decacsinc

American culture is a bourgeois culture. By this, i mean the dominant culture is shaped and propagated by the bourgeois (upper and middle) classes.

To be born and raised in America is to be steeped in this culture. The culture in which you are socialized shapes your ambitions and desires. Even the working and poor classes aspire to achieve the cultural standard as established by the bourgeois classes.

Individualism, competition, and consumerism are but a few of the values deriving from bourgeois culture. For the poor and working classes, these values work against Our best interests. Yet, We seem to practice these without understanding how these values only serve to keep Us subjected to bourgeois domination in the form of colonialism/neo-colonialism.

An essential aspect of revolutionary nationalist struggle is to identify and reject bourgeois values that perpetuate our oppression, exploitation and degradation.

As a colonized people, even the middle class among New Afrikans practice bourgeois values against their best interests. As such, the New Afrikan middle-class often have greater privileges than lower level working and poor classes, and typically struggle to protect and expand such privileges. As such the New Afrikan middle class accepts (existing) privilege over (envisioned) power, and never challenges colonial domination. This is the basis of neo-colonial reformism as opposed to revolution.

Amilcar Cabral says the bourgeois class (and i would also include ALL other classes within the nation) — if it wish to serve the cause of national liberation — “has only one choice: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to reject the temptations of becoming more bourgeois and the natural concerns of its class mentality, to identify itself with the working classes and not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that in order to truly fulfill the role in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie MUST BE CAPABLE OF COMMITTING SUICIDE AS A CLASS IN ORDER TO BE REBORN AS REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.” – Kwa Kwamu

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Read Amilcar Cabral’s important 1966 speech “WEAPON OF THEORY” here: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm