Avant-Garde Journal

03/10/2025

On April 27th, 1968, barely three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King delivered a speech to an audience of peace activists. It was entitled “Ten Commandments on Vietnam” and drew from the notes enfolded in King’s pockets when he was murdered. These commandments commanded the people to reject the ideological consensus of the ruling elite for a War Economy, and to see the world from the perspective of humanity and children who long for peace and self-determination. Coretta Scott King explained how her husband saw the problem of racism and poverty at home and militarism abroad as two sides of the same coin: “The bombs we drop on the people of Vietnam continue to explode at home with all of their devastating potential.” Scott King was one of a long tradition in the Black Freedom Struggle who saw freedom, full employment, and peace as inseparable. They fought for a Peace Industrial Economy of the welfare state, rather than the warfare state.

Despite their tireless efforts, the vision of Coretta Scott King and the Black Freedom Struggle did not come to be. The War Economy elite extended their influence over Congress, labor unions, universities, and large swathes of the American people. They took over the American government apparatus and turned it into a warfare state, a form of state capitalism that directed America’s natural, economic, and human resources towards never ending wars. They successfully sold the lie that a permanent War Economy would bring prosperity to all Americans. The result was disinvestment in American cities and infrastructure, human potential squandered in crime and violence, and the deindustrialization and devastation of the American working class.

Today, the war consensus is breaking after decades of tacit approval. The deindustrialized masses register their anger in populist movements which reject the ruling elite and its institutions. Students march for Gaza, rejecting their war-beholden university leadership. America teeters between two choices: a continuation of racism, poverty, and war, versus a revolution of democracy, economic justice, and peace. In this context of mass disillusionment, a crisis of legitimacy unforeseen in the American body politic, we must return to the tradition of Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Ron Dellums, and others who fought to educate the people about the reality behind the War Economy and the possibility of an American renewal via a Peace Industrial Economy.

In her profound grief, Coretta Scott King spoke to the peace movement as the heirs of her husband’s legacy. As she said in that 1968 speech,

“You who have worked with and loved my husband so much, you who have kept alive the burning issue of war in the American conscience, you who will not be deluded by talk of peace, but who press on in the knowledge that the work of peacemaking must continue until the last gun is silent.

I come to you in my grief only because you keep alive the work and dreams for which my husband gave his life. My husband arrived somewhere to his strength and inspiration from the love of all people who shared his dream, that I too now come hoping you might strengthen me for the lonely road ahead.”

That road is no longer so lonely. Millions of Americans reject the War Economy and seek an alternative. The alternative lies in education for the truth about the stolen potential of the American people and the American renaissance that lies in the wings. The Black Freedom Struggle can lead us there, if we can believe in our capacity to build a Peace Industrial Economy through investment in humanity, most especially the children.

02/07/2025

What is revealed is that the main audience for Kendi’s analysis is the ruling class and policy makers. His evangelical salvation narrative is to save those in power. He wishes to teach them how to be "anti-racists."

Anthony Monteiro on Ibram X Kendi (2020)

This article was first published on Black Agenda Report on the 2nd of September, 2020. Rich white capitalists may be donating millions to Black Lives Matter, but they’re also funding and praising n…

02/03/2025

A new democratic upsurge marks Asia at this time. The need of the hour is new revolutionary ideas that come from, and can awaken the masses of the Indian and world's people. For this, a new social science, which rejects the West's pessimism and postmodernism is needed. This social science will have to study the Indian people on their own terms, and delve into the human psyche and sociology rather than just deterministic political economy. We publish here essays on three remarkable Indian social scientists: Brajendranath Seal, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, and D.D. Kosambi. Further, we explore the idea of the novel as a method of investigation of the people's life worlds in an essay on Mulk Raj Anand. Further, along with this upsurge in Asia, we must understand the strivings and spirit of the American people at this time who have elected Trump as their rebellion against the American elite. This is explored in an interview with Dr. Anthony Monteiro. Lastly, we publish an archival essay by Brajendranath Seal.

Painting: Harvester by Ramkinkar Baij

01/20/2025

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. This would require the youth to break away from patterns of narrow politics of the Trotskyite Left, identity politics, cultural nationalism, and short sighted economism to claim their own revolutionary legacy.

The Indian revolution and the Black Freedom Movement were both revolutions of a new type. They both represent to us the need for a new theory of revolution that can both explain and build on them. They cannot be understood in old categories, but are a departure in their very essence.

The legacy of the Indian revolution and Black Freedom Movement show us that revolutions cannot be defined purely in terms of the material basis of a society, but must be defined in human terms. “The burden of the material on man is ancient,” as Rabindranath Tagore said: it is man’s ideas that make him modern. The two movements show us that a revolution must be the raising of the consciousness of a people to a new stage, such that they do not accept old forms of rule, but demand a further expansion of democracy. Of course, an expansion of democracy must be accompanied by new forms of social organization and relations of production, but advances in the ideas and consciousness of a whole people may play a more central role in the revolutionary process for the 21st century than ever before. Further, revolutions must not be seen as events, but in a processual way. The Black Freedom Movement showed us that revolutionary change must not be envisioned as seizing of state power by one class, but by an expansion of democracy for the whole people. It was only through the freedom of the Black proletariat that American democracy for the whole people could be realized.

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.

01/20/2025

Seldom recognized for his philosophical and political genius, Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement because he knew his people and he knew America. He sensed the precise moment when Black people were “ready for mass action, ready for its risks, and ready for its responsibilities.” He was an earthquake in the landscape of American religious and political orthodoxy, harnessing the Black church and prophetic tradition to their fullest power. He broke the McCarthyite consensus that had frozen the nation into ideological sterility. Through his words and by his willingness to suffer, he challenged Black and white people alike in a way that no figure ever had or has since.

Like water in the desert, or light roaring down from heaven, nonviolence forged a path to democratizing America that has not yet been fully realized. This was the dialectic of the Movement: it forced American bourgeois democracy to fulfill its long-forsaken promise of legal equality and enfranchisement to Black folk, while at the same time conceiving a new type of democracy directly in the battles and campaigns waged across the South and North.

On the eve of the October Revolution, Lenin looked to the Soviet councils created by Russian workers and saw the seeds of a new democratic state that could supplant the crumbling Tsarist regime. In the whirlwind of the Third American Revolution, King saw the new human beings and social relations being created through nonviolent action and understood that therein lay the possibilities for a new people’s democracy in the United States. His name for it was the Beloved Community. James Baldwin translated this vision into a task: “achieving our country.”

It is commonly said that King became “more radical” in his later years. This is a fundamental misreading: the Civil Rights Movement and its strongest adherents were revolutionary from the beginning. Revolutions do not happen overnight, but rather proceed in stages; even a sudden lightning strike of revolutionary action is the result of deeper processes of change, tension, and protracted struggle.

The next stage of the Movement naturally reached for a broader, deeper coalition—a Poor People’s Campaign—to attack the “triple evils” of racism, poverty, and war. Where the Movement had earlier sought to negotiate with the state to gain equal rights, the question of war placed the Movement into more direct opposition to the state and monopoly power. America’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam spoke to the success of the Vietnamese liberation forces as much as it did to the demoralization and opposition of soldiers, young whites, and Black folk who listened to King and Muhammad Ali more than they did Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon. By 1967, when King named the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” he understood that he was marked for death.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the beginning of a concerted, merciless campaign to overturn the Third American Revolution as it was reaching a higher stage of development. This counter-revolution wrought more chaos and destruction than we know: it left in its wake not only the smoldering cities that erupted in anger and pain immediately after King’s death, but also the ruins of the deindustrialized, impoverished, war-like heartlands and urban metropolises that we live in today, as the nation continued to gorge itself on new wars that paved the way for the hollowing out of domestic industry as cheaper labor was secured abroad.

The ruling elite again tried to reassert control over time by making King’s memory and martyrdom obsolete. In later decades, they found it safe enough to appropriate nonviolence itself: removing its revolutionary, democratic, emancipatory essence, and turning nonviolence into an empty form of protest that could be made to serve whatever agenda the state wanted. Drunk on its apparent victories, America at the close of the 20th century found itself secure as the so-called leader of the free world. Yet for the people, it was another long night of desolation and wandering.

The Third American Revolution was forestalled and undermined—but it was not a failure. Americans are less racist than they were in 1955. They are more broadly suspicious of the ruling class than ever before. They have grown exhausted and disgusted with unending wars. These are the marks of the Third American Revolution upon the body politic of the country. Untold effort has been expended to reverse these advancements of the people’s consciousness.

The science of nonviolence can be developed in a multitude of new forms to help the American people find each other again; to openly confront the obscenities of our senile, inhuman elites; to create new spaces where the people can come together—unbothered by official institutions—to work out their common problems and grapple with their common future. Peace and war, poverty, violence, moral values, education: all these and more are questions that must be made democratic, that must be returned to the province of the people’s will. We are only at the tip of the iceberg of what can be conceived in this peculiar drama called the American experiment.

Can it be done? Can our people find it within themselves to achieve King’s vision, or are we all doomed to go down with our war-crazed ruling elite? We do not know—the shape of the future is sharp and uncertain.

But what will happen if we do nothing? What do we reveal about ourselves when we say that hundreds of millions of people in this country—and all the children to be born—are beyond saving? What does humanity demand of us, if not the complete transformation of America from an empire to a new nation that “studies war no more”?

01/19/2025

Physical copies of Issue 3 are now available! Get a copy through The Saturday Free School in Philadelphia

12/11/2024

In October 2019 in Philadelphia, Rev. James Lawson joined a conversation with members of the Saturday Free School as part of the Year of Gandhi, a yearlong celebration of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150…

12/06/2024

This is how the American State’s unabashed support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has to be seen: as a war in defense of white supremacy. Baldwin makes it clear that the “compulsive American dream of genocide” starts with the systematic destruction of Black folk. For Black folk, there is no such thing as individual freedom without the fight for the collective freedom of Black people. Thus, Baldwin would say that it was impossible to create “a separate peace” and that, “In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.” The task is for all Americans to adopt this definition of freedom—that no individual can be free for as long as society is unfree from white supremacy.

Thus, Black people have historically been at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom in America and as part of the world anti-colonial and freedom movements. Ironically, as Baldwin notes, it is Black folk, the oppressed and disinherited, who are the most free and inject new meaning into freedom. On the other hand, it is white folk who are the most unfree and must be helped through struggle to shed their ideological chains of white supremacy.

Excerpt from essay by Emily D**g and Purba Chatterjee: https://avantjournal.com/2024/11/03/relocating-the-revolutionary-james-baldwin/

11/22/2024

Written as a salute to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Baldwin's last novel explains the inheritance of a new century, and what we are to become because of our responsibility to it: Young, Gifted and Black.

Essay by Serafina Harris:

James Baldwin’s last novel explains the inheritance of a new century, and what we are to become because of our responsibility to it: Young, Gifted and Black.

11/20/2024

In the wake of the Gaza encampments of the spring, James Baldwin's prophetic words best describe the inner turmoil which besets today's students—and the moral, revolutionary choice they must now make.

Essay by Nuri Yi:

Compelled by Gaza, the student protests of late spring reestablished a moral center desperately needed in American society.

11/19/2024

In 2020, we interviewed Catherine Blunt, a longtime educator and activist in Philadelphia. She is a native of the city and has witnessed its decades of transformation, from the 1950s up to the present day. Throughout her life, Catherine has participated in numerous political movements, including the Black freedom movement, the world peace movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and the struggle against gentrification. Our interview with Catherine sought to learn more about her experiences, and to understand the principles that guide her ongoing political and community work in Philadelphia, including with The Saturday Free School for Philosophy & Black Liberation.

Today’s youth are placed at a distinct disadvantage if they wish to know the history of a city like Philadelphia, whether they are born here or newcomers to the city. The ruling class distorts our view of the past by suppressing the example of revolutionary traditions and leaders, thus limiting the possibility of discovering our own revolutionary potential for the present and future. If young people do become interested in politics, we are told that groups like the MOVE organization, which agitated against ordinary people, represent the most radical expression of politics in Philadelphia, or that increased apartment density and European-style urbanism are the progressive path to solving the housing crisis. These messages come from universities, nonprofits, dark money groups, and other powerful institutions; they do not come from people like Catherine who have been at the heart of decades-long struggles to carve out a better future for children and working people.

We published these interviews with the hope that they can open a window into a different understanding of the city and our nation’s recent history. This understanding can help us navigate the confusing, isolating ideological landscape of our times and encourage a new perspective on the contemporary possibilities and avenues of struggle today.

Interview Introduction: https://avantjournal.com/2023/01/25/catherine-blunt-interview-introduction/

Part 1: https://avantjournal.com/2023/01/25/catherine-blunt-interview-part-1/

Part 2: https://avantjournal.com/2023/02/08/catherine-blunt-interview-part-2/

Part 3: https://avantjournal.com/2023/02/16/catherine-blunt-interview-part-3/

Part 4: https://avantjournal.com/2023/03/03/catherine-blunt-interview-part-4/

Part 5: https://avantjournal.com/2023/03/23/catherine-blunt-interview-part-5/

11/18/2024

There is a door that each of us must enter
(today in Gaza — and tomorrow…?)
and the price of its ticket is death

A poem for James Baldwin, in Issue 3 of Avant-Garde:

There is a gate at the end of the world / and it is the mouth of a burning paradise

11/15/2024

James Baldwin's centenary calls for a reassessment of what freedom means in America, as well as a hard look at the q***r movement which seeks to ideologically assassinate Baldwin.

Essay by Emily D**g & Purba Chatterjee:

Baldwin’s centenary calls for a reassessment of freedom in America, as well as a hard look at the q***r movement which seeks to ideologically assassinate Baldwin.

11/13/2024

Even as the world passes through a period of erupting violence, it is clear the Western world’s sun is setting. The darker world stands at a precipice of a new colored modernity — a stage of history that finds its first example in the African American experience.

Nandita Chaturvedi's essay in Avant-Garde:

Pressing toward a new stage of modernity, the darker world finds its first example in the African American experience.

11/11/2024

"And then I got started loving the Sound of Philadelphia. So it was like part of my DNA."

Today, Jazz is assumed to be more advanced than Rhythm & Blues because it is more abstract and favored by sophisticated audiences. But each is part of a single garment of musical creativity that manifests the people, The Black Proletariat, from which it comes.

An interview with Alfie Pollitt, Master of the Philly Sound — by Michelle Lyu, Kathie Jiang, Anthony Monteiro: https://avantjournal.com/2024/11/03/alfie-pollitt-master-of-the-philly-sound/

11/08/2024

The U.S. empire is in decline, poverty increases, and for the majority of people, life is a dark and tragic landscape. Du Bois and Baldwin offer theory which ascends to the concrete realities of the U.S., especially at this moment of crisis.

Read Anthony Monteiro's essay in Issue 3 of Avant-Garde:

As two of the most important thinkers of the modern epoch, they provide foundations for new and better theory in today’s battle of ideas.

11/03/2024

In the throes of our nation's greatest crisis, we present the Third Issue of Avant-Garde. We dedicate this Issue to the revolutionary James Arthur Baldwin in the year of his centenary—with the conviction that the next 100 years may well be defined by his ideas, philosophy, language, and vision of our human future.

Read online at avantjournal.com