Category: Party Building & Activism

  • Mandela: An Example of Principled Leadership

    Mandela: An Example of Principled Leadership

    Analyzing an excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s The Long Walk to Freedom, addressed to the New African Voices Alliances in the late winter of 1990. I thought I might use the speech of Nelson Mandela as an example of what good revolutionary leadership is. Everyone has noted his remarkable strength and dignity, notwithstanding the ordeal of…

  • Nelson Mandela – An Example of Principled Leadership

    I thought I might use the speech of Nelson Mandela as an example of what good revolutionary leadership is. Everyone has noted his remarkable strength and dignity, notwithstanding the ordeal of almost 28 years in a South African prison. I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you,…

  • Racism as “Phenomenon” – Letter Excerpt, July 1989

    That the elaborate and all-pervasive system of racism has been vital to the economic and political well-being of the masters of society is a truism in all progressive sectors of society, among all left groupings. That racism is of such strategic importance that no democratic movement of any kind can generate the necessary power to…

  • A Word About the Liberals – Letter Excerpt, October 1988

    A word about the liberals. WE need to wage an all-out ideological war against them. We need to expose every vacillation, every instance of cowardice, opportunism, etc. But this does not preclude entering into agreements with them around specific issues or actions. There are times when tangible benefits for the masses and better conditions for…

  • National Liberation and Class Struggle

    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…

  • Observations of the Movement

    The worst thing for people with our viewpoint to do is to act on an ad hoc basis, to merely respond to crises or opportunities, without having some plan, without being mindful of the strategic goals of the period and fitting one’s activities into that plan and subordinating one’s activities to those strategic goals. One…

  • Gloria Richardson

    Gloria Richardson

    Gloria Richardson remains undeterred by the threat of a Guardsman’s bayonet – Cambridge, Maryland, 1963