This is a special period in the life of the United States. Two hundred fifty years ago, a congress of men gathered in Philadelphia to declare their independence from Britain. One hundred fifty years ago, in the throes of the nation’s Reconstruction after bloody Civil War, legions of newly freed Black workers “stood for a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery” under the burning cross of white supremacy. And so the modern course of world history was set into motion — culminating in a thunderous stretch of years when the children of the formerly enslaved picked up the weapon of nonviolence and fought to make freedom real for all Americans. Then came another winter.

It is the year 2026 and for the American people, there is little to celebrate. Out of the bitter cold, the anger of the people boils over into what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the summer of our discontent.” The U.S. ruling elite, together with Israel, have sought to destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran and other non-Western peoples of the earth. They have waged this war in the name of white civilization, and they are losing. The heroic resistance of the Iranian, Palestinian, and Lebanese peoples blazes a new moral path for humanity. The civilizational consequences of this defeat for the American Empire and Zionism are profoundly significant.

Into this moment of crisis and rapid change, we present the Fifth Issue of Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science. Contained within this Issue are essays, interviews, and efforts to advance a revolutionary sociology grounded in the lifeworld of the American people; and in particular, the Black proletariat in Philadelphia. In our search, we follow the principle of W.E.B. Du Bois: who assumed that to know the people is to know their strivings, consciousness, and democratic potentiality, along with the objective conditions that shape them. We assume that the people, the majority of whom are workers and the poor, can become agents of revolutionary change — capable of thought and governance, great art and beauty.

Answering the call of history, we join the ranks of our people who are fighting on the battlefield for our children’s future. Now is the time to build, out of the ruins of the old, a new civilization worthy of human beings.

We begin with a Declaration of Resistance and Purpose for the 250th Year of the American Revolution.