930s, nor was it Europe.
This was the 1970s United States, where Black people had been enslaved. Where there was no equal justice for Black people. And to free this woman would require more than good lawyers—a great political strategy that could unite the world behind her. But this nuance comes out of what I wrote about in this article in Avant-Garde, a Black Proletarian Imaginary. If you don’t know the way racism operates in the lives of Black people, you cannot make the right decisions about Black people.
And this is why Winston would always say, “Can you accept Black leadership?” He would say it in the party, “Can you accept Black leadership?” And at this late date, you take leaders like Du Bois or you take Martin Luther King. You take Paul Robeson. Paul Robeson becomes a singer, not a political leader or a scientist; Du Bois was only interested in race, meaning only interested in the Black population. Henry Winston could never rise to the level of white leaders of the Communist Party because he was only concerned with a Strategy for a Black Agenda—without reading the book.
So the other thing, and I’ll end here, believe me. Many people are more interested in popularity than they are in principle. You know, popularity is a fleeting thing; you can be popular one period and be forgotten in another. Most of our politicians and intellectuals want to be pop stars. Many of the Black ones model themselves upon hip-hop artists.
Winston felt that there’s a difference between an electoral majority and a revolutionary coalition. The politician who runs for office wants to get a majority of the votes—temporary thing. A revolutionary wants to win the long game. To lay the foundation in politics, and ideas and culture that gives the people the tools that they need to liberate themselves. And hence, a revolutionary coalition which is not necessarily a majority, but a decisive, strategic part of the people. And that was his politics.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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