The success of national-liberation movements is intimately linked to its social content. The more the national revolution adopts a social program that embraces the burning needs of the masses, the more the masses become part of that movement, the stronger that movement, the more rapid its victory and the greater the assurance against national betrayal after the revolution. The Vietnamese liberation movement’s adoption and then implementation of a radical social program ensured national victory against overwhelming odds against US imperialism. By contrast, the conservative social agenda of the Kenyan leadership created conditions for the triumph of neocolonialism.
History has shown that it is the working-class that is the most consistent and steadfast champion of the national interest and that national movements led by the bourgeoisie and the petit-bourgeoisie frequently founder on the egotistic interests of these strata.
One of the serious shortcomings of many African-American and Puerto Rican revolutionary organizations is their ignoring the social aspect of the national liberation struggle, thus marking them as petit-bourgeois revolutionists. These groups highlight issues of police brutality, the viciousness of the criminal justice system, and various cultural aspects of racism. But they will not organize around issues such as housing, education, jobs, wages, etc.
Thus they remain generally impotent, without a mass following. Occasionally, in the wake of a particularly outrageous instance of racist brutality, they are able to generate some response from the community, but the response is ephemeral.
In Philadelphia, there is the potential for a solidly grounded national liberation movement because people like yourselves are firmly linking that movement to the people’s survival needs. This does not mean, of course, that one does not agitate around many of the same issues as do the revolutionary petit-bourgeois nationalists, but it means that one addresses racism in all its manifestations and getting people into motion.
And the masses get into motion, into sustained motion when dealing with the most pressing problems of their lives. Gradually, however, their notion of what directly impinges on their lives broadens, as their class and national consciousness deepen. And then the masses are prepared to act and even make substantial sacrifices on behalf of what are seemingly more remote issues.
Thus, while at an early stage of development, it appears that it is only college students, intellectuals and other middle class forces who are capable of throwing themselves into struggles out of their outraged sense of justice, while workers can only be moved around bread and butter issues, at an advanced stage of development, it is precisely the working people who evince the greatest heroism and sacrifice on behalf of long-range revolutionary aims, while much of the middle class, intellectuals, students, shrink from the sacrifices demanded or “come to their senses.”
The working class becomes transformed because they develop an ever-deeper understanding of the connections between their daily suffering and all oppressive social phenomena (thanks in great part to the agitational efforts of revolutionary cadres), and internalize this understanding.
To the petit-bourgeois nationalist, such issues as jobs,. housing, education, wages are not national-revolutionary issues but are to be tackled and solved only after national liberation. Two results flow therefore: Such revolutionary nationalist forces never win the support of the masses, and on the other hand, those who take up these survival issues usually do so from a reformist perspective. Thus the revolutionary nationalists in effect abandon the masses to reformist influence.
