vision statement
US imperialism and its Zionist puppets have brought humanity close to a 3rd world war. The Palestinian people and their martyrs, women, children and the elderly, are contributing mightily to the dual projects of anticolonial and anti white supremacist liberation, and for world peace. These are unprecedented times. Tectonic shifts in the movements of humanity are unfolding in front of our eyes. The negative peace of a unipolar neocolonial world order led by the West, a Pax Americana, as it were, which our generation became adjusted to, is becoming a thing of the past. President Biden’s most recent speech to the Congress has called for financing war, not only against Russia, but also the Palestinian people and the broader Middle East, including Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. His speech promised future wars against China and North Korea. The ruling elite has lifted the veil, revealing that their only agenda is war. Whatever moral legitimacy they had in the world, has crumbled. The overwhelming majority of the world’s people categorically reject its war agenda, choosing to break away from its web of political, economic and ideological control.
The call to war exposes the bankruptcy of the ruling class, which has no vision for a future worthy of the American people. Homelessness, poverty, unemployment and under-employment, drug epidemics and crime ravage every major city and widespread parts of America. Increasing numbers of the youth slip further into self-degradation and nihilism, unable to imagine a future worth fighting for. The depth of the domestic political crisis is perhaps most starkly seen in the fact that more than 40% of the population do not vote.
The upcoming election will be fought on the question of war, peace and the economic wellbeing of the people. We are approaching a moment of reckoning for the establishment, who remain unalterably committed to the triple evils of racism, poverty and war. At the same time, the American people are war-weary, and more anti-war than ever. They are joining hands with world humanity in the effort to build a lasting and positive peace. They aspire to create a Peace Economy, centered on the human, rather than profits from endless wars. Today this is the foremost imperative for living dignified, purposeful lives.
History teaches us that in times such as these, a ruling class in crisis is desperate to maintain its legitimacy with new forms of control. It is prepared to go to any length to thwart a people’s struggle for peace and genuine democracy. The world has moved far beyond the time when the scientific pursuit of knowledge, to change the world, lay in the hands of a few : today, the masses of humanity are prepared to make their contribution to the struggle to democratically transform the world. At the center of this struggle is the struggle for ideas. The ideological struggle to win the future must draw on lessons from history and be rooted in the concrete conditions of today. With this aim, we commence on this two-day symposium studying the life, legacy and thought of one of the most original thinkers America has produced, Henry Winston.
Henry Winston was the Chairman of the National Board of the CPUSA from 1966 until his death in 1986. He was born in Hattiesburg Mississippi in the heart of the segregated South after the defeat of Reconstruction. Growing up under racist terror and extreme poverty, he embodied the lifeworld of the Black proletariat. The options left to a young Winston were a life of unending misery and degradation, or a life in struggle. The uplift of dignity and decency in the lives of the most oppressed would be his life’s work, and he held that knowledge of the world was indispensable to struggle. As he would say, “We drink from the fountain of knowledge from whatever source, and use it for social advance.” Winston studied the world through active engagement with various forces involved in changing it. He came into contact with the Young Communist League through his work with the Unemployed Council of Kansas City, Missouri, fighting for the army of unemployed that was rapidly growing during the Great Depression of the 30’s. He joined the efforts to defend the freedom of the “Scottsboro boys”, who were on trial for the unpardonable crime of being Black. By the age of 25, he was the national organization secretary of the Young Communist Leage, and a member of the National Board of the CPUSA. His study of politics, philosophy, history and economy naturally led him to the science of Marxism-Leninism at the International Lenin School in the Soviet Union, which was attended by world revolutionary figures such as Josip Tito, Deng Xiaoping and Ho Chi Minh. He developed close relations not only with revolutionary figures in the Soviet Union, but also with the leadership of anticolonial movements in Africa, in particular in the People’s Republic of Congo, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, the Communist Parties of Sudan and South Africa. He saw the World Communist Movement as the leading force for peace and democracy in the world, and Marxism-Leninism as the general theory to understand and guide the revolutionary process.
At the same time, Winston saw the revolutionary process in America to be a part of the world revolutionary process, albeit a unique part. His study of W.E.B. Du Bois, especially Black Reconstruction in America, allowed him to fundamentally ground the struggle in America in the centrality of the Black proletariat. The capitalist economy, with the US at its center, was built on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. Du Bois formulates the sociological category of the Black worker, an enslaved proletariat created by a white supremacist social system, on whose back was built the capitalist economy. However, the Black proletariat was not simply the most oppressed, but constitute the vanguard of the revolutionary process. At every stage in America’s history, while the ruling class had fortified its political control through new forms of attack on the working class, the Black struggle has furthered the cause of democracy and class emancipation. Armed with Du Bois’ special theory of the class struggle in America and Lenin’s general theory, Winston works out a revolutionary synthesis in theory and practice for the science of social change. He emphatically asserts that the Black struggle is not a thing in-itself, but forms the basis for principled unity of the world movement from the age of imperialism to the age of humanity.
Not only does Winston deploy a revolutionary science to further the broad democratic struggle, but he must be seen as a scientist who furthers scientific knowledge. At a time when countless freedom fighters such as Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Winston himself, were persecuted by the McCarthy era anticommunist witch hunt, he strove tirelessly to elevate the science of Marxism-Leninism to the changing concrete realities in America. His theoretical and political work must be seen as part of a whole. His centering of the Black worker in the class struggle, while at the same time fighting endlessly for a united working class, changed the very way the class and antiracist struggles were thought of. Winston connects the anti-slavery and anti-monopoly struggles, and their chief theorists, Frederick Douglass and Marx, and Lenin and Du Bois, to show that the Black proletariat was the advance guard in the struggle against racist monopoly capital.
Strategy for a Black Agenda, and his subsequent work Class, Race and Black Liberation, shows the full scope of Winston’s thought and his working out of a scientific synthesis indispensable to the struggle in America. It shows a dynamic mind that was rooted in the concrete Black struggle, but international in outlook. Winston saw the essential oneness of the world, a oneness necessitated by a global capitalist economy and neocolonial war agenda, and the struggles against it. The Russian Revolution, the anti- colonial movements of Asia and Africa, the world communist and peace movements against imperialism, and the Black liberation movement, were all distinct in their strategy and forms. However, they shared
the essential unity of fighting different stages of the same capitalist system , operating through white supremacy, colonialism and neocolonialism. The basis for principled unity between Black America and neo colonized Africa was not a “skin strategy” but a common imperialist enemy and a shared future in peace, democracy and socialism. Armed with this clarity and vision, Winston exposed the various and varied ideological currents of neo-Pan Africanism, cultural nationalism and Maoism for what they were : ideas that ultimately obscure imperialism and stand in the way of a united struggle against it.
Today, we live in very different times than Winston’s. The rising tide of neocolonialism is today at a stage of crisis, with most of Africa and West Asia breaking away from the West’s orbit. Neither are the American people where we were : the nation has been fundamentally changed by the Black freedom movement of the last century, and by the leadership and vision of Martin Luther King. It has laid the grounds for yet another revolution. The Fourth American Revolution, which completes the radical revolution of values that King demanded, contains the seed for the emergence of a new American people.
Henry Winston’s thinking offers a scientific basis for this emergence, a new people who are more Black than White, and centered on the Black proletariat and his monumental contributions. This moment in history is ripe with possibilities of a philosophical shift from the logic of imperialism toward a new stage of humanity, and science is indispensable to this transition. We speak of science in its broadest sense as the method for advancing knowledge and seeking truth. As such, science is inseparable from its revolutionary purpose of changing the world, and revolutionary times call for a qualitative leap in science itself. Today, at a time when science is weaponized by the ruling class to serve its own agenda, it is up to the people to recapture the revolutionary spirit of science, and free it from dogma and irrelevance to ordinary lives. This calls for a reappraisal of science itself. As the Indian scientist, scholar and freedom fighter, D.D. Kosambi said, science is the cognition of necessity. Thus we see science and freedom as inseparable parts of the movement of humanity.
The Saturday Free School organizes this two-day symposium to study Henry Winston’s mind, and develop his science for our times. In this moment, youth and children must be convinced there is a sky and a future worth fighting for. We call on the youth and children of our nation, to join the youth and children of Palestine, for it is they who will bring the future into being. The solidarity of the youth and children of these two peoples, Palestine and America, is an act of revolutionary love. It is the only way out of this moment of intense crisis, to forge out a moment of clarity, and be a part of the forward movement of humanity.
The call to war exposes the bankruptcy of the ruling class, which has no vision for a future worthy of the American people. Homelessness, poverty, unemployment and under-employment, drug epidemics and crime ravage every major city and widespread parts of America. Increasing numbers of the youth slip further into self-degradation and nihilism, unable to imagine a future worth fighting for. The depth of the domestic political crisis is perhaps most starkly seen in the fact that more than 40% of the population do not vote.
The upcoming election will be fought on the question of war, peace and the economic wellbeing of the people. We are approaching a moment of reckoning for the establishment, who remain unalterably committed to the triple evils of racism, poverty and war. At the same time, the American people are war-weary, and more anti-war than ever. They are joining hands with world humanity in the effort to build a lasting and positive peace. They aspire to create a Peace Economy, centered on the human, rather than profits from endless wars. Today this is the foremost imperative for living dignified, purposeful lives.
History teaches us that in times such as these, a ruling class in crisis is desperate to maintain its legitimacy with new forms of control. It is prepared to go to any length to thwart a people’s struggle for peace and genuine democracy. The world has moved far beyond the time when the scientific pursuit of knowledge, to change the world, lay in the hands of a few : today, the masses of humanity are prepared to make their contribution to the struggle to democratically transform the world. At the center of this struggle is the struggle for ideas. The ideological struggle to win the future must draw on lessons from history and be rooted in the concrete conditions of today. With this aim, we commence on this two-day symposium studying the life, legacy and thought of one of the most original thinkers America has produced, Henry Winston.
Henry Winston was the Chairman of the National Board of the CPUSA from 1966 until his death in 1986. He was born in Hattiesburg Mississippi in the heart of the segregated South after the defeat of Reconstruction. Growing up under racist terror and extreme poverty, he embodied the lifeworld of the Black proletariat. The options left to a young Winston were a life of unending misery and degradation, or a life in struggle. The uplift of dignity and decency in the lives of the most oppressed would be his life’s work, and he held that knowledge of the world was indispensable to struggle. As he would say, “We drink from the fountain of knowledge from whatever source, and use it for social advance.” Winston studied the world through active engagement with various forces involved in changing it. He came into contact with the Young Communist League through his work with the Unemployed Council of Kansas City, Missouri, fighting for the army of unemployed that was rapidly growing during the Great Depression of the 30’s. He joined the efforts to defend the freedom of the “Scottsboro boys”, who were on trial for the unpardonable crime of being Black. By the age of 25, he was the national organization secretary of the Young Communist Leage, and a member of the National Board of the CPUSA. His study of politics, philosophy, history and economy naturally led him to the science of Marxism-Leninism at the International Lenin School in the Soviet Union, which was attended by world revolutionary figures such as Josip Tito, Deng Xiaoping and Ho Chi Minh. He developed close relations not only with revolutionary figures in the Soviet Union, but also with the leadership of anticolonial movements in Africa, in particular in the People’s Republic of Congo, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, the Communist Parties of Sudan and South Africa. He saw the World Communist Movement as the leading force for peace and democracy in the world, and Marxism-Leninism as the general theory to understand and guide the revolutionary process.
At the same time, Winston saw the revolutionary process in America to be a part of the world revolutionary process, albeit a unique part. His study of W.E.B. Du Bois, especially Black Reconstruction in America, allowed him to fundamentally ground the struggle in America in the centrality of the Black proletariat. The capitalist economy, with the US at its center, was built on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. Du Bois formulates the sociological category of the Black worker, an enslaved proletariat created by a white supremacist social system, on whose back was built the capitalist economy. However, the Black proletariat was not simply the most oppressed, but constitute the vanguard of the revolutionary process. At every stage in America’s history, while the ruling class had fortified its political control through new forms of attack on the working class, the Black struggle has furthered the cause of democracy and class emancipation. Armed with Du Bois’ special theory of the class struggle in America and Lenin’s general theory, Winston works out a revolutionary synthesis in theory and practice for the science of social change. He emphatically asserts that the Black struggle is not a thing in-itself, but forms the basis for principled unity of the world movement from the age of imperialism to the age of humanity.
Not only does Winston deploy a revolutionary science to further the broad democratic struggle, but he must be seen as a scientist who furthers scientific knowledge. At a time when countless freedom fighters such as Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Winston himself, were persecuted by the McCarthy era anticommunist witch hunt, he strove tirelessly to elevate the science of Marxism-Leninism to the changing concrete realities in America. His theoretical and political work must be seen as part of a whole. His centering of the Black worker in the class struggle, while at the same time fighting endlessly for a united working class, changed the very way the class and antiracist struggles were thought of. Winston connects the anti-slavery and anti-monopoly struggles, and their chief theorists, Frederick Douglass and Marx, and Lenin and Du Bois, to show that the Black proletariat was the advance guard in the struggle against racist monopoly capital.
Strategy for a Black Agenda, and his subsequent work Class, Race and Black Liberation, shows the full scope of Winston’s thought and his working out of a scientific synthesis indispensable to the struggle in America. It shows a dynamic mind that was rooted in the concrete Black struggle, but international in outlook. Winston saw the essential oneness of the world, a oneness necessitated by a global capitalist economy and neocolonial war agenda, and the struggles against it. The Russian Revolution, the anti- colonial movements of Asia and Africa, the world communist and peace movements against imperialism, and the Black liberation movement, were all distinct in their strategy and forms. However, they shared
the essential unity of fighting different stages of the same capitalist system , operating through white supremacy, colonialism and neocolonialism. The basis for principled unity between Black America and neo colonized Africa was not a “skin strategy” but a common imperialist enemy and a shared future in peace, democracy and socialism. Armed with this clarity and vision, Winston exposed the various and varied ideological currents of neo-Pan Africanism, cultural nationalism and Maoism for what they were : ideas that ultimately obscure imperialism and stand in the way of a united struggle against it.
Today, we live in very different times than Winston’s. The rising tide of neocolonialism is today at a stage of crisis, with most of Africa and West Asia breaking away from the West’s orbit. Neither are the American people where we were : the nation has been fundamentally changed by the Black freedom movement of the last century, and by the leadership and vision of Martin Luther King. It has laid the grounds for yet another revolution. The Fourth American Revolution, which completes the radical revolution of values that King demanded, contains the seed for the emergence of a new American people.
Henry Winston’s thinking offers a scientific basis for this emergence, a new people who are more Black than White, and centered on the Black proletariat and his monumental contributions. This moment in history is ripe with possibilities of a philosophical shift from the logic of imperialism toward a new stage of humanity, and science is indispensable to this transition. We speak of science in its broadest sense as the method for advancing knowledge and seeking truth. As such, science is inseparable from its revolutionary purpose of changing the world, and revolutionary times call for a qualitative leap in science itself. Today, at a time when science is weaponized by the ruling class to serve its own agenda, it is up to the people to recapture the revolutionary spirit of science, and free it from dogma and irrelevance to ordinary lives. This calls for a reappraisal of science itself. As the Indian scientist, scholar and freedom fighter, D.D. Kosambi said, science is the cognition of necessity. Thus we see science and freedom as inseparable parts of the movement of humanity.
The Saturday Free School organizes this two-day symposium to study Henry Winston’s mind, and develop his science for our times. In this moment, youth and children must be convinced there is a sky and a future worth fighting for. We call on the youth and children of our nation, to join the youth and children of Palestine, for it is they who will bring the future into being. The solidarity of the youth and children of these two peoples, Palestine and America, is an act of revolutionary love. It is the only way out of this moment of intense crisis, to forge out a moment of clarity, and be a part of the forward movement of humanity.
