November: Red

Session 6: Revolution

‘I follow three teachers:
don pritts, my spiritual guide, "love without action is just a word."
john brown, my moral guide, "what is needed is action!"
emma goldman, my political guide, "if i can't dance, i don't want to be in your revolution."’
— Willem Van Spronsen

Revolution represents a collection of thoughts, hopes, writings, art, and actions of people not willing to accept oppression in the face of destruction. Revolution is a series of committed and ongoing acts to overturn the status quo in the hope that the future can be better if we make it that way. Despite the conventional logic of capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity that insist there are no alternative systems that could possibly be employed, many have organized in pursuit of a revolutionary future. This collection of texts, poems, songs, and letters illustrates that revolution does not look any particular way. The following excerpts are meant to act as a brief introduction to some of the ways that revolution has been dreamt of, articulated, longed for, and organized.

These texts model examples of how we can stay committed to the study and the active process of revolution despite oppressive conditions. They can show how analytical rigor can be contained in everyday language and can help us articulate our own vision for the process of revolution. As you read, please let the following questions anchor your exploration: How does your experience fit into the context of revolution? What would revolution look like to you? How do these figures theorize revolution and how do they live it? Is it similar or different from you? What can we learn, expand, and reject from the readings provided and how can we incorporate them into our daily actions and beliefs?

Don’t forget to check out the facilitator guide!

Readings

Core Texts

Supplemental Texts

Discussion Questions

Assata Shakur, Assata

  • How does Assata mimic hooks’ method for analyzing love in her own analysis of revolution? What does she think of vague conceptions of revolution? (pp. 197)

  • What are Assata’s views on racial solidarity? Is it necessary for revolution? (pp. 200)

  • How does Assata differentiate adventurism from revolutionary progress? Why must the revolution be a “people’s war”? (pp. 242)

  • Why is Assata’s language rooted in terminology found in Marxism-Leninism and Maoism?

George Jackson, Soledad Brother

  • “Tuesday, March 24, 1970” discusses Jackson’s views of psychological manipulation in regards to parole board hearings. Do you agree with his views? Why does Jackson think this is the first thing that happens when a prisoner enters Chino?

  • In this same letter, how has Jackson already begun to theorize abolition? (p. 221)

  • How does Jackson feel about non-violence? What are the two things non-violence presumes about the oppressor and oppressed? (p. 223)

  • How does Jackson understand leadership? (pp. 226-227)

  • What does Jackson think of ‘Black Capitalism’? (p. 237)

  • On pages 233-250, Jackson outlines how identity is constructed or sprouts out of the economic material history that unfolds. What does he understand the relation between Blackness and capitalism?

Eugene Debs, Statement to the Court (1918)

  • How does Debs address his opposition, while simultaneously identifying groups he is in solidarity with? Where are these lines drawn? Do these ideas resonate with you? How do your ideas differ? (p. 297)

  • What does revolution achieve in Debs eyes? (p. 298)

Women’s Brigade of the Weather Underground, “Message from Sisters Who Bombed HEW for International Women’s Day” (1974)

  • How does the Weather Underground Organization Women’s Unit see the bureaucratic structure of welfare? Why do they feel like its not upholding its slogan to be “People serving People”?

  • Why do they recognize women’s liberation as a necessary element of revolution?

Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, “What Kind of Revolutionary Organization Is Useful Today?” (1995)

  • What are the two conventional responses to overcome capitalism? Why are both inadequate?

  • What is the third way proposed by the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation? How does it meet the failures of the previously mentioned strategies?

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, “Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons”

  • How does the SCJP theorize the post-civil rights South? Where role does incarceration play in this analysis?

Leonard Peltier, “An Eagle’s Cry”

  • How does Peltier’s poem theorize human’s place in History and Nature? Does it exclude non-natives or include them?

Langston Hughes, “Lenin” (1934)

  • What does “Lenin” represent for Hughes? Who does Hughes think Lenin’s (communist) message is for? By receiving this message what do they receive?

Jimmy Boggs, American Revolution

  • What group does Boggs think is “exploding” population-wise in the US? Why does he feel this is the case? What is the significance of labeling them “outsiders”?  (p. 50)

  • Why are the Outsiders capable of thinking beyond the limits of capitalism? (p. 52)

bell hooks, All About Love and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Reading hook’s All About Love and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed together presents two different problems that utilize similar methods in order to define familiar terminology that can point to innovative solutions. For example, In Love, hooks sees conventional claims that love is “undefinable” as making space for relational dysfunction and ‘lovelessness’ to infiltrate understandings of what it means to behave lovingly. As such, she claims that if love is instead defined as the aggregation of what we do and how we behave, we can see that intentions that are not matched by some practical action cannot meet the criteria of love. Freire offers this same methodology, but instead of concerning himself with love explicitly, he directs his attention at freedom and oppression. By rejecting freedom as some idyllic value, Freire begins to define freedom as the ability to transform one’s future, and the absence of freedom (oppression) is the act of denying someone that capacity. Both hooks and Freire address conventional definitions, highlight their inadequacies, and suggest new definitions that allow their validity to be tested empirically.

  1. What definitions in your own life do you find inadequate?

  2. Thinking about the definitions you’ve just thought of, how can we redefine them so that they are testable? They can be measured in the real world in some way?

  3. How does this act of reconceptualization stand in as a metaphor or microcosm of revolution? How does living (and subsequently, thinking) differently allow us to create a future that meets our needs?

Albert Woodfox, Solitary

  • How does the author theorize “violence”? Why are the BPP not violent? (pp. 68-69)

  • Why is unity and solidarity so important to the BPP project of Black liberation? (pp. 68, 70-71)