When one commits to the cause of proletarian revolution, they embrace a myriad of difficulties and challenges. They lose employment opportunities. They become targets for state surveillance and harassment from law enforcement. They face ridicule from liberal and reactionary people around them. To fight for your class, you need to be strong. And the way to gain this strength is by embracing a role as a revolutionary militant.
A revolutionary militant doesn’t care that standing up for justice will carry consequences. They struggle all the same. As Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton was being targeted by the intelligence community and profiled by an American law enforcement apparatus that would assassinate him when he was 21, he said: “I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat, I am the people.”
But despite his willingness to die for the revolution, Hampton wasn’t a nihilist who charged forward without thinking. He stressed the importance of gaining revolutionary education before taking action, having once said: “We’ve got to understand here the educational program that you have to be able to figure out, whether you’re going in the right lines, whether people will end up in a situation where they can be able to really control themselves...without education, the people take the local foundations [of the revolutionary apparatus] and start stealing money, because they won’t be really educated as to why it’s the people’s anyway.”
Part of this education that made Hampton and the other Panthers so qualified to lead a revolution was their education in anti-imperialism. The Panthers recognized the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as an ally of the global proletarian and anti-colonial movements, with the BPP’s Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver having traveled to Pyongyang and stated that “the BPP joins hands with the 40 million Korean people in our common struggle against our common enemy- the fascist, imperialist United States government and ruling class.” Cleaver also concluded that “Comrade Kim Il Sung is the most relevant strategist in the struggle against U.S. fascism and imperialism in the world today and he has put the correct tactical line for the universal destruction of fascism and imperialism in our time.”
The Juche communists of the DPRK continue to share a kinship with everyone else who’s struggling against global capitalism and imperialism. They’ve had to rebuild their country after the U.S. burned down all of the towns in the DPRK during the genocidal Korean War. They’ve lived under the perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation by the U.S. for seventy years. They suffer U.S. sanctions that are designed to kill their people. They’re characterized by the imperialist media as backwards and tyrannical. Yet they continue to defend themselves and build socialism.
And radicals in the vein of the Black Panthers continue to recognize this parallel between the struggles of anti-imperialist nations like the DPRK and the struggles of oppressed groups within the imperialist countries. “The reason why those parallels exist is because the struggle against imperialism waged by the DPRK and the struggle against national oppression waged by black people are actually part of one struggle,” the American communist YouTube channel The Black Internationalist said in a video from this year. “That is the global class struggle between exploited classes and nations against exploiter classes and nations, in which both the socialist revolutionaries in the DPRK and their black counterparts in the USA spearhead the struggle of the masses against capitalism and imperialism, so that they may strike down their oppressors and advance toward a future free from racism, imperialism, and class alike.”
In their mission to become revolutionary militants, these U.S. radicals are effectively embracing Juche-the ideology that the DPRK has used to instill its society with a collective revolutionary militancy. Juche’s calls for national self-reliance, unity around the cause of communism, and faith in the masses to carry out the revolution are a collective version of what it means to be an individual revolutionary militant.
On both the individual and collective levels, revolutionary militancy means adopting a mentality of unshakable determination for the cause of proletarian liberation. More than that, it means constantly working to improve oneself so that one can better serve the cause. This means expanding upon one’s political education. It means becoming more self-disciplined. It means taking care of one’s health and training for all types of combat so that one can be ready to fight in a revolutionary scenario.
As one of Juche’s modern upholders Kim Jong Un has said: “As even steel gets rusty if left outside, anyone goes degenerated ideologically if he or she neglects training his or her revolutionary spirit. No one can ever be a perfect revolutionary, so there is no end to revolutionary self-improvement and training.”
To defeat the increasingly fascist bourgeois power structure in the United States, we’ll need to apply this mentality to how we interact with our surroundings. We’re in a situation where the capitalist state is becoming ever more intolerant of dissent, and where the encroaching police state is correlating with the decline of capitalist economies and the collapse of the climate. We face truly overwhelming crises, ones that can only be overcome by becoming revolutionary militants. We must train ourselves to fight fascism and imperialism with such dedication that no hardship can derail our efforts. We must all make ourselves invincible by attaching ourselves to the global movement for class liberation.
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