We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s January 1, 2024 session. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube.
I just want to build upon something we began a couple weeks ago when we talked about the rise of Protestantism and that period in the 1500s, 1517 when Martin Luther arises as the pivotal figure in a struggle against the church and the medieval state. This is an attempt to frame the intellectual history of the modern world for the purposes of understanding the revolutionary struggle that we are confronting, and for a way to locate James Baldwin as a revolutionary.
I trace the modern world from Martin Luther’s 95 demands upon the Catholic Church that he nailed upon the doors of the cathedral in the city where he lived, claiming that the individual establishes his or her own relationship to God. That the church or the hierarchy that ruled people, that ruled society, did not and could not mediate, I’ll put it that way, people’s relationship to God.
More than anything else it was a declaration of the sovereignty of the individual. And thus the individual was an agent of his or her own being, unmediated by the state. I want to underline the word, unmediated by the state.
Some would say however, that the period 1350 to 1550 was what could be called pre-modernity, usually associated with the Italian and Dutch Renaissance, the achievements of painting, most notably the depiction of the individual as she or he actually was. This was a great period. And of course we often associate it with what we call the Dutch Masters, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Michelangelo. These great artists who by the way painted on the ceilings of churches, but were proclaiming a different engagement with the church. So this is often called pre-modernity. It is in this period that we have a new literature, such writers as Shakespeare and Machiavelli and such.
People will say, “Well, why are you focusing upon Europe as the center of the modern world?” And that is a legitimate question. It is a question that Baldwin confronted, that King and others, Du Bois confronted—we’ll talk about that in a moment. But then the question, when unanswered or improperly answered, leads to a counter-revolutionary passivity, fitting of a period—the last, let us say, 40 years of the attempt to undo the Third American Revolution and its meanings going forward. Which also has witnessed an out-and-out attack upon James Baldwin, which we’ll talk about when we read the other draft of the vision statement for this year.
This period in human history which is thus centered in Europe is what we would call an Axial Age. Axial from the word axis, where the axis of human civilization shifts from the Afro-Asiatic world to Europe. It is an Axial Age. Now, there were two previous Axial Ages. The one around 5000 BCE where we see the rise for the first time of the state, the pharaonic state of Egypt. The dynastic states of India and China, most significantly China, paralleling in terms of the time period the Babylonian state. But certainly, archaeologists have discovered in the same period, that is around 5000 BC, the emergence of the state throughout the world; one might even suggest the Inca and Aztec states, the Congo state in central Africa, the Nubian state. But this period around 5000 BCE is perhaps the first great Axial Age.
Some archaeologists and anthropologists would say this is a transition in human development from barbarism to civilization. I want to explain those words because I think each has been totally distorted. “Barbarism” is the pre-state form of human development. In other words, where human beings for the most part lived in smaller communities, one would even say communes, or communistic forms of existence. Nomadism was very developed, and early agriculture. That is what was known as “barbarism.” Civilization, the word itself is connected to “civil” which means law-based society. And the great civilizations of this early axial period were, again, Egypt—some would call it Kemet, ancient Egypt. The reason 5000 BC is so important is that this is when Upper Egypt—which is the south of Egypt; and Lower Egypt—which is the north of Egypt, are united into one state.
Similar processes, I’m not, you know, informed enough to talk about the process and the transition in China, and of course these state forms, these early state forms lasted millennia. The Chinese dynastic state lasted at least 3,000 years. The ancient Egyptian state lasted longer than everything in history that has come after it. So the early state forms were stabilizing, and endured, not without revolutions, not without struggle. Probably the greatest revolution of ideas in ancient Egypt was that initiated by Akhenaten, who was the first to proclaim monotheism, one God, as opposed to three and then many others that were derivative from the three gods. And it was from Akhenaten that you get Moses and the Abrahamic religions. You know, Moses was raised in the household of the Pharaohs, and he associated with the ideas of Akhenaten. And when Akhenaten is overthrown, the followers of monotheism were cast out. That’s where you get the myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, they were cast into the desert. But they were not Jews as such, they were monotheists, followers of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten.
Nonetheless my point is that there were rebellions, there were ideological struggles within these states. However the long duration of the ancient Egyptian state speaks to its sophistication. I don’t think we know enough about the ideological history of the Egyptian state and so on; the same thing with China. When you think about the Chinese state or the dynastic state, from about somewhere around 3300 BCE up to 1911, you know that’s a long duration. Others perhaps didn’t last as long, but they became the model of the state.
The next Axial Age was around 600 BCE, and that is where we saw the rise of Buddhism, the rise of Zoroastrianism, the rise of the Greek philosophers and such. It was not confined to a particular geography, but it was part of a world movement of ideas, etc. And then the next Axial Age occurs with the rise of modernity and Europe. And this, as I was saying, I identify this with the 1510s and Martin Luther; others would say that early modernity was the Italian and Dutch Renaissance, the revolution in art in particular and in literature. And by art I’m talking primarily about painting.
So it was an Axial Age, and anyone who wishes to go back to a previous axial moment—a previous axis of human civilization in the name of let us say Black liberation—are really farcical; it’s a farce.
History moves forward, and no one can reverse history, and thus in the name of rejecting Eurocentrism go back to an Axial Age where Africa and Asia, Egypt and Babylon, and then India and China were the axes of human civilization. That is an impossibility. Or the claim that to “locate and define the Black person in modern America,” we have to go back to our “classical civilization” which is ancient Egypt, in the same way that Europe has its “classical age” in Greco Roman civilization. It is ahistorical, it’s without any real scientific foundations, believe me. I say that only to say that we, all of us and all of humanity, are part of the Axial Age that we call modernity.
The formation of this Axial Age, which we know more about than previous ones, occasioned wars, revolutions and great ideological struggles. This Axial Age is perhaps more dynamic than any that preceded it. Now having said that, I do not minimize the Agricultural Revolution. In fact the history of Africa, in terms of its languages, in terms of its technology, is grounded in the agricultural revolution that took humanity from the most simple forms, and even from nomadism, to settled agriculture, which meant food production became more robust. And with more food production it was possible to feed more people. Society became healthier, more stable, etc.
However, even if one looks at the history and languages on the African continent—just parenthetically, scholars and researchers who study linguistic groups argue that the foundation of every language in the world is seven African languages associated with speakers and tribal groups in Southern and Central Africa. That every language, in vocabulary but more in grammar and syntax, can be traced back to seven African languages. If you’re interested there’s a book by a man named John Reader entitled Africa: A Biography of the Continent and the reason I mentioned it is because he offers a very, very good bibliography of—at that time this was in the late 1990s—of the best research up to that time.
The other is Bernal’s three volumes, Black Athena, especially the third volume which I find profoundly important to understanding the evolution of linguistic groups in Africa. And you know, languages are not just “the language we speak,” but are divided into major language groups. Major language groups are the boundaries of civilizations. That is why I do not adhere to the Cheikh Anta Diop thesis of two cradles of civilization, or one African civilization. Africa consists of four distinct civilizations, which are bounded by the four major language groupings in Africa. Most who adhere to an Afrocentrist thing associate Africa with phenotype. You know, it’s a very interesting imagination where the prototypical African in their mind is a West African; but Africa is phenotypically so diverse, perhaps the most diverse part of humanity, you know, phenotypically.
So if you go to East Africa, if you go to Northeast Africa, Afrocentrists will claim that the “Arabs” appropriated ancient Egypt. Well first of all Arabs are a language group, falling within that larger group of languages known as Afro-Asiatic languages. So Arabic is not a colonial language in Africa, it is organic to the linguistic history of Northeast Africa. You know part of the Afrocentric imagination accepts the British division of Saudi Arabia and the Arabian peninsula from Africa because of the Suez Canal. So they basically accept a colonial framing of the question of civilization. Saudi Arabia and the nations along the Red Sea are as “Black” as they get, in a lot of ways. But it is linguistically connected to Northeast Africa.
The other major group people talk about—the Sudan. The Sudan is divided between north and south. And divided between linguistic groups. Now the Sudan as we know it is a colonial boundary. So you can’t just say, “Oh, the Sudan is Arabs and the North,” or “Muslims in the north and Animists and Christians in the south of the Sudan.” No, you’re talking about two distinct language groupings and two civilizations. The Nilotic people, who speak Nilotic languages—and phenotypically they’re very diverse by the way, but we’ll come back to that.
But the point I want to make is in the evolution of language, civilization, and technology in Africa. What you had was the spread of a linguistic group associated with the Bantu languages. So if you go to West Africa, all of the languages there are part of Bantu languages. Some racist European archaeologists and anthropologists have associated Bantu with “inferior.” That’s, if you take Rwanda, remember the Rwanda Civil War, genocide of 1994, 95. Well the Germans who had colonized that country and others in that area saw one group of people who were tall, aquiline nose, and who looked to them more phenotypically European and spoke a Nilotic language; they associated them with superiority over the shorter, less aquiline noses, broader lips of Bantu speakers. So you get in Rwanda, the Hutu and the Tootsie. Both groups are very interesting, but they are two different language groups emerging from two distinct civilizations.
And of course civilizations are bounded; they speak the same language, they probably eat the same food, and they intermarry. So people take on phenotypic characteristics more similar to each other. That’s why, you know you get a lot of basketball players from Africa, especially from the Sudan; cats 7-foot-6. And they’re all tall like that. And if you go into Rwanda among the Tutsis. I mean, first of all they don’t play drums the same way as they do in Nigeria. Nigeria is the capital of drumming, you know. But their music is different, their dance is different—you see, there’s a leaping straight up. That is Tutsi, that is Nilo civilization, it’s a very interesting thing.
I could go into the history, what they call the history and geography, of human genes. One thing genetically that establishes the oneness of human civilization, is to be human is to carry African genes. There’s no question about that. Every human population has genes that go back to Africa. Because that is where the transition from pre-human, to what is called anatomically modern human beings, begins about 200,000 years ago. The genetic variation is so fascinating. Science rebuts fiction and farce. Mitochondrial DNA, a genetic mutation occurs maybe a million years ago, crystallizing about 200,000 years ago in human and what we call populations which are no longer apes; they’re definitely not Neanderthals. You know, people talk about “the Neanderthal question.” Now there’s no evidence that Neanderthals lived in Africa, but they did live in Europe. Now they are somewhat modern human and somewhat not, but they died out. They interconnected with anatomically modern human populations, there was interbreeding, etc, but what happened to the Neanderthals, we don’t know. Now, I’m not going to go to the Nation of Islam and the evil scientist theory, but they ceased to exist maybe about 6,000 years ago.
The major genetic variation upon the African gene, which evolved for over 100,000 years, is the Asian gene. And that is, if you take big populations, we can see a genetic variation upon the previous African gene. The two major genetic populations in the world are African and Asian. And here is where science rebuts modern white supremacy. There is no European gene. European populations are a mixture of African and Asian genes.
Overall, if you take European populations genetically, they are 35% African, 65% Asian. But that’s just in the overall sense. There are European populations for instance, the earliest and most ancient Irish who are genetically—not phenotypically, because they’re white—but genetically they are closer to West Africans than either population is to South Africa. Which means that these early European populations were Africans who got caught up in the Ice Age, you know what I’m saying. I don’t want to get into all of that [laughs], we can take that in any direction, but nonetheless there are multiple ways of arguing for a single humanity. You can do it linguistically, you can do it genetically. And other ways, but from the earliest moments of humanity, our languages have a single source and our genes have a single source. And they are African. Africa as we call it today, I’m certain if you go back before, the Egyptians did not call themselves African. I don’t think anybody called themselves Africans, they were identified with their language, their religion, etc.
Having said all of that, the period of modernity has been at once the most dynamic and one of the most creative moments in human civilizational history. But at the same time one of the most destructive. Revolution, constantly. War.
Again, ideological struggle to explain to themselves what was actually happening, you see what I’m saying. That is an ideological framing of the objective material developments.
When Martin Luther proclaims the centrality of man as man, he is making a claim against the theist notion that man is but a, how would you say, a creation of God, and was in that sense static. That man had little, if no agency. That’s the point I’m trying to make. Man was overdetermined; I’m using man generically. Please, I mean, I don’t want anybody to misunderstand me; when I say man, man qua man, man qua human being, man qua anatomically modern, genetically modern, that’s all I’m saying.
If man is not over-determined by God, if man is not perpetually a servant of something beyond man, then what is man? Thus out of Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church, was an ideological challenge—that man was a moral agent unmediated by the church or the state. Now, you know we hear this so often: separation of church and state, that man is not a subject of the state, but that the state is the subject of man. That man is sovereign, not the state. And hence you get, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century. The French writer who says that it is the will of all, you could use the word the general will, that the state should serve. And not the opposite. That the state had an obligation to serve the general will, to serve the people rather than the other way around.
Two great political and ideological moments in this new axis of civilization are important to understand. One, as we mentioned, the Protestant Reformation. No small matter. Now a lot of people will seize upon all of the contradictions, inconsistencies, and failures to realize themselves, that is, the Protestant Reformation, to reject it, cancel it. “If it’s not perfect, it’s not worthwhile, because we’re perfect, I guess, and anything that is not up to ‘our level’ is not worth considering.”
The Protestant Reformation ultimately realizes itself in the great revolutions of the 18th and early 19th century: the American, French and Haitian Revolutions. However, it was no walk in the park to get from Martin Luther to the Haitian Revolution.
There had to be, and what was, great ideological struggles. And this is what I wish to emphasize: that every revolution in modern history is not only preceded by, but are in fact revolutions in the ideological level of humanity.
Every revolution is, in the end, a revolution of ideas, a change in the ideological relations between human beings. And that is why anti-revolutionaries in our day, and in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries; everyone has always understood that who commands the ideological upper hand, controls and directs society.
You cannot be a revolutionary without understanding the inevitability of the conflict of ideas. You can’t say, “Well, I’m not interested in physics, that’s a European, male white thing,” you know. Well even if it is just that, does that make it less significant in the struggle for a revolutionary transformation of society? If it is everything bad, then does that make it insignificant? If it is the ideology of a group that controls the state and thus society? And must those ideas—and I would put it this way: positive, negative features of it—must they not be constantly assessed and fought against?
The Chinese Revolution, Mao and them did not say, “Oh, we want to go back to the most ancient Chinese dynasty.” They said, “No. We wish to embrace modernity—that the dynastic organization of Chinese society had prevented our becoming modern.” So they embraced the American Revolution, the French Revolution, you know. Zhou Enlai famously said, when asked, “What is your assessment of the French Revolution,” he said, “Well, it’s too early to say; we’ll see how this thing in China works out.” It’s so interesting.
Ho Chi Minh, in their constitution, cites the American Constitution. Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture in Haiti cite the French Revolution and the Rights of Man. More than that, the most left-wing of the French Revolution, the Jacobins.
No revolutionary has tried to go back to a pre-modern period in order to liberate society. They start with modernity. Now, the Protestant Reformation, which as it matures and as those struggles—and I want to talk a little bit about those struggles and wars—as those struggles went forward, crystallized this idea that man is sovereign, the state is not sovereign. And all of these struggles, Protestant Reformation into the Enlightenment, were about the rights of man; the individual.
Which then broke the nexus of oppression. Because if the ideology that the church and the state ruled over men because the state was connected to God and the Holy Roman Emperor served at the behest, let us say, of the Pope, of the church; the state was an instrument of the church. The vast peasantry had to exist as subjects of the state.
So you can see, by the 18th century Voltaire and Rousseau—this is not trivial. Millions of people died in peasant wars, and in actual wars, and in the English Revolution, the Cromwellian Revolution. And what is so interesting, well before I get to Oliver Cromwell—and believe me, it’s a little hard for me to connect all of this, by the way, because well I don’t know enough.
Before I get to that. Karl Marx, he looks back to the struggles in the early modern period. So after Luther you have the peasant war in Germany led by a heroic man by the name of Thomas Müntzer. Nobody knows him these days, except if you read Karl Marx on the peasant wars in Germany. This peasant uprising, led by a priest of a Catholic Church in the same way that the Protestant Reformation was led by Luther, a bishop, a subject of the church. But a rebellion from within based upon the class differences within Catholicism. Asking: “Why should the peasant pay taxes to a regime that did not consider his or her interest?”
Well the peasant uprising in 1525 in Germany was crushed after a year, but we would see in the same the Taiping Rebellion in China in the 1850s; a peasant uprising. The Chinese Revolution, a peasant uprising in the name of modernity. Indian independence, peasant uprising. Now it’s easy for a person today to say, “Oh those peasants are just a bunch of dumb people. And if we were ruling them, we would do ‘X, Y, Z.’” But you’re not going to rule them because they don’t give a “eff” about you, you know. The same thing in China, Sun Yat Sen as a representative of Chinese modernity, Chinese democracy and a new republic. Mao is just continuing what Sun Yat Sen was doing.
You know, a lot of people have a dogmatic and romantic idea of the Socialist Revolution. Well it is really a democratic revolution led by people who are socialists and communists, and that’s all. I mean that’s basic theory you know. And a lot of people say, “Well China has returned to capitalism.” China hasn’t returned to anything, China is going forward solving profound and millennial old problems such as poverty. And how do you do that, what are the economic mechanisms, the tools that revolutionaries adopt to resolve these problems will differ; time, space, circumstances. But the integrity of revolutionaries and of the revolutionary vision is what is important. We can come back to this, we can debate this. Because this relates very much to the American revolutionary process, and of course the Third and Fourth American Revolutions.
Nonetheless, the European Enlightenment of the 1600 and 1700s leading to the rise of figures such as Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei. These were not small matters. The idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the opposite, was a way of talking about the centrality of the human as opposed to the centrality of God.
I should say about the medieval construction of God; it was a fiction to justify state power remaining out of the hands of those who are oppressed, the majority. It was a way of saying to the majority, “You are where you are because it is ordained by God. And we the ruling class are merely carrying out the Mandate of God.” And that’s why, you know, an emperor would always be coronated by the Pope. And even in czarist Russia you would see the head of the Orthodox Church side-by-side with the czar.
The English Revolution is very important because it was never completed. The English Revolution of the 1600s took on the form of a struggle between Parliament, the people’s institution, and the Crown. These wars went on for about 40 years, and a compromise was reached where you had a parliamentary, or what they call a constitutional monarchy. The two could co-exist.
The French Revolution which comes approximately a hundred years later cuts off the heads of the queen and you know, we’re trying to hunt down all the other people to biologically or physically eliminate the old ruling class and their representatives. Ultimately in France it would be a compromise, but a weak one. That’s why you know, if you study the French Revolution, the first thing they do is to establish a parliament and political parties. The concept of left and right comes dead out of the French Revolution. And the diversity of the revolutionary forces in France is just stunning, including the far left consisting of the Communards, the Communists, even then.
In fact, Karl Marx when he talks about the three foundations of Marxism, he says there’s English political economy, German philosophy, and French socialism. And the socialist movement in France crystallized in the revolution of 1789. But then Napoleon comes, everybody thinks this guy is going to free everybody, and he’s going to spread the French Revolution throughout Europe, the Germans, you know awaited the French armies and Napoleonic armies with excitement. And Beethoven writes, I think it’s the Ninth Symphony in honor of Napoleon—and then when he discovers that Napoleon is just like the other emperors, he is not a democrat, he wants to build an empire—and so Beethoven renames the Ninth Symphony.
And of course the Napoleonic wars in Russia. So Napoleon sets a paradigm for the appropriation of revolutionary ideas for their opposite. And it would be that way going forward. We see that with the American empire. I mean, in their sense they’re very “Napoleonic” or “counter-revolutionary.”
The Napoleonic Wars and the defeat of Napoleon creates conditions for Europe to liberate itself from the remaining vestiges of feudalism and the medieval period, which in a lot of ways it never did. But in France and you know it’s almost parallel to what we see in this country after the Third American Revolution where the revolutionary forces are dismantled and, how would you put it, fake revolutionaries are put in their place.
In France you have, with Napoleon going down and the French political system going into chaos, this kind of farcical development of people who claim then to be carrying on the legacy of Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte. So this is the beginning, or this is the crystallization of a form of political leadership of the state known as Bonapartism. And this again, I’m referring to Marx, where farce comes after tragedy. The tragedy is the undoing of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, the farce is for all of these perpetrators to come forward and claim the “greatness of the French Empire and Napoleon.” Louis Bonaparte’s probably the most famous. Louis Bonaparte was famous for the statement, “I am the state and the state is me” you know, which is the complete opposite of the French Revolution, and of the English Revolution, and of the American Revolution. France would then go into a descent, into political stasis. France would become what it is today, I’ll come back to that.
You know, one of the interesting things is that when Europe hits the 20th century, a new set of crises break out. These crises are more connected to colonialism and colonial empires—and hence Du Bois will say that the origins of World War II are in Africa in the struggle for colonial supremacy in Africa. Most Europeans and historians would not take that as a serious claim, although I think while there are multiple and interacting causes, one cannot rule out that a political crisis in the age of European colonialism and empire must consider the question of colonialism, and which European nation would be the dominant colonial one.
The 20th century, after this long period, believe me, of war and revolution in Europe, which is great, instructive and so important. The sad thing is we just don’t know it enough. It is not taught, and without teaching it you can’t understand American history. Some people say, “Well, you’re giving a Eurocentric interpretation.” [Laughs] No, I’m not giving a Eurocentric interpretation—you know, I have to tell you all, you know I taught at a university where Afrocentrism was the dominant ideological position. And it was allowed to become so because it did not challenge anything about white supremacy or American empire, any of that. It was very satisfied with it in the sense of, “The white man, you do your thing. Just give us space to talk about our thing,” you know.
To speak about this and the crisis of Europe as part of the crisis of the world, and hence the crisis of Europe being a condition for the emancipation of the vast majority of humanity without the crisis which leads to World War I and hence World War II—or in that interregnum, that intermediary period between the two wars, the greatest economic depression in the history of of modernity—without understanding those 30 some years, you cannot understand the rise of China, India, Africa and the potentiality going forward into the 21st century.
As you know, we’ve talked a lot about the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the centrality of the individual. Very, very important because that in itself creates a cause célèbre. Now you can say well, “Thomas Jefferson owned slaves,” indeed he did. However, and here’s why I differ with Gerald Horne, the causation of the American Revolution was not to protect slavery, but to create a new state—which in itself was a contradiction to slavery. So a slave owner creates a system which at the same time creates the conditions for the overturning of slavery.
That’s historic logic, which is inconvenient for many people, you know, if you’re simple-minded you don’t want to hear that, but that is true. So Thomas Jefferson is not just a slave owner, which he was. But he was part of the foundation of the American state. It’s either that, or remain within the framework of British colonialism, and a regime that well—some would do well, you would probably still have slavery in the United States, but you would not have the modern American state, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
I just want to repeat this. I can understand how this is almost mind-boggling, well first of all to most Americans—because what I think about, people from India you know. The Indian independence movement was more straightforward. The formation of the Indian state from Gandhi to Nehru to Indira to what we have today; struggle for modernity.
But here you have grafted on to a major revolution a system of labor which contradicted the revolutionary aspiration. But that was not new in modernity. The Enlightenment proclaims the rights of man, proclaims science, proclaims art, proclaims man qua man as the center of the universe. Put forward the deistic rather than the theistic; understanding a man’s relationship to God—God created the world and then he got out of the way. Everything is now on us, so to speak. That’s Jefferson.
That’s the American revolutionaries, you know. Man is morally responsible, therefore Jefferson—owned slaves—but then I’m talking about the rights, “We are all created by a single thing,” you know. And he goes to his grave conflicted, morally. “How do I reconcile”—you can’t reconcile it. And so it will take a Second American Revolution to resolve the contradiction. Was it a brutal period? Yeah. The slave trade, all that, but so was the period of peasant wars in Germany. So was the Thirty Years War where, in our terms, it would be hundreds of millions of people, given the population of Europe at that time.
I want to emphasize that the success or failure of a revolution is measured by what class and ideological forces assume control of the state. Every modern revolution is about taking control, or seizing power in the name of the people.
This is why reading Voltaire, reading Rousseau is so enriching. The great modern literature of Europe is not to be trivialized. That’s what I’m trying to say. Tolstoy. Les Misérables, Victor Hugo. You don’t lose nothing in reading it. It is enriching because it talks about the contradictions of those moments in history. And that is what we want to understand: the contradictions and how they play out in the lives of the ordinary person, the peasant, the worker, the revolutionary—the defeated revolutionary, the revolutionary lost and turned out, you know what I’m saying? That’s Victor Hugo. Read it. You know, what happens when a nation is invaded and the ruling elite don’t speak the language of the people, i.e. the people speak in Russian and y’all speak in French. You know, but you’re being invaded by a French army under Napoleon. Who will decide the day. And so on. Okay, you get my point.
So, these people who are writing, Voltaire, Rousseau, they’re writing in the throes of a revolution. These ain’t no cats sitting around, armchairing it, “Oh I got my tenure.” These are cats on the edge of existence; life and death, you understand, hunted down. These are revolutionary works.
To a certain extent we could say John Locke, but the English were always compromised. Because the Cromwellian Revolution, which they called a dictatorship, and he never denied it. [Laughs] That’s what he said. But he was defeated. So it was always compromised.
The French Revolution, thorough revolution. Kill the aristocracy, kill the church, kill anybody that got in our way. And if that wasn’t enough, we setting up a different calendar. You know, a revolutionary calendar. Everything. You know, “You say it’s January. No, no, that ain’t January.” It is so fascinating. But they were just people like us, they didn’t know how to get to where they were aspiring to. They were working it out. And so these intellectuals, they went back studying Voltaire, they went back to the English Revolution. And most times, most revolutionaries said, “We don’t want to go the way of the English.” I don’t care whether it’s in philosophy, or politics. English thinking, it’s always a compromise. Always a compromise. Even the best of them, but that’s another story.
The intellectual history of modernity is defined by science, art, literature, and revolution. By science we’re talking about the discoveries: physics, chemistry, biology. We’re talking about Newton, Galileo, and Darwin.
In art we’re talking of course about what they call the Dutch masters, the Italian painters. And ultimately the counter-revolution in painting against that with the American Cold War artists. “Let’s get paid by the CIA,” you know, keep it real. The retreat from realism to a kind of, you know, modernism or postmodernism à la Basquiat, you know, or Jackson Pollock, you know what I’m saying, or Andy Warhol. That is all commercial. There is no soul in the art. See, when people say soul music, they’re talking about the inner life. A lot of people think when I say “soul music” I’m talking about just partying.
No, soul music is the exploration of the inner life, the soul. And it is soul music, you know, it is soul music. Commercial music is music for sale. The Italian and Dutch painters were exploring the soul of man. And by man I’m talking about “qua man.” Qua means as.
Because one explores the inner life—and this is Baldwin—of the human being, one is more optimistic than pessimistic. In spite of all of the difficulties and contradictions. You discover something in human beings that is cause for optimism. A belief in the human being, that’s the point. The belief in the human being.
And that is the point of art, except when it aligns itself with empire. How does it align itself with empire? I consider hip-hop to be out of the trajectory of Andy Warhol; it’s all for sale, it ain’t worth nothing, it’s just how much money I could make off of it, you know what I’m saying. I saw a clash of cultures, and I learned this from Kathie and then I saw it on YouTube, of Lauryn Hill and the Fugees, and The Delfonics. Because I guess the Fugees’ most popular song is based upon the Delfonics’ “Ready or Not Here I Come,” you know what I’m saying. And so I looked at it and I saw a clash of cultures.
The song is written by William Hart Muhammad, who we honored. And he said, “Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide. Gonna find you…” So they’re singing, The Delfonics, in this performance. And I guess they were just told that they were going to be on this, at the last moment and there was some technological shit so they could hear each other and hear themselves. So they were doing a medley. And they were very respectful, of themselves, of the music. And Lauryn Hill, “Hey, Philip, The Delfonics”—we know that, you ain’t introduced us to nothing. But it was a clash of culture. One art, one commodity. What they call pop culture today, is commodity culture.
The Renaissance gave us art that elevates the human, explores through depictions of various physical types of human beings, including not just men à la the Greek sculptures, but women. And presenting the human in all of its physical topology. In other words the nude, the modern nude, which takes me back to Barbara Bullock and Jasmine Gardens. My paintings of Barbara Bullock; people come in my house and they think I’m some kind of freak of nature, “Oh, what he’s into pornography”—that isn’t no pornography, this is Barbara Bullock. [Laughs] I said, “Well if you don’t like this, what do you think of Michelangelo, what do you think of the Dutch Masters of the Italian Renaissance painters who explored physical type and were not afraid of the human—that’s the whole point—or were not ashamed of the human.”
This would evolve the Renaissance painting into what we would call social realism and socialist realism. Socialist realism is where not only do we explore the typology of the human physique, but now we want to look at the working class.
And here you get Jacob Lawrence, you know, the Great Migration, Black folk, you see what I’m saying. That paralleled the painting of the Russian Revolution, socialist realism; we could sometimes just call it social realism. The counter-revolution against that, that is, against the Romare Beardens, the Jacob Lawrences, Augusta Savage the great sculptor, you know, and others.
The reaction against that is the Cold War abstraction. Where the word realism is not even mentioned any longer. And then the further crystallization of that is Andy Warhol, where everything is a joke. And ultimately you get Basquiat which is “a return to an infantile imagination”—which is really not a child’s view of the world. A child is more advanced than that. But they claim this is the way children paint and so on. Chaos. What Andy Warhol introduces is a complete commodification of art. That commercials are modern art. The depiction of the Campbell Soup can—okay maybe there’s something there, I don’t know. But it does not investigate the interior life of the human, you see what I’m saying?
And that’s why I said, you know, what Kathie told me, and then I saw it, where the Fugees and The Delfonics—and The Delfonics’ music of course, is not commodification, you know the person that wrote most of it, William Hart Mohammed, when he talks about his creative process and his intentionality, you know it is not the way it was appropriated by the Fugees. And you could see, and I was so happy to see that clash. And it got to the point where, you know, that kind of hip-hop performance, and what they supposed to be doing—but now you’re grown people, you’re 50 years old, so why you still acting childlike,, you know. And so the Delfonics were left standing there not knowing what was going on, while these young men came, you know, all that jive shit man. Come on dog, respect something. If you don’t respect yourself, you know, that’s the other thing, there ain’t no shame in their game.
Then, literature. The rise of Shakespeare and the modern English language. The modern English literary language. Every modern language—I want to emphasize modern language—is kind of preceded by a revolution in the literary language of the people.
That’s why Chaucer is so vastly different from Shakespeare. That is why in Russia they say Pushkin, the poet, is the father of modern Russian language. The literary language in many ways or most profoundly, constitutes a revolution in language. It is the modernization of the language. And then as it evolves, it becomes common; the common language.
But Shakespeare is decisive. He builds upon the revolution that says the individual, and his plays of course, romance, race, the struggle for power. All of these things, you don’t find this in the Greek drama. And Shakespeare properly read, the way Robeson read him and acted him makes you understand the humanity of Shakespeare and the complexity of Shakespeare. And how the state and race overlap. That was very, very advanced. So you say, “I don’t like Shakespeare,” you know whatever, whatever. Hey dog, you just cut yourself off, from yourself. Because the language and the conceptual framework that you think out of, even romantic love, which I will return to.
Because once you go to the individual, the interior life of the individual, I’m feeling a certain way. That’s my interior life. I’m feeling loved, I’m feeling romance. You know, they were teenagers, Romeo and Juliet, why, because they’re highly sexual at that age. Now they try to use Viagra to get it back up. But on the natural side, you can’t, once you lose it it’s gone. All I can tell you is work out, you know maybe you get the blood flowin’. But he had to have teenagers because it had to be intense sexual romantic love, for which you will die. That’s how intense the feelings are. But it’s real. But without the revolution which centers the individual, who gives a damn about what you think. You either live by the rules of God or die, you know, live or die so to speak.
This revolution in the interior life was manifested in the United States in the youth revolution of the 1960s and 70s. When they said the “Summer of Love,” they were not talking about agape love, believe me. If they were, they didn’t have to get naked, you know, because it was sexual love, it was intimacy—give me the freedom to feel what I feel, you understand what I’m saying? Don’t tell me to feel like you feel and you 70 years old, you ain’t got nothing happening no more. You’ve been, well I was gonna say “lost and turned out” but yeah, you see the point.
And then revolution. And that’s why I mentioned three great revolutions of the Age of Revolution: the American, French, and Haitian.
We are still, now—some people call the period we living in now: “late modernity.” I don’t see it that way. Indeed, Europe is exhausted. Europe is more like a museum. If you want to go and see old shit, go to the museum—go to Europe. The people are saying, “Look, we’re tired, we’ve been through too much, you know, we fucked ourselves up and these wars and colonialism and the ruling class led us down the primrose path. And now you got us involved in Ukraine this fool here Biden trying to get us involved in the Red Sea and fuckin’ with them cats over there which is a no-win situation.” Ansar Allah. Whenever you see that, “Allah,” it’s like “Hezbollah.” Hey man, then you know you up against something because I’m not just acting on my own behalf, it is Allah.
So Europe is tired. “Let us hold together the welfare state. Give me some free, health care, education and let me chill. You know, legalize heroin. Yeah, you got to legalize drugs. Because I’m too alienated, I’m too tired, I have no meaning nor do I have a way to search for meaning.”
That’s different than the United States. Europe is very different than the United States. And it ain’t just cause they white, it is because the exhaustion after 400 years approximately, of war, revolution, rebellion.
In the Axial Age we call modernity, Europe moved Humanity forward. It really did, and I’m not hating, they did. You have to assess it positively, you know what I’m saying. Any nihilism, historical nihilism, you can only be pessimistic. You know in a lot of ways that’s why we’re a little bit different in our feelings, we in the Free School, the way we feel. Because I don’t feel pessimistic, I don’t feel nihilistic, I don’t feel that there is no hope and that I just have to go for myself and do me. I don’t feel that. I reject the culture of a ruling class which hates people. Let’s start there. Biden, you don’t like the American people; by the way, they don’t like you. And you gonna find that out.
The people of this country have utter contempt for the American ruling class. And never has it been so intense. Europe, they don’t like the ruling class, but shit, fuck it, “just let me live.” Here—we don’t like the ruling class, we’re gonna try to bring them down.
I don’t consider this “late modernity,” nor do I consider us on the threshold of a new Axial Age. The axis remains the same, although the center of it has shifted it to the Afro-Asiatic world.
Because there is no modern revolutionary of Asia-Africa that rejects modernity. Now, maybe a couple hundred years from now we will enter a new Axial Age. Maybe that is what the communist reorganization of society will be. We can’t say, you see where I’m coming from?
Have you ever heard of this cat named Dugin out of Russia? Yeah, my man Dugin. Dugin is a philosopher of the fourth wave. And he says to go forward, we have to go back to Hegel.
Now, I agree. Hegel is indispensable for understanding or explaining modern knowledge, you know science, that’s what he was trying to do. However, like he says, Marx was a Hegelian, a Left Hegelian. Well I wouldn’t disagree with that, but then Dugin says that Marx bastardized Hegel. I do disagree with that. But even if one takes Hegel you cannot separate him from Kant, Spinoza, or Descartes, you can’t. Or Newton, or Galileo or whatever, you know. Or from the French Revolution.
The thing with Dugin is that it is philosophy outside of history. It is philosophy without the materiality of the world. And it is philosophy that is blind to the radical and revolutionary changes which have occurred since the Russian Revolution. What he is saying is that the West as civilization can be reignited, can be resuscitated. My argument is that no, the world and humanity have moved forward. That the moment will be enlivened in the renaissance of humanity, from a new civilizational, ideological center of humanity.
And indeed you could say, “Well the Chinese are not like the Indians. The Chinese are not like the Africans.” But one thing we do know, that all of these people had one thing in common; they suffered colonialism, semi-colonialism, slavery, etc. So a person, Xi Jinping goes to South Africa, they’re gonna say, “Hey brother what’s happening.” Because they, as they say, game recognize game; you were oppressed, we were oppressed, by the same people, you know.
I don’t know about Modi; how he gon’ navigate the Afro-Asiatic world when he always sitting up there with some white people and talking trash, and down with Israel. So I don’t know how he gon’ navigate that, that’s on him. But when Indira or Nehru or Romesh, my man. Whenever they went out, the world said, “Hey man what’s happening. We recognize you. You look more like us than the people that oppressed us look.”
That baseline is the framework, the historical framework for a new Enlightenment, a new revolution of ideas. It’s all over Xi Jinping. It’s all over him, when he talks, he’s talking about a renaissance that is not limited to China. Xi is not, as they try to say over here, another Chinese emperor. No he ain’t, that ain’t his dialogue. Because the Chinese emperors, what did they believe in: the Middle Kingdom. That we don’t have to go nowhere, everybody will come to us because we are the center of civilization. That’s the way the Chinese emperor thought, but Xi ain’t like that, he’s saying “Belt and Road” you know what I’m saying. “Win-win,” you know, “Isolate the white man,” [laughs] the subtext.
You know, people that dig it; I could dig Xi. I dig exactly what he’s saying man, you don’t have to say nothing, I see the way you carry yourself, your body language, you understand. Just like Alice’s dad said, “I never wanted to expose to you how much I hate the white man.” So Alice said, “I picked it up in your body language.” Because there is that. So when they see Hamas they said, “Shit yeah, you didn’t do nothing wrong. That’s the white imaginary that say you wrong.”
So we come to this new moment for us, the American people. It is Du Bois, King, and Baldwin. Maybe not exclusively but somehow you got to start there. If you gonna begin with a postmodern gender analysis, you ain’t going nowhere. It’s too narrow, you understand. If you think Audre Lorde replaces Baldwin, well, get off that weed you smoking. You know that self-referential thing is not the point. Just like, Purba was telling me she was looking at a podcast, Finding James Baldwin: The Magpie Years, his high school years. And in their interpretation of Baldwin they separate him from King. That’s not possible. He admired Malcolm, he admired the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He came to understand his father, that is, his step-father.
Baldwin, when you read him, I would say first of all he is channeling King. But he’s delving into the complexities unleashed by the Third American Revolution. Emily and others, they read the novels of Baldwin so well. What I learn from them and the Free School’s reading of the novels is that in so many instances Baldwin is reconciling himself to his father, to his community.
He is reconciling himself to his own interior life. But not separate from world history, from struggle. I think these figures and their literary work play a role comparable to Voltaire and Rousseau and the French Revolution.
And that’s why we say that the ideological preconditions for the revolution that the country must go through are to be found in the Black Radical Tradition of ideas and thought. That there is such a thing as a Black Proletarian Imaginary. Baldwin, when he says the singers that he likes, they’re all Black. Why is that? Because of the parallel imaginaries. I hear Dinah Washington, although you on the other side of the color line have been socialized not to hear it; I hear the blues. Bessie Smith don’t mean to you what she mean to me, you know what I’m saying. ‘Cause he like Patti LaBelle, he like Aretha Franklin.
What is he hearing that the people who control aesthetics and music critique—what don’t you hear. Like I heard a cat saying, “The Beatles are the greatest musical achievement of the 20th century,” I mean like Little Richard said, “You ain’t nothing but an imitation of me.” He said all of that. James Brown, the Beatles, Tina Turner all come out of him. And when you look at it it’s true, so he said, “Well y’all ain’t did nothing but imitate me and then come back here and tell me I ain’t did nothing.” Anyway that’s a whole ‘nother question. But who was Little Richard. Who is Little Richard.
It is a distinct imaginary. “Shouldn’t I be down, depressed and sad all the time given what I done gone through? I should be. But I’m not.” That imaginary.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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