Revolution In These Times: Black Panther Party Veteran Dhoruba Bin Wahad on Anti-fascism, Black Liberation, and a Culture of Resistance
by Dhoruba Bin Wahad
Common Notions, £14.99

A REVOLUTIONARY is not a victim. In fact, a revolutionary fights against victimhood past, present and future. Former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army (BLA) member Dhoruba Bin-Wahad not only understands this truth, he preaches it and he lives it.

Revolution in These Times is a collection of conversations, interviews and talks featuring Bin-Wahad. These forums took place over the past 10 years or so. Many of them are (edited for clarity) transcripts of conversations held on Black Power Media, an alternative media undertaking founded by Kalonji Jama Changa that describes its politics as Pan-Africanist, internationalist, and socialist.

The topics addressed include the history of white supremacy and the resistance to it, the nature of US capitalism and the political system it commands, the nature of reform under that system, and the history of the Black Liberation Army, the New York Black Panthers, COINTELPRO and other counter-intelligence programmes run against black liberation and other radical left organisations by the US government.

The result is a book filled with history and political theory examined and discussed by those who have learned from books and from praxis. The understandings expressed within these covers provides both a basis and inspiration to create a way forward in a time when what Bin-Wahad calls “democratic fascism” is removing any of its remaining democratic elements ever more quickly.

One of the crucial features of the current US political system is one Bin-Wahad calls encapsulation. Bin-Wahad describes the process as “the tactic and strategy of war and repression.”

The fundamental components include appropriating the language and occasionally even the so-called leaders of a movement into the elite’s political system of elections, lobbying and NGOs. Meanwhile, the actual substance is removed and replaced by often meaningless legislation or the exact opposite of the movement’s intentions.

A couple of recent examples of this process include the transformation of the movement against the US war on Iraq into a campaign to get Barack Obama into the White House. The war not only continued, it expanded into places not even Dubya Bush and Donald Rumsfeld had sent forces into.

Another more recent example is the so-called Black Lives Matter movement. Using the small city of Burlington, Vermont (where I live) as an example, the results of the protests against police brutality and racism in that town have been an increase of the police budget and the creation of more police positions that essentially operate as a kinder, gentler nightstick (truncheon).

Bin-Wahad brings up similar examples while simultaneously pointing out that this doesn’t mean the protests were a failure, but were focused on victimhood, not on gaining power. In other words, movements against war and the police state must be movements for popular power because those currently in power have no reason to change the way things are.

Bin-Wahad makes the point that a movement resisting the capitalist state must know history; the history of the struggle and the history of the system the struggle is fighting.

While Bin-Wahad lauds the spirit of the BLM protests and the numbers involved in the mobilisations after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, he also criticises its leadership as a leadership that at best minimised their historical knowledge and focused instead on Floyd’s victimhood (and that of others murdered by the police).

The criticisms are not made in a manner that diminishes the importance of the movement or the protests, but as a means to understand why they ultimately failed. To those who might argue that they didn’t fail, a few statistics should clarify the truth of that statement. Every year since 2020 has seen an increase in killings by police. Furthermore, the rate of killings of unarmed black men by cops is more than double the rate of killings of the dead classified as Hispanic or white.

This juncture is where history becomes ever more important. If those fighting the powers that be today are unaware of the history of their struggle — unaware of its militancy and its revolutionary politics — they are unlikely to consider such politics for themselves.

Instead, radical reform becomes the end goal rather than a place to pass through on the trail to liberation. Like Bin-Wahad and his host remark, if BLM stood for Black Liberation Movement and not Black Lives Matter, then there could be some hope for our future.

The focus of movements against fascism and its manifestations should be about building power in the community, not latching on to already existing power structures. This latter phenomenon is one reason the movements Bin-Wahad calls hashtag movements fail.

Dhoruba bin Wahad is legit. Revolution in These Times is a book about history and power. It’s about the powerful erasing of history, and about having power and fighting for power. It’s about rejecting the identity of victim and learning to be a revolutionary.

Like Dhoruba’s life story, it’s also about the determination required to maintain the focus required to oppose the ever more pervasive nightmare the modern world of billionaires and the governments they own.

In its telling, the authors go after those who profit from the movement—the folks the Black Panthers called pork-chop nationalists and the self-appointed leaders, and the politicians who talk the game but play for the other side.

This aspect of the book is perhaps unforgiving, but it is done with a clear focus on who and what should not be forgiven. Their ultimately regressive role in history is crucial to not repeating that history.

This is an abridge version of a review that first appeared in counterpunch.org