Read Time: 5 minutes
Revolution in These Times by Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, edited by Kalonji Jama Changa.
Dhoruba Bin-Wahad in Revolution in These Times offers incredibly lucid commentary on the current moment we find ourselves in the United States. As a veteran of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, Dhoruba offers key insights into the history of the revolutionary militant struggle for liberation in America. Throughout the book, which is a compilation of edited interviews by Black Power Media, Dhoruba connects today’s struggles with those of the 60s and 70s. He writes that any movement today must learn from the movements of yesterday to learn from their mistakes and avoid losing battles won in the past. Dhoruba offers plumb analysis from lived experience and his words are sure to be of use to anyone organizing in the realm of Black liberation, Anti-Fascism, and Anti-Capitalism.
Chapter 1, “Lessons from the Black Liberation Tradition”, opens with a reminiscence of Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a recently-deceased revolutionary associated with the Black Liberation Army. For Dhoruba, a key component of movements today must be focused on getting political prisoners out of prison using organized people’s power rather than being granted freedom by the mercy of the State. It is an indictment of the Black movement of today that these leaders and their teachings are being forgotten in prison. Dhoruba links the failures of Anti-Racist and Anti-Fascist groups today to an ignorance of the historical tradition. COINTELPRO, as well as the lesser-known CHESROB and NEWKILL, sought not only to destroy Black revolutionary groups like the Black Panther Party but also destroy the connection of future generations to these struggles. The US government went to great lengths to kill, exile, or imprison these leaders to silence their messages and defang future movements.
In reaction to the overt hostility of the US government to the Black community, the Black Panther Party was fierce advocates of the ability for Black people to defend themselves against white supremacy. The Black Panther Party, first and foremost, used guns to defend their free breakfast programs and medical clinics. “The gun,” Dhoruba writes, “… was looked upon as an instrument to galvanize, revolutionize, and educate Black people. We use Mao Zedong’s phrase that, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’”
Chapter 2, “To Be Black is Necessary, But it ain’t Sufficient”, discusses some failures facing the Black community in the United States, primarily related to Black political leaders in the US government and the US government’s international domination of marginalized communities. Dhoruba links the domestic struggle against white supremacism to that of the Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Colonial struggle internationally. As Dhoruba reminds the readers, it was only after Martin Luther King Jr. called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” was he assassinated.
Chapter 3, “The Unstoppable Power of Self-Determination”, examines the destruction of the Black Panther Party and the effect COINTELPRO has had on radical Black organizing in the United States. The US government was well aware of the threat that Black liberation soldiers, much like in Asia, Africa, and South America, brought to the political landscape and made the determination that they “have to kill the leaders of the revolutionary movement so that they don’t pass on their information, their knowledge, and their experience to another generation.”
Dhoruba identifies critical failures of mass movements like Black Lives Matter as failing to redefine public safety away from a law-enforcement-centric model and toward a broad, community-centric model that contains elements like sanitation, education, public health, and development. By allowing the State to define public safety as that dealing with policing and incarceration, you abandon sweeping reforms like community control of the police for that of more body cameras, more training, and more community outreach. Fundamentally nothing has changed about the relationship of the police, the State, and the communities that they occupy, nor does it empower the community with greater political might.
Chapter 4, “Recollections of a Black Revolutionary”, Dhoruba walks the reader through his personal history as part of the radical movements in the 60s and 70s. “We were at war,” he states, “and the enemy was trying to kill us.” In the same breath, “a revolutionary is never a victim.” Dhoruba recounts his lawsuit against the US government as being the one that revealed over 300,000 documents relating to COINTELPRO. These documents were instrumental for exposing the ways and means employed by the government to stifle these revolutionary movements and how they might be employed today to continue to destroy incipient fervor.
Chapter 5, “You Cannot Reform the Police in a Police State”, is a call to Anti-Fascist action against the ever-strengthening white supremacist police in the US. Dhoruba highlights Cop City in Atlanta (and the construction of Cop Cities across America) as being a sign that the government seeks to increase its armed capacity. The resistance against Cop Cities is important, yet they too display the failure of BLM and Black leaders in power. Dhoruba advocates for policies aimed at community control of the police rather than the establishment or strengthening of community oversight of the police.
Chapter 6, “The Limitations of a Hashtag Movement”, criticizes social media movements as being easily encapsulated by liberal forces. Dhoruba uses BLM again as an example of how the enemy hijacked genuine calls for radical change and transformed it to a virtue signaling and money laundering scheme for the Democratic Party and corporations like Amazon. BLM also tied the idea of victimhood to that of abolition and liberation. BLM was a spontaneous emotional response led by victims, and as Dhoruba stated before, revolutionaries are never victims: “the minute that the victim decides that he’s not going to be a victim no more, it’s a whole different movement… now, he’s active in his own liberation.”
Chapter 7, “Soldiers’ Stories”, is Dhoruba in conversation with Black Liberation Army veterans Sekou Odinga and Thomas “Blood” McCreary. They relay important lessons on organizing while under attack by the State.
Overall, Revolution in these Times is loaded with concise analysis on our present moment by veterans of revolutionary movements in the past. Their messaging is urgent and forceful, but genuine and backed by concrete experience. It is a must-read for those planning on resisting the US government in their genocidal plan to conquer and exploit the world. It cuts no corners, grounded in accessible language, and challenges even the most dogmatic leftist. I’m grateful to have been able to sit with Dhoruba’s words and look forward to incorporating them in my organizing strategy.