Revolutionary suicide & the need to abolish the United States

In the debate between the revolutionary position and the reformist position, the root dispute is over whether revolutionary suicide should be embraced. Revolutionary suicide is the idea that should the revolution demand someone lay down their life in the struggle against oppression, they ought to accept this prospect beforehand. This is a mentality which implies that for oppression to be defeated, the state will need to be overthrown—necessarily entailing at least some degree of bloody struggle, and therefore a potential for the freedom fighters to have to sacrifice their lives. Since the reformist position claims that oppression can be ended peacefully, it’s opposed to the concept of revolutionary suicide.

These differing perspectives are especially relevant in the context of settler-colonialism, because the colonial contradiction adds an extra, racialized layer to the revisionist theory that the reformists put forth. We can see this in the theory from the Center for Political Innovation, the organization of an ideological strain that calls itself “the city-building tendency.” This year, the CPI’s guiding polemicist Caleb Maupin wrote a more nuanced version of the stance he’s previously articulated about how the “city-builders” want a “peaceful, democratic transition to socialism,” adding some qualifiers to this sweeping statement:

We reject Left adventurism and like all responsible revolutionary organizers we advocate a peaceful, democratic transition to socialism. We recognize that as capitalism enters a crisis, the ruling classes often move to abolish democratic rights in order to preserve their power. We recognize the people’s right to defend their organizations and communities in such a context. However, we are absolutely clear that we want peace and stability, not chaos. It is capitalism that is destroying the United States of America, and socialism will rescue it, rebuilding the country on new foundations, overcoming the legacy of colonialism, slavery, and many other crimes that hang over this society as a curse.

No doubt Maupin had in mind the many instances throughout history where capitalist states have sought to exterminate the communists within their borders, like in Indonesia following the 1965 CIA coup. This provides the strongest argument for utilizing force, since it obviously involves a scenario where violence is the only viable way to keep revolutionaries alive, so it’s unsurprising that the CPI would agree with it. But their stance still lacks the material analysis required for overthrowing the state.

The most telling part of that statement was the repeat of Maupin’s “peaceful, democratic” phrasing. To imply that a transition to socialism would be undemocratic if it were to be done through violence is to apply an ahistorical analysis. Were the revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam, and other locations for guerrilla warfare not democratic? As explained in Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare, there are procedures that communists are obligated to carry out to ensure that if they forcibly take territory from the jurisdiction of the capitalist state, they act as liberators rather than conquerors, functioning as agents of the will of the masses instead of going ahead of the masses. Mao said a similar thing, declaring that to go on the offensive when the masses are not yet ready is adventurism. That’s a proper critique of adventurism, superior to Maupin’s critique of it—which unnecessarily portrays a socialist transition as undemocratic if it isn’t peaceful, or purely defensive. As these communist military theorists explain, there are both times when going on the offensive and holding back are appropriate. And so long as revolutionaries judge those times correctly, the ways they act won’t go against democracy. They’ll advance democracy.

I make so much of this wording because it shows the ideological inclinations behind the other stances that the CPI, and those who share their positions on the colonial question in the U.S., uphold. These stances being that the United States has a right to exist despite being founded on colonial genocide, and that communists should try to build a “socialist America” rather than returning full jurisdiction to the tribes and building workers democracy on a post-colonial continent.

It’s that vision of ending settler-colonialism which is consistent with revolutionary suicide, because as the Black Panther Party’s newspaper stated, revolutionary suicide is “suicide motivated by the desire to change the system or die trying, to change the reactionary conditions.” A stance that seeks to “rescue” the settler state, and rejects guerrilla overthrow as going against democracy, innately goes against revolutionary suicide, as it seeks complacency with the reactionary conditions instead of defiance of them. Conditions where a settler state exists are inescapably reactionary. But the CPI doesn’t share that desire to escape them.

The CPI’s camp might argue that this is an arbitrary boundary to draw between revolution and reaction, that just because the U.S. was founded on genocide (as Maupin acknowledges it is), doesn’t mean abolishing it is required to end our reactionary conditions. If land reform is carried out under a workers democracy, as their camp advocates, wouldn’t national oppression end? This argument represents a deviation of the correct stance on the national question within the United States, as articulated by U.S. communist parties such as the Panthers. This stance being that the United States should not be changed into some redeemed settler state, but abolished.

Whereas the CPI says that “The right to a job, housing, education, and healthcare must be added to the US constitution,” the Panthers concluded that “We must draw up a new constitution, one that will apply to the needs, aspirations and desires of all oppressed peoples in America.” Their newspaper elaborates that:

We will erase the laws and all documents of all so-called guaranteed human rights, that have been misconscrewed and made non-functional for the people, including the present constitution of the U.S.A. from the pages of the history of the world. The details contained in all these documents are eternal, yet still these ideals have not and will not be put into actual practice as long as we have a country that is [not] being maintained by the people, but being run and controlled by a handful of greedy pigs. We’re saying something else has to be done in order to live and let live and enjoy the fruitility of life.

Unsurprisingly, in the same issue the Panthers declare that “There cannot be a bloodless revolution and there never will be.” This is the stance that comes from seeking to abolish the United States, which is what’s entailed by that call to erase the U.S. Constitution. The Panthers recognized that a peaceful transition to socialism is not possible; that the settler state must be disbanded rather than reformed in order for the entire proletariat to be liberated; and that it’s dishonest to portray the acknowledgment of these material realities as not democratic. In fact, theirs is the only truly democratic stance.

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