The alternative is an uncompromising revolutionary stance against the universality of racial capitalism. Our historical materialist analysis understands theory as the material force that galvanizes workers against global imperialism and exploitation.

The same contradiction, between the impotence of “hegemonic” critical theory in civil society and the material power of revolutionary theory in the hands of the oppressed masses, can be appreciated by turning to a person who was arguably at the time the second most advanced Marxist theorist in California and likely the United States as a whole: George Jackson. Jackson became imprisoned in 1960 as a teenaged petty criminal and had no formal education. For holding up a gas station, he was given an “indeterminate” sentence, which became a practical life sentence. By the end of the decade, he was the Black Panther Party’s leading theoretician and wrote cogently on the application of Lenin and other revolutionary theorists to the struggle for liberation in the United States and especially in the prison system. He did this with a shockingly limited access to textual resources and wrote much of his theoretical output on a plastic typewriter. As was and is common in U.S. prisons, he was subjected to extended solitary confinement as punishment, some of that time in open-air cages. In his letters and writings he described the prison’s sadistic tortures, its corruptions and obscenities and plots. At the time of his death he had ninety-nine books in his cell: his access to Lenin’s thought was limited and he mostly had to rely on secondary sources or anthologies. The fact that his theoretical development was so acute and sophisticated under these conditions suggests something of the universal pertinence of revolutionary theory in the Leninist vein. In his theoretical work, especially Blood in My Eye, a major work published posthumously, Jackson attempted a clear-eyed confrontation with the “fascist” character of the U.S. racial state and social system. He also excavated Leninist revolutionary theory’s relevance to the predicament of America’s oppressed masses, insisting over and again on the international character of the struggles raging in U.S. ghettos and prisons. Following Mao Zedong in particular, Jackson advocated a prolonged people’s war against the U.S. government. Echoing Engels, he insisted that “People’s War is not polite or proper. . . . People’s War is improvisation and more improvisa- tion.”25 Following Fanon, he appreciated the importance of state violence in imposing colonial conditions and recognized that the development of revolutionary class consciousness was hindered absent a militarily powerful revolutionary movement that could offer real protection for oppressed peoples. Like Lenin, Jackson always framed his struggle as a planetary struggle of oppressed peoples against imperialism. In Left-Wing Communism and other texts, Lenin characterized the newly formed workers’ state as engaged in unrelenting war with the international bourgeoisie. For Jackson likewise, the latest sadistic technique of brutality introduced by the “pigs”—prison guards—was but a material manifestation of the real global struggle that the Black Panther Party shared with the National Liberation Front, and other military forces opposing the U.S. empire. Jackson is a quintessential Leninist not only because he persistently advocated for proletarian revolution (although that is so), but because he conceived of his own struggle, which was one of life and death within a small enclosed space, as part and parcel of a planetary transition that was open to scientific, materialist analysis. From his cell, Jackson could reevaluate the history of the U.S. state and social system without illusion, and realize that as a racial dictatorship, its history was linked to and coeval with other forms of fascism. Prison lays power relations bare—on that, most would agree. But for Jackson, the effect was not to narrow his vision to the demoralizing and undignified intrusions of the state onto his person, but to evince a stark and penetrating analysis of the prison as a legible manifestation of white supremacist global governance. It is such a perspective, I am arguing in part, that allows for and warrants the designation “Leninist”: an uncompromisingly revolutionary stance toward “local” political questions, such as the fate of one particular nation-state: We must accept the eventuality of bringing the USA to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked down, the commonness of death. . . . We simply stop allowing ourselves to be hunted and do some stalking of our own; their secret police aren’t really too secret at all. (55) As Lenin insisted in State and Revolution, a materialist idea of the state sees it as nothing more than “special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc.”26 From George Jackson’s vantage point of being completely controlled by this apparatus, he concluded optimistically that its overthrow was nigh. The latter, moreover, was a prerequisite for the realization of a true universality, one where Black people were in fact free to live. What does it mean to point, then, to the unrealized universality of (Leninist) revolutionary theory? For one thing, it serves to remind us that whatever one thinks of the heroic scenario of the proletariat’s role in history, its alleged mission to abolish first the capitalist system and then all class distinctions as such (creating a proletarian state and then “withering” it into nonexistence),27 it is a theoretical terrain open to the future—and not one that restricts understanding of class struggle to the point of production.28 Second, perhaps more pointedly, it reminds us that for Lenin and revo- lutionary theorists of the twentieth century broadly, imperialism was the name for the planetary system into which capitalism had developed, not a policy of this or that country. Imperialism was, and is, inseparable from the division of the planet into oppressor and oppressed nationalities: liberation from national oppression thus cannot come without a confrontation with imperialism qua global system. Third, and most pointedly still, it insists that there can be no talk of universality as if it were a settled accomplishment: we cannot talk as if humanity is not still “divided.” Put more simply, “humanity” itself is (has always been) the name for a false, presumptive (white supremacist) operationalization of “universality,” the latter having been foreclosed by the racial dynamics of capitalism’s own development. Finally, we cannot understand Black Leninism without understanding its never-ending confrontation with white supremacist counterrevolutionary forces, without understanding Blackness as premature death, without the dialectical relations of the “unrealized” and universal. White supremacist state violence is not an ancillary condition of capitalism—it cannot be explained away in a footnote as in contradiction to this or that philosopher’s appeal to the universal condition of humanity. On the contrary, the “universal” as we have come to inherit it is not just drenched in blood, but irredeemably constricted by its emergence from within the racial partitioning of humanity. Only a revolutionary break with the white supremacist racial states that continue to govern the imperialist system can allow for the realization of a true universality. If we take together the examples of two mid-century comrades, Angela Davis and George Jackson, it couldn’t be clearer: the Black claim to universal emancipation elicits state violence. Liberation for Black people means liberation from the U.S. empire, which is why the latter designates so many state resources to the global and local maintenance of white supremacy. The violence unleashed against Jackson and whosoever invoked his name to assert the “humanity” of the imprisoned (at Attica and so on); the state’s determined effort to try Davis for her life—such examples must be appreciated in the context of a truly planetary operational field (U.S. support for Rhodesia, its proxy wars to prop up apartheid Southern Africa, etc.). Quite simply, the history of Black Leninism suggests that the putative universals we have come to anticipate, such as “humanity” or emancipation per se or theory for that matter, require a thoroughgoing and radical reconstruction, rather than to be “decentered” amid a pluralism of incommensurate forms of life. After the apparent contraction of Black liberation struggles in the late 1970s, the (temporary) end of the long Black freedom movement, there was much academic hand-wringing about whether and to what degree Marxist theory does or can attend to Black liberation, to a universality constituted by Black people: does it not throw Marxism, or Leninism, as “European” theories, into epistemological crisis, or push them uncomfortably into a different ontological terrain? On the contrary, I have argued in this section that it is only by way of Black critique of putative universals do we arrive at the truly universal implications (realizable in the future) of the Leninist ambition to overthrow imperialism as the world system. Moreover, critiques of the presumptive universality of (white, European) theory are necessary to the revival of revolutionary theory per se—not as an idealist, academic language game, but as a material force that grips and bolsters the multinational working class. The final section will examine one particular example of a policy oriented toward a revolutionary transformation within the heart of imperialism—the Black Belt Thesis.