Avant-Garde Journal

A Declaration of Resistance and Purpose in the 250th Year of the American Revolution We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Man is divine, that although he has unleashed enormous technological powers, he has yet to free himself. That of all human acts, the most sacred among …

The Mountain Upon Which We Fight
— In honor of W.E.B. Du Bois, born on this day in 1868

Out of the chaos of the social sciences of the early 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois sought to create science which could explain racial oppression and colonialism; what he viewed as the principal contradiction of liberal democracy and the capitalist organization of society. His book The Souls of Black Folk announces a new approach to social science, where he transgresses the West’s assumption that Black people were not human; Black people were human, he insisted, and could be studied scientifically. The assumption of early white sociology was that because Black folk were less than fully human, they should be studied using biology, but not social science. Du Bois thought that social science might be deployed to solve the crisis of U.S. democracy and transform society, producing a multi-racial democracy.

What he began and then carried out for the rest of his life, was a decisive break with the European view of humanity. Du Bois invents a new way of scientifically studying Africans and ultimately humanity. He makes a decisive break with the idea that knowledge is essentially a European thing, and that European knowledge was universal. He insists that the study of history and modernity from a European standpoint narrows the lenses of knowing and ultimately distorts knowledge. What comes out of European philosophy and human studies was Eurocentric and prejudiced in favor of humanity’s minority, white folk. ... Of the white world, he says in Dusk of Dawn that it was “thinking wrong about race, because it did not know.” It did not have either the philosophical or civilizational prerequisites to know. And what they didn’t know about race and democracy, they thought wasn’t consequential, at any rate. Du Bois passionately disagreed; what the white world didn’t know about race would turn out to be the most consequential thing about American capitalism and modernity.

One of the great discoveries of revolutionary thought is of the Black Proletariat. This historically constituted and revolutionary category builds upon, yet supersedes, the Marxian notion of the class struggle. Du Bois saw the Black Proletariat as the central revolutionary force in the anti-slavery struggle. He saw it under slavery as an enslaved proletariat. The logic of this discovery leads to Du Bois’s proposing a historical logic that proceeds in threes: the Black worker, the white worker, and the white capitalist. Rather than a dialectic, as in a logic of twos, Du Bois proposes a trialectic, a logic of threes. He makes robust claims concerning the role of the Black Proletariat, including the possibility during the Reconstruction era of a dictatorship of the Black Proletariat being established in several states of the U.S. South. This dictatorship was a necessity, he reasoned, to secure a revolutionary democracy and the freedom of the former slaves.

The larger point is that the Black Proletariat is the central force in the revolutionary and democratic struggles of the United States up until now. It represents the highest levels of democratic, anti-white supremacist, and working-class consciousness. It is from a logical standpoint the working class in its becoming, which means that the Black Proletariat is the ground upon which the entire working class rises or falls. To achieve a revolutionary democratic consciousness, white people must reject whiteness; the working class must become more or less the Black Proletariat; hence the Black Proletariat is the entire working class in its becoming: a class for humanity. This expresses the revolutionary potential of the working class. This means the white worker, over time, becomes one with the Black worker; white workers start to think like and identify with Black workers. This is precisely the point that James Baldwin makes; the first step to a revolutionary consciousness is for whiteness as an identity to be rejected.

We are excited to share the Eleventh issue of Vishwabandhu! This issue is titled “World Path to Democracy”. This issue features an interview of Prof. Uma Dasgupta on her recent book on Santiniketan. Several articles in the issue look at different aspects of Visvabharati and its continuing importance. Other articles look at recent tumultuous world events, including in Venezuela and Bangladesh.

What Would Martin Luther King Say to a Nation Trapped in the Wilderness of Chaos and Confusion? January 18, 2022 | Address for the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission’s Martin Luther King Day celebration Note: Reassessing the centrality of Martin Luther King Jr. to the American revolution…

A man for the future: We celebrate the 84th birth anniversary of Muhammad Ali, born on this day on January 17th, 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky.

"If there is one thing that made Ali beloved, it was his willingness to sacrifice for the oppressed. Solidarity, a subset of love, is something scarce today. We cling to material things and see our lives and worth as tied to them. In a time in which superpowers genocide children, at most we utter cautious words of sympathy. Yet, Ali shows us that to live one’s principles means to be willing to sacrifice everything — wealth, titles, even exposing one’s life to racist attacks. A higher belief, what King identified as the third dimension of life, what Ali called Allah, a concept of God that motivates moral courage and sacrifice, is inherent in the Black Freedom Struggle, and something that Ali exemplified. [...] Humanity will prevail when we see ourselves as tied to each other, and are willing to sacrifice accordingly.

"Ali represents the Black Worker striving for a new modernity. He is a representative of a civilization of peace. When the U.S. state silenced Paul Robeson, another artist who became an icon of the struggle against white supremacy, Ali appeared on the world stage. [...] Ali is one of Black America’s greatest gifts to humanity. The footage that remains of him, viewed billions of times over the decades, shows world humanity’s love for Black America. What would he have been without the moral choice? Cassius Clay, another prizefighter. Yet the impact of the people, their zeitgeist, and a liberation theology turned him into Muhammad Ali, a champion for world peace, truth, and humanity; a man for the future; a sign of the world to come.

"The American people and world humanity have been changed through their love for Muhammad Ali. He is an icon of truth and world peace who lives in them. They see him as an example of what they can become with moral courage and strength. He was a man of the Third American Revolution, who embodied the freedom movement’s challenge to rethink notions of art, beauty, science, and democracy. He was a fierce, but gentle, Black embodiment of the truth, in his clinical pugilism, his poetry, his approach to the poor, children, and the oppressed. The spirit of Ali, which is an embodiment of the Black Freedom Struggle, lives in the hearts of the people. It can be ignited when they revolt against warmongers and oppressors. When they strive to be people who cannot fit into a system of warmongering and oppression. When they see that the uphill battles of their day to day lives are for an eternal cause greater than themselves. When they see that art and beauty are not defined by the elites but something for everyone. When they begin to think about the world in their own terms and not those of elite intellectuals; it is this that still holds the potential to free humanity."

From our Editorial on Muhammad Ali for Issue 4 of Avant-Garde: https://avantjournal.com/2025/07/03/muhammad-ali-peace-truth-editorial/

Today we honor the birth of Martin Luther King Jr., the father of a new American people. We celebrate his revolutionary life and ideas, which lay down an unfinished task that all-humanity must take up to answer the crises of our time.

On this occasion we revisit an essay by Nandita Chaturvedi on King as a revolutionary prophet for the world future:

"The Civil Rights Movement was a part of the great upsurge of dark humanity crying out for democracy between the 1950s and 1970s. It may represent for us today one of its most advanced forms. This is not to compare narrowly revolutionary struggles all over the world, but to scientifically study the trajectory of revolutionary thought and ask what remains for us today a resource to expand democracy. Indeed, Martin Luther King represents the great gift of Black America to the nation being born within the U.S., but also a gift to the world humanity as a whole.

"It is one of the most remarkable epics of modern history how the message of nonviolence and freedom was taken up by African Americans through the leadership of Martin Luther King.

"How did King 'apply' Gandhi’s methods to the society he lived in? It was no dogmatic application, but a creative synthesis that in substance allowed the African American struggle to advance the ideas of the Indian Freedom Movement. The synthesis involved the work of the cadre of transformed nonconformists in the Black Freedom Movement such as Diane Nash, James Lawson, Coretta Scott King, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, King himself, and many others. This synthesis found expression in the sermons and speeches of King.

"This time of acute political and social crisis in the U.S. calls for the young generation of Americans to take up a study of the Black Freedom Movement, and to complete the revolutionary process that would make Martin Luther King the father of a new American nation.

"Emphasizing the human, Martin Luther King shows us through his life that the working class and poor cannot be understood as abstract categories, but must be understood in the concrete. His life’s work involved dealing with the oppressed in an existential way. He spoke regularly through his sermons and speeches to the anxieties, contradictions, and aspirations of the Black proletariat. Further, he challenged them to become better human beings, to become people who could challenge the systems of racism by refusing to participate in it. He saw, as Gandhi did, that bringing the people to a place where they had the confidence and ideas to reject the lies that had been told about them was not a trivial matter. He dealt with the poor as individuals rather than an undifferentiated mass.

"King articulated through his brilliant oration much of what was symbolism in the Indian Freedom Movement. Gandhi was speaking to a largely illiterate and widely diverse peasantry, while King spoke to the Black proletariat that had a high level of consciousness shaped by their position at the center of empire. He took the ideas of nonviolence to a higher stage by framing them in the context of world philosophy and historic human development. He extended the ideas of nonviolence to international relations, speaking of an alternative form of world organization that was not dependent on coercion and war. King also conceptualized the nonviolent transformation of the American state from a war economy to a peace economy. He showed concretely how such a transition could take place through his work in the urban North of the United States in the last years of his life."

As our nation faces its 250th year, we return to a 2010 speech by Rev. James Lawson on America's revolutionary calling to remake itself into a new civilization.

Rev. James Lawson: ‘We Have Not Yet Arrived’ As our nation faces its 250th year, we return to a 2010 speech by Rev. James Lawson on America’s revolutionary calling to remake itself into a new civilization.

We are sharing an essay by Anthony Monteiro written shortly after the death of Nelson Mandela, shedding light on Mandela's neoliberal turn toward the end of his life and the role of ideology in shaping political leadership.

"Nelson Mandela’s death in December 2013 ended an epoch in the South African people’s revolutionary history. The generation which included Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Alfred Nzo, Govan Mbeki, Ahmad Karthdra, Dennis Goldberg and others assumed the stage of history from within the ranks of the ANC Youth League in the mid-1940’s. Sisulu and Tambo were Mandela’s closest comrades and his political and intellectual mentors. Mandela’s life is, finally, a lens through which to understand the South African struggle. Rather than a single line, his life proceeded through stages and contradictions. Since radical politics starts with concrete analysis of concrete situations, we are compelled to study Mandela as a living human being in a concrete epoch of history. To do this we must study the stages of his life, how his consciousness evolved, and actualized in his organizational and ideological activity and most importantly how he emerged as a revolutionary committing himself completely to the liberation of black South Africans and to Africans generally. We must also forthrightly address those contradictions in his development that produced the weakening and finally the abandonment of his revolutionary resolve.

"It is clear, for most of his life as an activist and icon of his people’s movement Mandela was a revolutionary. From the mid 1940’s until 1990 he thought and acted as a revolutionary. After 1990 he takes a different course, which ends in him being embraced by the global forces of counterrevolution; in fact the enemies of the people he fought so valiantly and selflessly for. It is Mandela as an ally and representative of western imperialism and neo-colonialism that the media will highlight in the praise and memorializing of Mandela. They will claim him as a savior of capitalism and white interests in South Africa. For them he protected western and white interests, especially the vast mineral resources and cheap labor, not just of South Africa, but of southern Africa, the world’s mineral treasure house."

Nelson Mandela: The Contradictions of His Life and Legacies Publication date: February 24, 2015 | Published in African American Futures, with an earlier 2013 version in Black Agenda Report Note: As a campaigner for the freedom of Nelson Mandela in the 1970s…

The recent publication of the U.S. National Security Strategy under the Trump administration draws attention to the civilizational crisis of the Western world. Nowhere is this felt more keenly than among various factions of the ruling elite, who are confronted by the dead end of their own historical epoch.

With this in mind we share an essay by Nuri Yi for Issue 1 of our journal, published in 2023.

"The terms of civilization and modernity are serious and mighty; they carry this weight because they are the birthright of the masses who make up the majority of humankind and have toiled for thousands of years to build civilization—an advanced stage of human development that produces a way of life. Civilization must be protected because it captures an essential current of humanity and its progress. It is thus a category that has a place together with History: the long arc of human history from past to present, with continuity and movement forward. Civilization, though related to History, is a distinct category with new dimensions and meaning. Beyond the materialist stages of history conceptualized by Marx and Engels, civilization considers the qualitative development of human morality, ideas, philosophy, and culture. It points back to our ancestors and the link from them to where we find ourselves today, to the future of our children’s children, and asks: how did we get here?

"In this time, civilization cannot be left as an abstract idea for detached academics or elites to pessimistically problematize or deconstruct, severing the concept from its source. The stakes are indeed high, but the concept of civilization has been thrust in our faces, demanding to be worked out, put into practice, and fought for. The discussion is clearly ongoing: it has not yet been entirely decided as to what extent civilization will be an assertion of the past, with the objective being return to a previous status quo, or an assertion for the future, with the objective being genuine human progress. It is up to the people of the world to weld civilization into the latter.

"The American people, too, must take up the question of civilization: what will its meaning be to us, and what will our contribution be to it? Given that America is so young, these concepts may on the surface seem relevant to Americans only insofar as other civilizations might encroach on or threaten our way of life. However, the current crisis of American society—a crisis of legitimacy in the midst of poverty and war—compels us to find a lifeline that can lead us to the future and help us to reestablish our proper place in the world. The call for “civilization,” whether in America or anywhere else, provides a self-conscious category that demands unity and purpose in the continuous struggle for human advance. Thinkers of the Black Freedom Movement saw this possibility the most clearly: they saw civilization in the modern age as a double-edged sword which could be used to either uphold a sterile and doomed system of white supremacy, or decisively pierce through this system to dismantle it for a greater human freedom.

"The concept of civilization declares that this future must carry the old but reflect something new, providing a continuous link to history while simultaneously transcending previous achievements. Today in America, a young country with history still to make, a healthy understanding of civilization and its responsibilities can give depth and voice to the discontented. It can double the voice of the American people calling for an end to poverty, inequality, and war by linking their aspirations to those of the world’s people, who seek democracy of opportunity for advancement. America’s and the world’s people must be freed from the imperialist order to establish equality amongst civilizations."

Civilization: A Concept for the Future of Humanity A generation ago, America’s revolutionary thinkers put forward a new theory of civilization.

Seventy years ago on December 5, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in a city known as the "Cradle of the Confederacy." We honor this day when the Black proletariat embarked upon a new Movement, unleashing great forces of history which became the Third American Revolution.

Below are excerpts of an essay by Jeremiah Kim from Issue 2 of our journal, published in 2024.

"To the outside observer, it seems strange that a new revolutionary movement should have begun in the U.S. in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. Conventional thought would tend to see greater revolutionary possibility in a period of intense economic crisis such as the 1930s, compared to a period of relative domestic economic prosperity like the 1950s.

"To the children and grandchildren of the former slaves, however, the outpouring of the nonviolent movement in Montgomery and soon a hundred other cities made all the sense in the world. What Black folk saw in the immediate postwar period was a world freedom movement flooding across humanity, as the system of colonial imperialism came under crisis. From Alabama to New York, from Tennessee to Florida, from Mississippi to Pennsylvania, over kitchen tables, among church pews, and in shaded street corners, news of the anti-colonial struggles of Africa and Asia spilled into the vision, hearing, speech, thoughts, and hearts of Black people.

"The remarkable victories of poorer, darker peoples over once-invincible Western empires forced Black folk in America to reflect on their own lack of freedom—in a nation that proclaimed its own 'freedom' as a model for the world, no less. It was doubly fateful that the Black proletariat saw the 100th anniversary of Emancipation approaching; for it was the defeat of Reconstruction which had, as Du Bois explained, laid the foundation for the ascendance of U.S. and European imperialism at the sunset of the 19th century.

"From the nation’s halls of power, the Black proletariat heard the constant refrain: 'Wait.' Yet from the turning of a world far vaster, the Black proletariat felt the thunderous cry: 'Move.' So they moved. And through their movement, hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of ordinary working people commandeered the pace and direction of social-historical time in the United States."

Read the full essay: https://avantjournal.com/2024/04/08/why-we-must-inherit-the-third-american-revolution/

Today marks the death of John Brown after his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, on the eve of the Civil War. We remember his martyrdom with an essay by Blaise Laramee written for Issue 4 of our journal.

"As long as we have the courage to make the moral choice, to reject whiteness and rejoin humanity, the spirit of Brown will be there. In the struggle for a new society and a new civilization, which follows the torch of darker humanity after the great death throes of white modernity have rolled away, we will need new human beings. It is the great capacity and test of each of us to choose our allegiance, as Brown chose, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that this choice is between life and death."

The Soul of John Brown What could the soul of John Brown mean to the American people today? Could we, in our time of great confusion and moral crisis, see such a spirit live again?

A SHORT HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA
From the Collected Writings of Anthony Monteiro

At the end of the 20th century, Harvard's 'Dream Team' of Cornel West & Henry Louis Gates and Temple University's Molefi Kete Asante represented two opposing camps of Black Studies. What united them was their rejection of W.E.B. Du Bois, as Anthony Monteiro argued in this essay from 1998.

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"While one hundred flowers bloom and a thousand schools contend, Harvard and Temple Universities’ African American Studies Departments have become the vanguard of opposing trends; one modernist and Eurocentric, the other Afrocentric and traditional. They represent the most publicized and well known of the centers of Black Studies. Each has its renowned scholars and stands upon its own theories and philosophies. Different political camps within the Black and white communities support each. Through academic journals, scholarly conferences and public discourse, Harvard and Temple struggle to gain the upper hand in deciding the direction of Black Studies and ultimately Black intellectual and political life. Each side claims history as the test of the validity of its positions, although none of the key players could be considered an historian and neither department has produced any significant historical texts.

"While these public differences are debated in the media and academic departments, below the surface the two schools share certain common beliefs and sensibilities; commonalities which neither is completely comfortable with, yet which neither can escape. At the core of these commonalities is their rejection of W.E.B Du Bois’s legacy. Both sides, while acknowledging Du Bois’s brilliance, define him as a failure. The Harvard school rejects him because he was not Eurocentric enough; while Temple rejects him because he was not sufficiently Afrocentric. Ironically, in rejecting Du Bois as the central figure of Black Studies, Harvard and Temple have turned the debate over Black Studies into a debate about Du Bois. The project to eliminate Du Bois as the central intellectual figure in the formation of the Black intellect can only be understood as a crucial part of the history of propaganda directed against the struggle for Black freedom. It is connected to the main centers of white propaganda and is shaped in significant ways by them. And thus the history of the struggle between the two schools of Black Studies is in substance a short history of propaganda. However, the central player in all of this is neither Asante and Temple, nor Harvard and West and Gates, it is the mighty Du Bois. To understand these camps one must understand how they understand (or more appropriately, misunderstand) Du Bois."

A Short History of Propaganda Publication date: 1998 | First published in The Real News, later in African American Futures Note: At the time this essay was written in 1998, African American Studies was, in the words of Dr. Mont…