Introduction

We in the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation are proud to present this Collection of Anthony Monteiro’s writings on the occasion of his 80th birthday. With these selected pieces, we strive to capture the full measure of the man. He is not one thing but many: a revolutionary teacher of teachers, a philosopher and theorist of knowledge, a Black man who has always defended Black folk, a partisan for peace who loves humanity and believes in democracy, a freedom fighter who never quits on the battlefield of struggle. All this and more.

The ideological landscape in America today would be darker if not for Dr. Monteiro. He has made indispensable contributions to the battle of ideas, which is the battle for the future. These contributions are best understood in the context of his own journey through ideas of Black liberation, the Communist Party, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles, and other people’s movements during the freedom explosions of the 20th century. At the dawn of the 21st century, in the face of world crisis and chaos, he started upon a new mountain of thought — the rediscovery of W.E.B. Du Bois as the central thinker for humanity’s future going forward.

Into this era we have each met Dr. Monteiro in different years and circumstances. We know him as a mentor, friend, comrade, and brother; a man who, in the sea of coldness that is American society, genuinely cares about people. There are hundreds if not thousands of people into whose lives he has brought such unbreakable light. It is a light more striking for its persistence against an overwhelming wave of counter-revolution. The Black flame he keeps alive is precisely that which a rising generation needs to claim its role in history.

Even at his most incisive, Dr. Monteiro speaks and writes in a poetic mode that is part of the gift of Black thought to the world. The artistic imaginary that colors his science is a flower from the soil of a broad Black proletarian consciousness, one that has drunk from the wells of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It evokes the genealogy to which he belongs — titans such as Du Bois, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King Jr. who have turned human beings’ eyes and hearts toward a new creation. He is a living link in that chain, having been mentored in his youth by Henry Winston, who in turn was a product of the seeds planted by Du Bois. And here, the crux: he has not betrayed his forebears, as others have. For his moral integrity he has been punished; yet he pushes on.

To prepare this Collection we have pored over dozens of Dr. Monteiro’s past writings, spanning several phases of struggle across decades of history. During this process, many of us felt we were discovering some vital, unspoken part of ourselves — a heritage that explains the future we believe in. If his thinking has evolved with time, it is because he emerges from a historically constituted people changing with time. It is because he committed himself as a young man, in the springtime of the Black Freedom Movement, to ideas and to struggle as the pillars of his life. Where many of his peers have frozen, shrunk back, or retreated inward, he pushes forward into the creative edge of consciousness, at the frontlines of ideological struggle — generating new knowledge that weaves itself organically into the stars of ordinary people’s thought and striving.

As such, we have chosen writings that we believe meet the demands of our time. They are concepts that have changed our lives; they have a message for all peoples and civilizations. Today’s aspiring revolutionaries should know they have a choice in deciding the foundations upon which they stand. They should know someone passed through fire to help make a futuristic, optimistic vision possible as we confront even greater, more dangerous crises in the twilight of white supremacy and Western civilization.

As for us, our ongoing work in the Free School involves clearing the field of ideas so that the people may have air to breathe. We do so with the faith that these ideas will be picked up by youth, children, and a generation unborn to assume the worthy task of achieving our nation.

Those who know Dr. Monteiro know his mind is always working, listening, circling horizons. Far from resting, he continues in the struggle. His spirit stretches wide, containing the ideological history of revolutionary thought and politics in our present epoch. In the currents of his life run the rivers of our world, ever remaking itself.

So we arrive at the place where rivers meet, seeking a new dispensation.

Monteiro 80th Collection Print Download

Knowledge and Revolution: Collected Writings by Anthony Monteiro

Contents

Introduction