How I Became a Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist Revolutionary:
An intellectual autobiography
 
By
 
Charles McKelvey
 

A young Cuban women who works in the Department of International Relations of the University of Havana read some of my blog posts.  She expressed to me surprise that someone from the United States would have such views.  She asked me if I could write something explaining how I arrived to the understandings and convictions that I presently hold.  I told her that I would try to do so, and what follows is the result of that effort.  It was written principally in late December of 2015.


    I am a retired professor from the United States, now living mostly in socialist Cuba.  I consider myself a Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist revolutionary.  I believe that the project of Marx has evolved in theory and practice through various stages: the Russian Revolution, led by Lenin; the Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel; and the project of “socialism for the twenty-first century,” declared by Chávez.  The phrase Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist is a shorthand expression: Marx was accompanied by Engels; Lenin, by Trotsky; in addition to Fidel, there was Ho Chi Minh and a host of leaders of movements of national liberation in Asia, Africa and Latin America during the middle decades of the twentieth century; and with Chávez have been Evo Morales of Bolivia, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and others.  As an intellectual and revolutionary, I am committed to seeking to make a contribution to the development of the subjective conditions that would make possible a popular revolution in my own country, the United States.  

     These autobiographical reflections seek to explain how I arrived to be a Marxist-Leninist-Fidelst-Chavist revolutionary, in spite of coming from a white middle class suburban social background in the United States in the 1950s.  It was a process of intellectual and moral conversion that has been gradual and deep, driven above all by a desire to understand the true, the right, and the good.


Family and social background

     I am the grandson of immigrants to the United States from Ireland and Italy who settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  They must have migrated around the beginning of the twentieth century.  Since my parents were oriented to making a life in “America,” I learned nothing of the life of my grandparents before their migration.  My father’s parents died before I was born, and my father rarely spoke of them.  I remember my mother’s parents.  But my Italian grandfather died when I was six, and my grandmother when I was seven, so I have only images of them.  My mother spoke of them with affection, and she portrayed her father as one who established rules that had to be followed, although not enforced in a harsh manner.  He was oriented, she said, to cultural assimilation in the United States.  Near the end of his life, he visited his family in Italy, but he did not enjoy the visit, feeling that he no longer belonged, as I understand it.

      My Irish grandfather developed a business tending to the lawns of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) living in the suburbs.  It is a thriving business today, owned and managed by my cousins.  My Italian grandfather, on the basis of his capacity to speak English, worked as a foreman in a hat factory, which had WASP management and Italian immigrant workers.  So both of my parents were products of the white ethnic merchant class, persons of high standing within the ethnic neighborhood but of low standing in US society as a whole.  This contradictory situation can produce a strong work ethic, as one becomes oriented to proving worth to the larger society.  My father possessed it, and so do I.

      My father was born in 1911.  At the age of 18, he obtained employment as a “messenger boy” at an insurance firm in downtown Philadelphia, adjacent to historic independence square.  The firm was developed by Daniel J. Walsh, an Irish-American, and it continued for decades under family ownership and management.  For many years until my father’s death in 1970, the firm was managed my Margaret Walsh, who was either the daughter, granddaughter or niece of Daniel.  Later, the firm was managed by Margaret’s nephews.

      My father went to night school for eleven years, the tuition paid by the Walsh’s Insurance Brokers.  At first, he went to Overbrook High evening school, in order to complete the college preparation courses. When he was a teenager at Lower Merion High School, no one told this son of Irish immigrants that he should take the college prep program.  He knew he wanted to be a businessman, so he believed that he should take the commercial program, which actually was more intended for training secretaries.  After completion of the college prep program at night school, he enrolled at the Evening Division of the prestigious Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.  Five certificates were needed to obtain a degree.  He completed three of these, all in business related fields.  He did not try to obtain the certificates in social science and science, believing that they were not necessary for his career, and that eleven years of night school was enough.  At some point during his night school studies, he became a broker in the Walsh firm, and he eventually functioned as an assistant manager of the firm, even though he did not have such a formal title.  The relation between him and the Walsh family was deep, because he appreciated their support for his career, and they were pleased with his contributions to the firm.  My father was generally viewed as a successful businessman.

      My father also enjoyed life intensely.  He played golf on Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays and Sundays.  The fees for the Chester Valley Golf Club were paid by the Walsh firm, and it was a good investment, because he had many clients at the club.  On the weekends, his tee time was 10:00 a.m.  The round finished at 2:00, and he drank and enjoyed the camaraderie of the men’s bar until 6:00.  He often was one of the centers of attraction at these men-only social affairs, telling stories and making jokes.  The men loved him for his outgoing and audacious personality; their wives considered him a bad influence, but they did not say so openly, out of respect for their husbands.

     My brother and I were included in the activities of the golf club.  I learned to play golf at the age of six, and I began caddying for my father at the age of 11.  Juniors could play on the weekends after 2:00, so I played golf while my father was at the club bar.  I also had the duty, being the most sensitive of the three of us, to pry my father away from the bar at 6:00, reminding him that Mom was preparing dinner, and she never liked it when we arrived late.  He always agreed that I was right, but at the same time he was very reluctant to leave.

    My father also was an avid sports fan, and my brother and I were included in these activities as well.  He went to just about every Phillies home night game (day games interfered with golf).  He sat in the bleachers, the inexpensive seats.  He interacted vigorously with his fellow fans, many of whom also were regulars in the bleachers.  He seemed to take no notice of the race or class of his bleacher mates; the important thing for him was their knowledge of the national pastime.

      Attendance at major league professional sporting events (baseball, football and basketball) was also intertwined with alcohol.  My father would buy a six-pack of beer prior to entering the bleachers, and would consume it during the game.  Following the game, we often would stop at a bar on the way home.  These were often working-class bars, and my father would enter into conversations and would quickly become the life of the party.  It was a racially-segregated and gender-segregated world.  When women were present, almost always accompanied by a man, my father treated them with courtesy and respect.  When a black man was occasionally present, my father included him in the party, jokingly dismissing any suggestion that blacks should be excluded.

      This is not to say that my father was free of prejudice.  He was active in restricting the number of Jews who could join the golf club, and he for the most part accepted the racial discrimination in employment and education of the 1950s.  However, he had no inclination to believe that some races and ethnic groups were superior to others.  For him, it as a matter of protecting group interests.  He believed that we Irish, Italians and Poles, who are excluded from many clubs, have to protect our own social space; clubs that allowed Jews to enter quickly became Jewish clubs, he maintained.  Similarly, the exclusion of blacks from certain occupations and educational opportunities functioned to ensure that there would be places for us, in a world in which we ourselves were victimized by prejudice and discrimination, even though, he understood, it was of a less extensive and less violent form.

     My mother was born in 1913.  My mother and father grew up in separate Irish and Italian neighborhoods of Narberth and Overbrook, such ethnic residential separation being common in that era.  For this reason, most white ethnics married within their particular ethnic group.  My mother met my father at Overbrook High School evening school, where she was taking a secretarial course, and he was completing the college preparatory program.  Both of their families objected to the relation for its violation of the ethnic norms, but they persisted.  She worked as a secretary prior to marrying, and she became a full-time homemaker upon her marriage to my father.

       My mother suffered from asthma and pernicious anemia, and later developed stomach cancer, which may have been a side-effect of the weekly B-12 shots that she was given as a treatment for anemia.  Her illnesses restricted her capacity to accompany my father in his very active life.  But she did participate to some extent, particularly at the golf club, and she was a highly respected person in the social world of the club, appreciated for her knowledge of public affairs, her maturity of judgment, and her sensitivity.  Since I was the youngest son, she sometimes confided in me the burdens that her illnesses imposed, which fostered in me an appreciation for the sufferings of others.

     My mother read a great deal, and many of her friends considered her an intellectual.  She appreciated this designation, which she considered high praise, but she also believed that her friends did not really know what an intellectual is.  In her view, an intellectual not only reads, but also writes.  But she certainly did read, and her reading material consisted primarily of books and editorials on the important political and social themes of the time.  She became quite knowledgeable about public affairs, developing a progressive perspective on social issues.  She for the most part supported the civil rights movement, and she in general had sympathy for the peoples of the world, excluded and suffering.  Moreover, prior to the emergence of the ecology movement, she expressed ideas that reflected an ecological consciousness.  My father, who never read anything that was not a business contract or was not on the sports page, tended to disagree with her progressive views.  But he engaged in conversations with her on social issues, and he always did so in a respectful manner.  He was never dismissive of her or her progressive views.  My oldest brother’s first wife often commented on the moral authority of my mother, a fragile and soft-spoken women, in a family of outgoing and opinionated men.

     I learned extremely important lessons from my mother.  Above all, I learned to be sensitive to the sufferings of others.  And almost of equal importance, I learned that we can deepen our understanding through reading.  My mother also taught me, by example, to have the courage to read about issues of importance, and to not be afraid to express your views to others, even though they may be controversial. This last lesson dovetailed with a lesson that I was learning from my father, also by example:  live your life as you want to live it, not how others want you to live.  In essence, I learned from my mother, but also from my father, to read, to think, to express, to be.

     The ideological world of my mother and father was shaped by the liberal-conservative consensus of the United States in the 1950s and the early 1960s.  I of course was shaped by this intellectual environment.  I was fourteen when John F. Kennedy ran for president.  I was fascinated by his candidacy, and I helped in a minor way to distribute campaign brochures.  I was attracted by Kennedy’s youth and vigor, but also by the socially significant fact that he was Irish Catholic, and he would become the first Catholic president.  I read his books, Profiles in Courage and Strategies for Peace, which tilted my thinking more to the liberal side.  In 1964, I read Barry Goldwater’s The Conscious of a Conservative, which moved me decisively to the right with respect to economic issues and foreign affairs, but not with respect to civil rights.

    My supportive orientation of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s was shaped not only by my mother’s progressive views; they were also influenced by my experiences at Upper Merion High School in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.  My parents had moved from the city to the suburbs in 1948, when I was two year old.  We moved to a recently constructed housing development in the suburbs, isolated from commerce and manufacturing.  The residents in such neighborhood were mostly young white middle class families.  This was the norm in Upper Merion Township, which in the 1950s was rapidly converted into a residential suburb of Philadelphia.  It was a conservative and un-cosmopolitan environment.

     Although there were some Catholics, we were a minority.  I was designated, and I to some extent cultivated it, as an “Irish Wop.”  Wop was a derogatory term for Italians, apparently coming from “without official papers,” or in other words, an illegal immigrant.  This was done in jest, but it sometimes bothered me, and it particularly bothered me, when in my limited and clumsy attempts at dating and with respect to my friendships, I learned or felt that some parents objected to me because of my ethnicity and/or religion. My parents told me to ignore such slights, and to not be affected by the sentiments of ignorant people.  I could not completely follow the advice of my parents, and I don’t think they could either.  I considered this social rejection to be completely unfair, because my father was a successful businessman and my mother was a homemaker who was providing a stable environment for her children.  I was learning an important lesson:  “America” claims to be democratic, but it does not fully understand what democracy means.

      This experience was the core of my attraction of the Civil Rights Movement, for which I had an intuitive sympathy.  African-Americans in movement were stating that the United States is less democratic than it claims, and the truth of this assertion was evident to me, as the grandson of Irish and Italian immigrants. The sentiment that the United States possessed the pretension but not the essence of democracy would be pivotal when I would later encounter ideas beyond the liberal-conservative consensus. 


From liberal-conservative to radical

     I entered college at Drexel University in 1964, with the intention of studying electrical engineering.  I really liked physics and math, which had been my best subjects in high school.  However, I became dissatisfied, for I soon realized that the engineering curriculum left little room for the study of social issues, about which I was passionate, even though much less gifted by nature.  Inasmuch as Drexel was at that time an engineering school, I decided to transfer to Penn State, and I began studies there in the fall of 1965.

      At Drexel, I had supported the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, and I vigorously defended his conservative views in informal discussions.  But by the time I graduated from Penn State in 1969, I had become a political radical.  Penn State, isolated in the mountains, was no Berkeley, but it did have manifestations of the popular revolution unfolding in the late 1960s.  Black students were organized in the Douglass Association, named for Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth century former slave, abolitionist and defender of a radical concept of democracy.  The Douglass Association set up tables with literature at central points on campus, and they would “rap” with anyone willing.  I often stopped by, occasionally asking questions but mostly listening to the “rap.”  The manner of the black students was aggressive, and their discourse was angry, an anger that was directed against whites in general and white society.  I looked beyond the anger and focused on the content of their message.  The African-Movement had turned to black power in 1966, and the black student discourse reflected this, focusing on the need for blacks to obtain power in order to protect their rights.  The Douglass Association students also denounced US imperialism, which was denying the sovereign rights of the black and brown peoples of the earth.  I felt that the black students were on to something, and I had respect for them.  On one occasion, they lowered the American flag to half-staff in order commemorate the assassination of Malcom X, provoking an angry reaction among some white students; I stood with the black students in support of their action, the only white to do so.

     I had much more mixed feelings with respect to the student anti-war movement, which was rapidly spreading on campus from 1965 to 1969.  Although in essence correct in demanding an end to the Vietnam War and in calling for university reform, it was characterized by ideological contradictions, immaturity, superficial understanding, and destructive tactics.  I was especially troubled by its failure to consistently reflect on the systemic implications of the war in Vietnam; by its conflation of political protest and personal rebellion in regard to dress, drugs and sex; and by its inattention to building the foundation for a sustained popular movement.  Nevertheless, because I considered the movement to be correct in essence, I participated in anti-war demonstrations, quietly and to some extent as a listener and observer. Although we were white middle class students, and considered ourselves as such, we nonetheless were conscious of ethnic identities, and we were aware that many of us were Jews, Irish, Italians and Poles, and that many of us belonged to the first generation in our families to attend the university.  

     It was a stimulating environment, with new ideas flowing everywhere, formulated by black students and radical white students, including white graduate students.  Our professors indirectly contributed to the environment, encouraging us to be receptive to new ideas and to decide on the basis of reason, and not unquestionably accept ideas that we had been taught at home, school and community.  Some professors contributed more directly to the new intellectual tendencies.  Professor Brewster in Political Science required us to read Peace in Vietnam, a 100-page book written by the Society of Friends (Quakers), a pacifist religion.  The book succinctly described the history of Vietnam, enabling me to understand that the Vietnamese had formed a nationalist struggle against French colonial rule and the subsequent US military intervention.  The National Liberation Front of Vietnam, I concluded, was a popular democratic movement justified in its goals and strategies.  In addition, a course on the History of Africa, offered by Professor Goldschmidt, taught me the basics of European colonialism in Africa and the justifiable African struggle of national liberation, leading to political independence, but not true independence.  These two courses, taken in 1966 and 1967, provided me with my first glimpse of the colonial character of the world-system and the role of imperialism in seeking to maintain it.

     The entire experience of a black student movement, a student anti-war movement, and an education rooted in Enlightenment principles, including influential courses critiquing colonialism, moved me considerably to the Left during my four years at Penn State.  When I entered the university, I had planned to become a military officer following graduation, with the assumption that I would serve in Vietnam.  After my arrival at the university, I applied and was accepted for a two-year program offered by the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC), which would have enabled me to become a Marine Officer upon graduation.  But when the time came to begin the program, my thinking had been increasingly moving against the war, so I thought it best to decline the offer to enter the program, following my mother’s advice.  By the time I graduated from the university, I was convinced that the war was unjustifiable and US militarism indefensible.  I therefore decided to provide medical evidence, which I had obscured in my application to NROTC, documenting that I had been diagnosed with petit mal at age 13.  This evidence disqualified me from military service and enabled me to evade the military draft.  I considered this a great pity, and I still do, because since my childhood I had admired military men, and I had wanted to spend at least a part of my life as a military officer.  But one who is fully committed to democracy cannot possibly be a military officer in an imperialist nation.

     My major at Penn State was Religious Studies.  I was attracted to it as a result of a course on the Old Testament taught by a graduate student, Terry Foreman.  The course text was Bernhard Anderson’s Understanding the Old Testament, which drew upon modern biblical scholarship to interpret the meaning of the ancient texts.  I was fascinated by the capacity of biblical scholarship to liberate the Bible from literal interpretations.  I also took three courses from the Catholic French theologian, Fr. Georges Tavard.  And I was influenced by a course on Religion and Social Ethics, which was taught by a professor of Japanese origin, Dr. Yoshio Fukuyama, and which spent a considerable amount of time on the Civil Rights Movement.  My minor was philosophy, which provided a structure for the reading and discussion of some of the works of Camus, Sartre, and Heidegger.  

     During my years at Penn State, I arrived at the decision to pursue a career in college teaching.  So following graduation from Penn State, I enrolled for graduate study in Catholic theology at the University of Saint Michael’s College, a Catholic university that was part of the University of Toronto.  However, I was interested in religion for its capacity to provide meaning to the human condition and to provide a foundation for emancipation and social justice.  But the program at Saint Michael’s College was strictly theological, and less connected to social issues than had been the study of religion at Penn State.  I decided to withdraw from the program after a couple of months.  During my brief stay in Toronto in the Fall of 1969, I joined a Toronto group in the mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC.


From radical to Black Nationalist

     In January of 1970, circumstances brought me to the city of Chicago, where I enrolled in a master’s program at the Center for Inner City Studies of Northeastern Illinois University.  The Center had a Black Nationalist orientation, and it provided the foundation to my transformation into a revolutionary.  Although I had arrived with a glimpse of imperialism and neocolonialism, the Center provided me with a broader and deeper view of the world from the vantage point of the colonized.  It offered “colonial analysis,” seeing European colonial domination of Africa, Asia and Latin America as fundamental to the making of the modern world.  European colonialism, I learned, had political, economic, educational, cultural and psychological dimensions, involving a thorough transformation of the society of the colonized, established on a foundation of conquest and military force.  The economic system of the conquered peoples was reoriented toward the production for export of raw materials to the “Mother Country,” which among other consequences, undermined the traditional manufacturing of the colonized peoples.  An “educated elite” was formed, with the expectation that it would represent the colonial power in the colony.  However, the educated elite did not fulfill this role, and it instead led the people in mass independence movements.  But the educated elite, tied to structures created during the colonial process, had an interest in the reform of the colonial system and not in its revolutionary transformation.  Therefore, colonial structures were preserved in a neocolonial form following political independence.  There were, however, revolutionary members of the educated elite, such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, who were attempting to lead their nations toward a true independence.

     The three teachers at the Center who influenced me the most were: Jacob Carruthers, a political philosopher for whom the Center is today named; Anderson Thompson, at the time a graduate student in history at the University of Chicago, who possessed an audacious rhetoric; and Elkin Sithole, an anthropologist in political exile from apartheid South Africa.  All of my teachers, and ninety percent of the students, were black.  We few white students were accepted by black professors and students, because we did not paternalistically presume to teach.  We genuinely were there to learn, and we considered it a privilege to be in an environment where the insights of the colonized flowed freely.  

    By the time I received my master’s degree in 1972, I had learned to look at the world from the vantage point of the colonized.  I had read the speeches and writings of Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, and Julius Nyerere.  And I had read the writings of African and African-American intellectuals: Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Chinua Achebe, Harold Cruse, and W.E. B. DuBois.  I believed then, and I still do now, that the essential claim of colonial analysis, which is that European colonial domination is the primary fact of the modern world and the foundation of the present world-system, cannot reasonably be denied.  I wondered at the time what white social scientists and historians had to say about this claim, if they had an alternative interpretation of the structures and dynamics of European colonialism.  I later learned, in my study of modernization theory, that white social scientists basically ignored colonialism and neocolonialism, as though black scholarship did not exist.  Perhaps this was due to racist assumptions, or perhaps it was because the insights of black scholars were inconvenient, inconsistent with the economic interests of whites.  But regardless of why it occurs, ignoring insights is not reasonable; it is unacceptable in the quest for understanding the true and the right.

    I was twenty-six years old.  I had learned to think from the perspective of the colonized, but I did not pertain to the colonized.  I belonged to the world of white middle-class “America,” which materially benefited from European colonial and neocolonial domination of the world.  In spite of my formation by black scholars, I never lost a sense of who I was and where I was from.  I wrested with the implications of colonial analysis for white society.

     I took very seriously the advice of Malcolm X: concerned whites should teach in the white community, seeking to educate whites with respect to racial injustices.   And so I continued with the plan to pursue a career in college teaching.  I returned to Penn State to enroll in a newly created doctoral program in Religious Studies, which focused on religion in the United States.  Although the program had been presented as interdisciplinary and as providing unusual opportunities for individualized direction of study, in fact it was strongly oriented to early American Protestant thought.  At the end of the first year, my examination for candidacy was not approved.  The professors wanted me to retake the exam, focusing more on what I had learned to that point in the program, rather than my projections for future study. However, sensing a significant gap between my goals and the perspective of the professors, I decided to withdraw from the program.

      In the Fall of 1973, quite by chance, I obtained a job as Instructor of Sociology at Gannon College, an urban Catholic college in Erie, Pennsylvania.  This meant that my subsequent fate would be tied to the discipline of sociology.  My quest to understand up to that point had transcended the disciplinary boundaries.  I had read works on the sociology of religion by the classic sociological thinkers Max Weber and Emile Durkheim; but I had no particular identification with sociology, or any other academic discipline. But now career demands required that I address the questions that I was raising within the framework of the discipline of sociology.


Lonergan: Objective knowledge through cross-horizon encounter

     I could not avoid reflecting back on my formal undergraduate education at Penn State.  The truly radical ideas that had prepared me for the Center for Inner City Studies came not from university classes, but from the black and anti-war student movements.  For the most part, even though I was oriented to selecting courses that were relevant to the social issues of the day, I had not been taught by my professors of the role of colonialism in creating the development of the West and the underdevelopment of the vast region of the Third World.  Even professors Brewster and Goldschmidt did not see the world as understood by Jacob Carruthers and Anderson Thompson.  I did not doubt the sincerity or the good intentions of my white professors at Penn State.  I believed that they were honestly teaching what they understood to be true.  But I could not deny that they were overlooking the significance of fundamental historical facts, and that their understanding was an implicit Eurocentric justification of white privilege.  

    I was confronting a fundamental epistemological problem: understanding is profoundly shaped by social position.  The problem is illustrated by the basic difference between white social science and black scholarship, rooted in the different social experiences of the colonizer and the colonized.  What are the implications of this?  Is objective knowledge possible, or is all knowledge of society rooted in social position?  Is there a reasonable resolution to the differences between white social science and black scholarship, or is truth what those in power say it is?  

     From the period of 1972 to 1976, I believed that an objective knowledge of society is unattainable.  I formulated this thesis in a paper, "Weber and the Problem of Objectivity: Toward a Subjectivist Sociology."  I argued that Max Weber, in the formulation of the concept of value-relevance, maintained that a knowledge transcending cultural boundaries cannot be attained.  I further argued that the discipline of sociology had ignored Weber’s insight by focusing on his concept of ethical neutrality, which he meant in a much more limited sense.  I maintained that the discipline should affirm its subjectivist essence.  I presented the paper at the Pennsylvania Sociological Society on November 1, 1975, the first scholarly conference I had ever attended.  

     In order to move ahead in my career in college teaching, I decided to study for a doctorate in sociology. At the same time, I was sympathetic to the revival of white ethnicity, which had emerged among Americans of Irish and Southern and Eastern European descent in the early 1970s, influenced by the turn toward cultural nationalism in African-American society.  So I applied for doctoral study at a few Catholic universities, including Fordham University in New York City, and I sent to them a copy of my paper on Weber and subjectivist sociology.

     I subsequently received a telephone call from Rev. Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, S.J.  Nearing retirement at that time, Father Fitz was the son of Irish immigrants, and he had arrived to be an influential person at Fordham University and New York City.  He had been a leading figure in an earlier intellectual current seeking to define a Catholic sociology.  As a young priest assigned to Puerto Rico in the early 1950s, he had encountered the same issue that I would later encounter in the black community: the Puerto Rican understanding of the modern world was fundamentally different from the English-speaking North.  He had wrestled with the epistemological implications of this throughout his career, and he ultimately arrived at the conclusion that the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan had formulated an “understanding of understanding” that addressed these issues.  He arranged for me to study sociological theory and the sociology of religion at Fordham, in a program of study that included courses in the philosophy department, including a course on Lonergan offered by Dr. Gerald McCool, S.J.

       My study of Lonergan convinced me that a form of objective knowledge is attainable.  Such knowledge is not eternal, but it transcends the limitations established by assumptions rooted in culture. Such knowledge has validity for a particular stage of human development.  However, to attain this form of objective knowledge, two conditions are necessary.  First, the person who seeks understanding must be driven primarily by the desire to know, setting aside other desires, such as the desire to protect the interests of particular classes or nations.  Lonergan insists that, although we all have desires other than the desire to know, there are persons whose lives are consumed by the desire to understand, spending countless hours in their study or in their laboratory.  Secondly, in order to attain objective knowledge, such persons driven by the desire to know must seek encounter with persons from other cultural and social horizons, taking seriously their understandings; through this process of personal encounter, persons seeking understanding discover questions that are relevant to the issue at hand.  When persons seeking understanding discover relevant questions that are beyond their horizon, they have an experience of intellectual, moral and spiritual conversion, enabling them to formulate an understanding that transcends their socially rooted horizon.

      Reflecting on the implications of Lonergan’s cognitional theory, I could see that the Eurocentrism of white social science was not an intrinsic problem.  It was a consequence of the fact that white social scientists did not take seriously the understanding of the colonized.  If white social scientists had encountered the colonized in a quest for understanding, they would have appreciated that, for the colonized, colonial domination has been central in creating global inequalities.  They would have discovered relevant questions, such as, what has been the role of colonialism in creating global inequalities and Third World underdevelopment?  If committed to understanding, white social scientists would have had to empirically investigate this question, leading to consciousness of significant historical events in the colonized regions of the world.  White social scientists who encounter the colonized and who possess the desire to know as their primary desire will experience a transformation of their understanding, moving them beyond ethnocentric theories and assumptions, rooted in white society and culture.  Personal encounter with the colonized is the key to overcoming the colonial denial of Eurocentric social science.  

     Whereas Lonergan had formulated the cognitional process as involving encounter with persons of different horizons, I reformulated this as encounter with the social movements constituted by the subjugated, the dominated and the exploited.  My experience in the black community in the early 1970s had taught me that it was the leaders and intellectuals of the movement that had given the most reflection to the colonial situation, and therefore they were in the best position to facilitate the discovery of relevant questions by white intellectuals seeking to understand.

     I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the implications of Lonergan’s cognitional theory for sociological theory, a project that was fully supported by Father Fitz, Father McCool, and Dr. James R. Kelly, another of my professors had Fordham.  The three formed my dissertation committee.


From Lonergan to Marx
 
     My study at Fordham from 1976 to 1978 did not include study of Marx.  When Father Fitz sent me on my way in my journey of seeking understanding, he advised me to study Marx.  And I did so.  I read The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, the three volumes of Capital, the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and The Poverty of Philosophy, and I read biographies of Marx.  

     Reading and writing on Marx’s project were central to my intellectual work from 1978 to 1988, during which time I regularly presented papers at sociological conferences, establishing relations with colleagues who were sociologists of the Left.  During this period, I taught at Saint Mary’s College, a woman’s Catholic college in South Bend, Indiana; and at Clemson University in South Carolina.  I was dismissed from both, mainly for violating the disciplinary boundaries in my teaching (at St. Mary’s) and writing (at Clemson).

     As a result of my reading of Marx, I came to understand that Marx’s approach to learning exemplified the method of seeking encounter with the movements constituted by the exploited.  Marx obtained a doctorate in the German university system, and he was formed in the tradition of German philosophy.  He moved to Paris in October, 1843, and this led him to encounter the intellectual traditions of British political-economy and French socialism, and to encounter the social movement formed by artisans, workers and intellectuals in Paris.  This simultaneous process of encounter with different intellectual and cultural horizons and with the social movement emerging from below enabled him to formulate a comprehensive analysis of human history and of modern capitalism, synthesizing German philosophy and British political economy.  And his analysis of capitalism and human history was undertaken from a proletarian point of view, from the vantage point of the seller of labor power.  

      Marx’s work represented a significant advance in understanding human history and society.  It incorporated the fields of philosophy, political economy, and history.  It transcended cultural boundaries defined by Britain, France and Germany.  And whereas all previous knowledge had been formulated by the privileged classes and had assumed this vantage point from above, Marx’s analysis was written from below.  As such, it had enormous emancipatory potential, for it implied the possibility of knowledge in service of the people, rather than elite interests.

      Because of the emancipatory potential of Marx’s project, it had to be marginalized, if elite interests were to be protected.  This was accomplished in the last decades of the nineteenth century by the development of history, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology as distinct disciplines, all of them separated from philosophy.  This fragmentation of knowledge reduced the probability that Marx’s comprehensive project would be a point of reference and that a similar comprehensive project would emerge.  Moreover, a positivist epistemology emerged, mandating a “value-free” approach to knowledge and undermining the possibility that academic work tied to social movements would formulate an analysis from below.  The implications of Marx’s project for a further advance in human knowledge and human freedom were eclipsed.

     Although I understood Marx’s method to be exemplary, providing the model for all of us who seek to understand human history and society, I at the same time recognized that Marx formulated his understanding in Western Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century.  This obvious fact had been central to the Black Nationalist critique of Marxism.  I believed, therefore, that we should follow Marx’s method, but we should not necessarily adopt his conclusions, which were conditioned by time and place. We need to take into account developments since Marx’s time as well as developments outside of Europe.

      Of primary importance in this regard is the fact that the proletarian revolution of Western Europe did not triumph.  Instead, a proletarian-peasant revolution triumphed in Russia, and peasant-petit bourgeois anti-imperialist revolutions triumphed in such places as China, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua.  At the same time, in the West, the superexploitation of the colonized and neocolonized zones, combined with state deficit spending, made possible significant concessions to the working class, converting the proletarian movement into a reform movement allied with international capital and imperialism in opposition to the national liberation movements of the Third World.  As a result, during the twentieth century, the Western industrial proletariat was no longer in the vanguard of the socialist revolution; this role was assumed by the Third World national liberation movements.  If we are to follow Marx’s method, we must formulate a new comprehensive analysis of human history and modern capitalism, written not from the vantage point of the nineteenth century industrial proletariat, but from the vantage point of the colonized.

     Such a reformulation of Marx’s project from the vantage point of the colonized would necessarily include a key insight of Marx: society consists of classes with particular interests, and this generates social conflict, as classes act to defend their interests.  In the case of the colonial situation, the national bourgeoisie has an interest in the reform of colonialism, but not its revolutionary transformation, because it benefits from the economic and commercial structures established during the colonial process.  In contrast, the popular classes and sectors have an interest in the transformation of colonial structures, in order that the institutions established by the colonized can be restructured to respond to the social and economic rights of the people.  Marxist class analysis enables us to understand that the political behavior of the African national bourgeoisie in support of its particular class interests was an important factor in preventing the Third World project of the 1960s and 1970s from attaining its goals.  And it enables us to understand that defense of the interests of popular sectors would be necessary for the attainment of true independence.  Thus, we can see that what is required is a synthesis of the class analysis of Marx and the colonial analysis of the Third World national liberation movement.  I would later learn that such a synthesis was indeed being forged by Third World charismatic leaders, such as Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro.

     Such was the understanding that I had formulated during the period 1978-88.  I had arrived to the view that Marx’s method of encounter with the social movement from below was exemplary for social science, and that the substance of Marx’s conclusions should be reformulated on a basis of encounter with the anti-colonial movements of the Third World.  During this period, I also read European neo-Marxists, such as Althusser, Gramsci, Habermas, Horkheimer, Lukács, and Marcuse.  In general, I considered these works to be insightful, but they did not point to a reconstruction of Marx’s project from the vantage point of the colonized.  I wrote a book on Marx’s methodology, and after some difficulty in finding a publisher, it was published by Greenwood Press in 1991.

      During the period 1978-88, I also began reading the works of Immanuel Wallerstein.  Wallerstein had encountered the African nationalist movement in the early 1960s, and this experience enabled him to formulate an understanding of the development of the modern-world system, taking into account the perspective of the colonized.  Wallerstein described the peripheralization of Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, converting them into zones of forced and superexploited labor for the exportation of raw materials to the core zones, and transforming them into zones that purchased the surplus manufactured goods of the core.  I considered Wallerstein’s work as confirming the colonial analysis of the Center for Inner City Studies, although placing Africa and Africa America in a broader global context.  In my study of Wallerstein in subsequent years, I would learn that, although he has a profound understanding of global structures of domination, he does not have a good understanding of Third World movements of national liberation, as a result of the fact that he did not continue with a process of sustained encounter with the Third World movements in the subsequent development of his ideas, following his encounter with African nationalism early in his career.  

      Thus, by 1988, I continued to be a Black Nationalist, recognizing the primacy of colonial analysis in understanding the modern world-system.  I had come to believe that white social scientists can attain objective knowledge, if they seek encounter with the movements constituted by the dominated.  And I had become a Marxist.  Not a classical Marxist, because I believed that we should follow Marx’s method, and not necessarily adopt his conclusions.  I believed that a new comprehensive formulation of human history from the vantage point of the colonized was necessary, which would affirm the need for the development of socialism in some form.

      In 1988, I was elected to serve as a Jesse Jackson delegate at the Democratic National Convention. The South Carolina Democratic Party had a caucus system, which provided some opportunity for interchange among the voters, all of whom were potential delegates.  There were some older black women who were forceful in presenting the idea that the delegates should include whites.  I had opportunity to present the Black Nationalist aspects of my background, and I was among the delegates elected at the South Carolina state convention for the national convention.  At the national convention, the meetings among the Jackson delegates were exhilarating.  I came to the conclusion that the Jackson candidacy was a revival of the Civil Rights Movement, drawing from the nationalist and civil rights strains within the movement.  I decided to write a book on Jackson’s candidacy as a renewal of the African-American Movement.  I tried to describe the continuity in the evolution of the ideas of the movement from the Pan-Africanism of the 1920s to the Jackson presidential candidacies of 1984 and 1988.  The book was published by General Hall in 1994.  In the period 1988 to 1990, Jackson delegates from South Carolina met on several occasions, seeking to establish the Rainbow Coalition as a popular organization in South Carolina.  But we were unable to keep the effort alive.


Encountering the popular movement in Honduras

     In the Fall of 1988, I obtained a position as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina.  By 1994, I had risen to the rank of Professor, and I had been granted tenure. The chair of the Department of Sociology had wanted to deny my application for tenure, on the grounds that I was a Marxist.  But a number of faculty members; from the departments of sociology, political science, history, English literature, religion, economics and business administration, biology, modern foreign languages, and art; came to my defense, and the sociology chair was overruled.  I was most grateful for receiving the security of tenure, after being dismissed from two positions for ignoring the disciplinary boundaries in my teaching and writing.  I am indebted to the senior professors at this small, church-related college, who were fundamentally decent men who possessed a sense of fairness.  On the other hand, I was to endure marginality as a tenured professor at the college, in part because of suspicion towards my radical and socialist orientation, and in part because of my own alienation from the bureaucratic structures of higher education.  

     During my twenty-three years at Presbyterian College, I developed experiential courses and programs in Honduras and Cuba, in which students and professors from the North learned about the neocolonial situation and the popular struggles of the South.  Some of the programs were independent of the College and were sponsored by the Center for Development Studies, a non-profit organization (now defunct) that I created for this purpose.  The programs were rooted in extensive travel to Honduras and Cuba.  

    I began to travel to Honduras in the early 1990s.  I followed the Lonerganian-Marxist method of encountering a social movement formed by the subjugated.  I listened to everybody: people that I met as I explored the capital city, leaders and activists in popular organizations, journalists, professors and politicians.  I read the daily newspapers, and I studied the books of Honduran academics and intellectuals. I was in Honduras during the implementation of the neoliberal project, and I could see firsthand its negative consequences for the standard of living of the people, particularly the effect of the end of state protection of the national currency, which led to a steep rise in the cost of goods in Honduran lempiras.  

     From 1990 to 1996, I spent on average four months of each year in Honduras, including the full academic year of 1994-95.  I conversed and read in Spanish.  I had arrived with a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, on the basis of courses that I had taken in high school and college.  As a result of constant conversations, my Spanish was developing.  During the months of the year when I was teaching courses at Presbyterian College in South Carolina, I listed to Spanish-language television program and read Spanish-language magazines every day, and I sat in on Spanish courses at the College.

     In the process of encounter with the Honduran popular movement and with the people, I found that the movement had a pervasive influence on the people.  Many people had internalized movement concepts and ideas, and intellectuals connected to the movement were known by the people.  And I found that the analysis of the movement and intellectuals connected to it was in essence the same as the colonial analysis of the Center for Inner City Studies.  It focused on the Spanish conquest, colonial domination, political independence that was not true independence, US imperialist penetration, and the popular movements in opposition to neocolonial structures.  In addition, I noted the vitality of the popular movement.  Popular organizations were mobilized in protest of the neoliberal project, and they were able present their demands in a united way in the form of a “Platform of Struggle.”  

     In addition, I had extensive conversation with women who had founded women’s organizations in Honduras in the 1980s.  They explained that in their turn to the issue of gender, they were careful to express these new demands in ways that did not appear to be critical of the men who had been leading the general social struggle and who were held in high regard by the people.  These Honduran leaders of the women’s movement rejected the criticism of feminists from the North, who viewed the formulations and the strategies of the Honduran women’s organizations as not sufficiently radical.  The Honduran women leaders, determined to develop a Honduran form of feminism, maintained that feminists from the North had little understanding of Honduran reality.  In Honduras, they maintained, there was not only a struggle for gender equality, but also a popular social struggle to try to establish that Honduran children would have beans to eat.  The goal of the Honduran women’s movement was the integration of the issue of gender into the general social struggle for national sovereignty and the protection of the social and economic rights of the people, thus bringing the popular movement to a more advanced stage.


Encountering the Cuban revolutionary project

     I first traveled to Cuba in 1993, to attend an interchange between US sociologists and the Facultad Latinoamericana de las Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) of the University of Havana, which was organized by the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association.  Since that first trip, I have traveled to Cuba extensively, engaging in a process of encounter with the Cuban people and the Cuban revolutionary project.  Again, I use the word encounter in Lonergan’s sense; I have been following the Lonerganian-Marxist method of encountering the social movements formed by the subjugated.  

     When I first arrived in Cuba, I was surprised immediately in two respects.  First, arriving in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, I had expected that Cuban socialism would soon fall.  Indeed, there was a deep economic crisis, which had caused a drastic cut in public transportation and a radical energy saving measure involving the reducing of electric services to homes and public buildings to twelve hours per day.  But in the midst of the crisis, I sensed a determination among the people to continue with their socialist project.  I said to myself, “I am not sure this thing is going to fall.”

     Secondly, I had assumed that Cuban public political discourse would be Marxist.  But I found that the political discourse was primarily anti-colonial.  It was in essence the same discourse that I had learned at the Center for Inner City Studies.  It focused on colonialism, neocolonialism, and the popular anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial struggle for true independence, reaching its most advanced stage following the triumph of the revolution in 1959.  The Cuban discourse, I had un-expectantly found, was a Third World discourse, holding fundamental concepts in common with the African-American movement and the popular movements of Central America.  I said to myself, “I have heard all of this before.”

      As I subsequently continued the process of encounter in Cuba, I at first was especially oriented to confirming if my initial unexpected impressions were correct.  And indeed they were confirmed.  As all the world knows and increasingly appreciates, the Cuban socialist revolution persists to this day.  With respect to the political discourse, I would learn that Cuba has forged a synthesis of a national liberation perspective, rooted in the political leadership and writings of the late nineteenth century revolutionary José Martí; and a Marxist-Leninist perspective, adapted to the particular conditions of Cuba.  

    A synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and national liberation initially was forged in Cuba by Julio Antonio Mella, the most important leader of the popular movement in the period 1921 to 1925, and one of the founders of the first Cuban communist party and the federation of university students.  It subsequently was developed, in a somewhat different form, by Antonio Guiteras from 1931 to 1935, who headed the revolutionary sector of the “government of 100 days” of 1933, the only government during the republic that did not have the support of the United States.  The Marxist-Leninist/Cuban nationalist synthesis attained its most advanced formulation with Fidel, who led the Cuban Revolution from 1953 to 2008.  

    The synthesis includes the class analysis of Marx, which understands that political action is driven by particular class interests.  However, it places this class insight into a larger framework that reflects the vantage point of the colonized, which focuses on: the conquest of the indigenous peoples; Spanish colonial domination; the peripheralization of the economy during colonial rule, involving large-scale production of sugar and coffee for export, using African slave labor; the launching of a dual struggle for independence and social transformation in 1868, eclipsed by the US intervention of 1898; the preservation of colonial economic and commercial structures during the neocolonial republic; US imperialist policies in order to sustain the neocolonial republic; the emergence of an anti-imperialist movement in the 1920s and early 1930s, eclipsed by US support of Batista in 1933; the revolutionary struggle of 1953 to 1959, led by Fidel; the socialist transformations since 1959, providing concrete benefits to the people, especially in the areas of health and education; and an international policy by the revolutionary government of solidarity with the peoples of the world, seeking a more just and democratic world-system that would be an alternative to the neocolonial world-system.

      During the first several years of my encounter in Cuba, in addition to confirming my initial impressions, I discovered two other facts, which I did not anticipate, with respect to the Cuban revolutionary project.  First, Cuba has a highly democratic political system, with extremely high levels of popular participation.  Free and secret elections are held in small voting districts, where voters select from two or more competing candidates, all of whom are nominated in neighborhood assemblies of the voters, and whose candidacy is presented without political party affiliation.  The elections have exceptionally high levels of voter turnout, in excess of 90%.  The elected delegates to the 169 municipal assemblies in turn nominate the delegates of the fourteen provincial assemblies and the deputies of the national assembly, which are confirmed by popular vote.  The national assembly is the highest authority in the nation; it enacts legislation, and it elects the Council of Ministers and of State, which is the executive branch of the government.  

     Intertwined with this political system, known as “Popular Power,” the people are organized in mass organizations of workers, students, women, neighborhoods, small agriculturalists, and agricultural cooperativists, with a participation rate of eighty-five to ninety-nine percent.  The leadership of these organization are selected from the base, in a manner similar to Popular Power.  The commissions (legislative committees) of the National Assembly are required by the Constitution of 1976 to have representation from the mass organizations in developing legislation.

     I was surprised to learn of Cuba’s system of participatory democracy, concerning which I did not have the slightest inkling prior to my arrival in Cuba.  The Cuban political system is not well known outside of Cuba, and even the defenders of Cuba often do not mention the Cuban structure of participatory democracy.  Seeking to correct this unawareness, I wrote an article on “The Myth of Cuban Dictatorship,” which bounced around the Internet for a period.  It was published in 1998 as “Cuban Democracy” in Global Times and in Cyberjournal, an on-line journal published by the Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance.  I continued to reflect on this issue, and I ultimately would arrive to see popular democracy in some form as integral to the process of socialist transformation in the world.

     The second surprising discovery, during the first several years of encounter in Cuba, was that Fidel Castro possesses extraordinary gifts.  I came to this discovery as a result of listening to Fidel’s discourses on Cuban television, reading two lengthy interviews with him by an Italian journalist and a Brazilain priest, and reading speeches he delivered, including a long speech at the First Cuban Communist Party Congress in 1974 as well as others at international fora, where he addressed the external debt of the Third World countries.  His gifts include an exceptional capacity to understand global structures of domination.  He sometimes displayed, for example, more knowledge of the workings of the world-economy than the great majority of economists.  And his gifts include an unwavering commitment to those living in humble conditions, which was demonstrated by his remarkable command of details in explaining how practical problems confronted by the people were addressed by the revolution.  This discovery of the exceptional gifts of Fidel prompted my initial reflections on the role of the charismatic leader in revolutionary processes, which I would later come to understand as a general phenomenon in revolutionary processes, and as necessary for socialist transformation.


Encountering the Latin American quest for a second, definitive independence

      As my encounter with the Cuban revolutionary project was unfolding, I began to write “La Vista del Sur,” a semiweekly column that appeared in La Opinión Hispana, a Spanish-language weekly newspaper located in Greenville, South Carolina.  One hundred seventy-nine articles were published from June 2001 to September 2008.  Writing the articles required me to keep abreast of events in Latin America, during a time in which the politics of the region were dynamically changing.  I used as my principal resource a Cuban Website, www.visionesalternativas.com.  Most of the articles were from Prensa Latina, a Cuban press agency.  They were commentaries and analyses of developments in Latin America, written from the perspective of the Latin American Left, and selected by a Cuban editorial staff.  My study of these articles on a regular basis enabled me to arrive to the understanding that Latin America during the period was pushing the world-wide socialist revolution to a new stage, characterized by: the taking of power by multiple popular sectors in coalition; the taking of power through bourgeois structures of representative democracy, but accompanied by new participatory political structures of popular councils; the recognition of various forms of private property, combined with advances in the nationalization of major industries; greater utilization of natural resources for the common good; the direction of resources toward social missions, with the intention of addressing the social and economic needs of the people; the toleration of private ownership of the media of communication, but accompanied by the expansion of state-owned media; and the development of Latin American and Caribbean union and integration, in accordance with the concept of South-South cooperation.

     My association with La Opinión Hispana, in which I was submitting articles as a voluntary contribution without compensation, facilitated my attendance as a member of the press at the 2006 meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana.  My coverage of the event enabled me to see that the Non-Aligned Movement, an international movement organization whose membership consisted of 118 governments of the Third World, affirms the principles of the alternative project being developed in Latin America.  Its 2006 Declaration asserted a desire for a more just and equal world order, and it rejected the neoliberal project imposed by the global powers, maintaining that commercial liberalization increases inequality and intensifies the marginalization of countries in development.  The Declaration also praised Cuba for its dignified example of independence, and it expressed support for Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia in their conflicts with the global powers.  


The Third World project for a just, democratic and sustainable world-system

     As a result of sustained encounter with the Cuban revolutionary project beginning in 1995, and as a result of study of political changes in Latin America during the period of 2001 to 2008, observing these developments through a Cuban lens, I arrived to understand that humanity confronts a choice between two different and opposed civilizational projects: the unsustainable neocolonial system, defended by the global powers through military interventions and a global economic war against the poor; and the Third World project emerging from below, which is seeking a just, democratic and sustainable world-system, characterized by respect for the equal sovereignty of nations, cooperation among nations, the defense of nature, and the protection of the social and economic rights of the people.  The alternative project emerging from below to some extent declares itself socialist, and it seeks to take steps that are incompatible with capitalism and imperialism.

     I also arrived to appreciate that the Third World project is not only fundamentally different from the neocolonial project.  It is also much more grounded in human knowledge.  The neocolonial project, in its ethnocentric extolling of the virtues of capitalism and the modern West, suffers from a colonial denial, ignoring the role of colonialism in creating the material advances of the West.  In contrast, the Third World project has formulated a comprehensive understanding, drawing from all the important currents of thought of the last two centuries.

     From the bourgeois revolution, the Third World project draws upon the concept of the equal rights for all, but expands it to include social and economic rights as well as political and civil rights; and to include not only the rights of individuals but also the rights of nations to equal sovereignty and self-determination. The Third World project affirms the rights of nations, not as a justification of the domination of other nations, as has occurred with European forms of nationalism and patriotism, but as an affirmation of the principle that no nation should be dominated by others, thus developing ethical and morally defensible forms of nationalism and patriotism.  

    From Marxism-Leninism, the Third World project draws upon class analysis, discerning that political actors in capitalist societies represent the particular class interests of the bourgeoisie.  It recognizes that, in neocolonized nations, the national bourgeoisie pursues its interests in alliance with the international bourgeoisie, undermining national autonomy and national dignity.  In addition, the Third World project discerns that national and international elites defend their particular interests through any and all means, adopting strategies that violate the principles of the bourgeois revolution.  

     Drawing from their own traditions of national liberation, the Third World project, looking at the modern world from the vantage point of the colonized, sees the role of colonialism in creating underdevelopment and poverty in vast regions of the planet.  The Third World project condemns imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism as violations of the principles of the bourgeois and socialist revolutions, and it proclaims the equal right of all nations to sovereignty and true independence.  

     Influenced by the women’s movement, the Third World project affirms the right of women to full and equal participation in the development of society, including the right of access to the highest positions of political authority.  In response to traditions in many societies of restricting the education of girls and women, the project embraces the notion of full educational opportunity for women.  And the Third World project develops structures for the protection of women and children from violence in all of its forms.  The Third World project sees the full protection of the rights of women as necessary for the full implementation of its historic struggle for national and social liberation.

     Drawing from the ecology movement, the Third World project embraces the human obligation to protect nature. Integrating ecological consciousness with the right of the colonized peoples to development, it has formulated the concept of sustainable development, and as a result, it has significantly influenced discussion of the environment in international fora.

    In addition, the Third World project draws upon liberationist tendencies in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  It calls forth leaders who live modestly, who govern with wisdom, who develop policies in defense of the poor and the needy, who seek justice for their peoples, and who cooperate in solidarity with the peoples and governments of the world.  The Third World project believes that leaders who are not corrupt and who defend the people will continue to be called to leadership by the people.  Casting aside the cynicism of the contemporary North, the Third World project has faith in the future of humanity.  It believes that a more just, democratic and sustainable world is possible.

      Thus, by 2008 I had arrived to appreciate that the project being developed by the governments and movements of the Third World appropriates from the most important intellectual and moral currents of the modern world, and therefore it is developing an integral understanding that is far more rooted in human knowledge and far more moral and ethical than the neocolonial project being pursued by the global powers.  I had arrived to be not only a Marxist but also a supporter of the revolutionary projects led by Fidel and Chávez, which I understood to be further developments, in theory and practice, of the Marxist project.  By 2008, I could be considered a Fidelist and Chavist.  


The process and structures of socialist transformation

       I retired from Presbyterian College in 2011, at which time I was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus by Presbyterian College.  In total, I had taught for thirty-six years at three colleges and one university.  Throughout my teaching career, I endured a high course load of four or five courses per semester, which had the effect of leaving less time for reading than I desired.  The great majority of my students were white middle class students, and the environment was socially and politically conservative.  Only about ten percent of my students appreciated and were genuinely interested in what I was trying to teach, and it was those ten percent that sustained me, compensating for the general indifference from below and the negative sanctions from above.  Some of my students were black, and they in general were far more interested in what I was trying to teach than the white students.  Given the structures of the US educational and occupational system, the interested students, white or black, found it very difficult to follow up on any new insights in their education, their careers and their lives.  But a few were able to do so, principally in the fields of ministry and education, and I maintain contact with some of them today.  Overall, my college teaching career was not fully satisfying.  The programs that I had developed in Honduras and Cuba had been appreciated by Presbyterian College, but not fully supported.  However, I did manage to make a living and to maintain a constant quest for intellectual and moral development through reading and the experience of personal encounter in Latin America.

     Upon my retirement, I began to spend almost all of my time in Cuba, while maintaining a formal residence in the United States.  My retirement initiated a period of reading of the works of Lenin as well as of the revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Ghana, Tanzania, Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, in addition to further reading on the Cuban Revolution.  Through this reading, I further developed my understanding of socialism, such that I began to formulate the essential characteristics of socialism, taking into account the characteristics of socialist societies, in their various forms, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  

     I arrived to understand that a socialist nation is, by definition, a nation that is ruled by delegates of the popular sectors and classes, who develop and implement policies in accordance with the interests of the people.  Socialist nations, however, must defend popular interests in the context of a constantly evolving international and national situation that includes counter-revolutionary initiatives by bourgeois interests.  Socialist governments, therefore, confront a variety of situations, and thus there is variation in the measures that they adopt.

    Although socialism is characterized by pluralism, there are common socialist principles:  the strong role of the state in directing economic development, with a variety of forms of property; national control of natural resources; the development of structures of popular democracy; the rejection of imperialism, and the adoption of foreign policies based on solidarity and cooperation with the peoples and nations of the world, seeking to develop trading relations that are mutually beneficial; government policies designed to protect the social and economic rights of the people; the inclusion of all, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or class; and the protection of the nature. 

     During my reading beginning in 2011, I also began to see common patterns in the taking of power by the people.  The triumphant popular revolutions in peripheral and semi-peripheral regions confronted what appeared to be impossible obstacles: the concentration of economic, political and military power; and ideological confusion and division among the people.  But they were able to overcome these obstacles by forming political parties or alternative political structures, which adopted proposals and slogans that responded to the concrete needs of the people.  The alternative political parties educated the people through meetings, assemblies, conferences, and the dissemination of reading material; and the emission of a manifesto as well as a platform that proposes a specific program connected to the concerns and hopes of the people.  They taught the people a global and historical perspective that was solidly grounded in empirical social reality and that explained why the concrete needs of the people could not be met under the existing political-economic-cultural system.  

    The triumphant revolutions were led by gifted persons who were well read, who were influenced by intellectuals and political leaders of their own nation and of the world, who had an instinct for the art of politics, and whose commitment to social justice knew no limits.   These exceptional leaders were lifted up by the people, who could discern their exceptional understanding and commitment.   The charismatic leaders fulfill the necessary function of unifying the party and the people for a struggle against powerful forces, national and international, who are determined to defend their particular interests and privileges.  

     Toussaint L’Ouverture, for example, was a military genius who also mastered the art of politics, gifts that enabled him to command a black army and control nearly all of the French colony of San Domingo (today called Haiti).  As a result of his political and military strength, he was recognized as Governor of the colony.  As Governor, he maintained the sugar plantations, converting the slaves into free wage workers. He stabilized the economy and enjoyed support among blacks, whites and mulattos.  He correctly understood that, as a result of the legacy of slavery, the development of the nation needed French support and cooperation, on the basis of Jacobin principles.  But this vision was not realized.  The Jacobins lost power in France, and the revolution in San Domingo that had been led by Toussaint was brought to an end by the invasion of Napoleon.  Toussaint was arrested, and he died in prison shortly afterward. Independent Haiti developed in a direction that was contrary to the vision of Toussaint.  Ties with France were severed, whites were massacred, and the plantations were divided into subsistence plots.  Haiti endured isolation and poverty for decades, a legacy from which it still suffers.

      In the case of the Mexican Revolution, a charismatic leader capable of unifying the revolution on the basis of a national plan that united the forces of peasants, workers, and the petit bourgeoisie did not emerge.  The Mexican Revolution triumphed not as a popular revolution but as a revolution by a rising petit bourgeoisie, based in the military.

     In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh forged in practice a synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and the political-intellectual tradition of Vietnamese nationalism, which had been developed by Confucian scholars, and in which he had been formed as a young man.  He thus saw the dual character of the revolution as both a social and class revolution and an anti-colonial revolution of national liberation.  He mastered the art of politics, knowing when to implement revolutionary measures.  These exceptional qualities enabled him to lead the Vietnamese people through two long wars against French colonialism and US imperialism, ultimately leading to the establishment of an independent nation that to this day follows an autonomous socialist path to economic, political and cultural development.

       In the reading that I initiated upon my retirement in 2011, I also was able to read further on the Cuban Revolution, which enabled me to deepen my appreciation of the exceptional gifts of the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution.  As a pre-university student, Fidel was formed in the tradition of the Cuban struggle for national liberation.  During his third year at the University of Havana, he began to read the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, using the library of the communist party.  He appropriated their concepts from the vantage point of the Cuban situation, thus forging a creative synthesis of the Cuban struggle for national liberation with Marxism-Leninism.  In accordance with this creative adaptation, he conceived a revolution of the people, rather than a proletarian revolution.  

      Fidel possessed an instinctive exceptional capacity for the art of politics.  He grasped that the bold attack on the Moncada Barracks of July 26, 1956 was the kind of action that was needed to galvanize the people.  In calling the people to revolution, he understood the necessity of making declarations that take into account the perceptions and values of the people.  He realized that the Cuban people of the 1950s were rebellious, but they had not yet developed revolutionary consciousness; so it was necessary to focus on concrete problems.  In addition, during the revolutionary war and after its triumph, he discerned the need for the unity of the diverse revolutionary forces, and he possessed the capacity to forge it.  During his many years as the Cuban chief of state, he also demonstrated an exceptional understanding of global dynamics, and he became an important voice defending a radical Third World agenda in the international arena.  

      Fidel also has possessed a remarkable faith in the ultimate triumph of the socialist revolution.  It is a faith that is rooted in the conviction of the justice of the socialist cause, and it is inspired by the examples of the great revolutionaries in human history.  In contrast to the skepticism of the intellectual who can see only the objective conditions and the subjective correlation of forces, Fidel’s revolutionary faith sees the possibility of changing these conditions and forces, through analysis that discerns hidden possibilities within existing conditions and forces.


Leninist

     In the period of reading beginning in 2011, I also read the works of Lenin as well as Trotsky’s three volume work on the Russian Revolution.  I came to appreciate Lenin as a charismatic leader and an intellectual.  He adapted Marxism to the conditions of Russia, discerning that the unfolding revolution was not precisely a proletarian revolution, but a peasant and proletarian revolution, led by a proletarian vanguard.  Appreciating the need for the support of the peasantry, Lenin put forth a slogan for the distribution of land to peasants.  In addition, Lenin discerned the importance of the soviets (workers,’ peasants’ and soldiers’ councils), as the expression of an advanced form of democracy and as an indication that the Russian Revolution represented a transition to socialism.  He developed the concept of the soviets as a structure of popular power that would serve as an alternative to the bureaucratic state.

     Lenin understood that the consolidation and development of the Russian Revolution would require the triumph of the proletarian revolution in Western Europe, in order that Western European governments would provide necessary technical support, inasmuch as Russia was relatively underdeveloped.  When the proletariat revolution in the Western Europe failed to triumph, Lenin discerned that the vanguard of the revolution would move to the East, that is, to the colonized and oppressed peoples of the world.  

      Lenin’s notion of the movement of the epicenter of the global revolution to the colonized peoples is of fundamental significance, pointing to the evolution of the Marxist project.  Whereas Marx developed an understanding of the proletarian revolution in Western Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, Lenin adapted Marx to the conditions of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, seeing a worker-peasant revolution led by a proletarian vanguard.  During the twentieth century, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro adapted Marxism-Leninism to the particular conditions of their nations.  They led revolutions of the petit bourgeoisie, peasants, workers and students, seeking both social transformation and national liberation.  In the beginning of the twenty-first century in Latin America, in the aftermath of the transition to representative democracy and the imposition of the neoliberal project, charismatic leaders in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador led socialist revolutions with new characteristics, leading to a reformulation of our understanding of socialism, along the lines that I have indicated above.  

       Thus, I arrived to discern an evolution of Marxism-Leninism: from Marx (and Engels), to Lenin (and Trotsky), to Fidel (and Ho and others), and to Chávez (Evo, Correa and others).  I had arrived to be a Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist revolutionary.


Popular socialist revolution in the United States

     As my study of revolutions continued, I arrived to the view that a popular revolution would be possible in the United States and other nations of the North, if the popular movements were to encounter the movements of the South, in order to learn from them, appropriating their insights and adapting them to particular national conditions in the North.  Such socialist revolutions in the core would have to include an anti-imperialist agenda, for they must seek solidarity with the peoples of the world in order to develop a politically and ecologically sustainable world-system.  The revolutions would have to explain to the peoples of the core that a more just and democratic world-system is the only solid foundation for saving humanity, and that the existing effort of the global elite to continue to defend the particular interests of core capitalists must be abandoned.

     Since the late 1990s, I have considered myself a revolutionary.  As my encounter with the Cuban revolutionary project proceeded, I came to appreciate that a revolutionary is not necessarily a guerrilla in the mountains.  Revolutionaries contribute to the revolutionary project in various ways, including intellectual work and education.  Accordingly, I understood my role as seeking to contribute through intellectual work and education to the global socialist revolution.  But when I arrived to discern the possibility of popular revolution in the United States, I shifted focus from reflection on the global socialist revolution toward seeking to contribute to a process of revolutionary transformation in my own country.  I came to consider it my duty, as a revolutionary intellectual, to contribute to the development of the subjective conditions for a popular revolution in the United States.        

     On the basis of my study of revolutions, I believe that I have developed an understanding of the basic steps that need to be taken in a popular revolutionary project in the United States: the formation of an alternative political party that seeks to educate the people and ultimately to take political power; the release of a manifesto, explaining historical and global dynamics, including the necessity of transforming the neocolonial world-system to a just and democratic world-system, in solidarity with the governments and movements of the world; and the emission of a platform, identifying specific proposals that are respond to the concrete needs of the people.  But having always been an intellectual and not a leader, I do not yet have a fully developed understanding of how to take such steps.

      Through conversations during the New Political Science Conference in Havana in November 2015, I came to the idea of calling a conference on the Unification of Theory and Practice, with the hope that it would lead to exchanges among academics and activists concerning the possibilities for developing alternative political parties in the nations of the north.  We have formed an international organizing committee of academics and activists, with the intention of holding the first conference in June 2017.  We hope to hold the conferences annually.  

     Anyone interested in learning more about this initiative should go to: First Annual Conference on the Unification of Theory and Practice, Havana, Cuba, June 2017.  We are looking to expand the Organizing Committee, whose members would contribute to the formulation of reading material and/or would search for organization and individuals for participation in the conference.  And we are seeking conference participants, both organizations and individuals.