We're in a tight spot here y'all. But this is not, by far, the first time people have faced a government that wasn't responsive to their will and needs. So in this New Ellijay TV Special, we take a look at one peculiar situation where people won an election they shouldn't have even been able to win. 75 years ago, Ghana was a colony of the UK known as the Gold Coast. When their leading independence party, the Convention People's Party (CPP), won the 1951 council elections with 90% of the vote, it signaled that the end was near for the era of British colonization, first in Ghana, and soon across the rest of Africa.
But a colonial regime isn't really accountable to an election. Their rule was based in force, so why didn't the British just ignore the result? They even had the CPP's leadership, including its charismatic head Kwame Nkrumah, in jail when the election took place.
Our answer comes from one of Nkrumah's most well known sayings: organize, organize, organize. The people of Ghana and their revolutionary leadership had embarked on a campaign to organize themselves in order to defeat the British colonial regime over the preceding years. They built up a network of local and national organizations, building off the existing social organizational structures already in place, and they used this framework to engage in just about every kind of non-violent resistance around. They coordinated boycotts, they held marches, protests, and demonstrations, and in 1950, they launched a general strike, which was what had landed Nkrumah and the other leaders of the CPP in jail prior to the 1951 election landslide.
Ghanaians didn't just wait for an election and hope for the best. They built a mass movement with its power rooted in the people, and they prepared to remove the colonial regime by whatever means necessary. So sure, the British could have waved away the result of the election, banned the CPP, and kept Nkrumah and his cadre in jail. But then what? A people prepared for a general strike are almost equally prepared for a revolution, and the masses would have been ready for revolutionary armed struggle, if that's the path the British had forced them down.
And reading about this is what made me want to make this video; waiting for another election and seeing what happens is like waiting to put on our seat-belts until we crash. We need to follow Nkrumah's message and organize. Being ready for a general strike should be our organizational goal, because like the Ghanaians showed us, a people who are organized enough for a general strike are organized enough to do anything they need to do in order to liberate themselves. So in this video, we go over some the history of Ghana and show how they succeeded in liberating themselves from colonialism, and we tie that to our current political predicaments, looking for the foundations we can lay to get us ready for a general strike.
Here's some of the key things I've been reading that led to this video and which could be some good material for your local revolutionary reading groups:
Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution by CLR James (this is the book with the most pertinent information about the Ghana revolution in particular, so if you're looking for more information about those events, this is definitely a great place to start).
https://files.libcom.org/files/CLR-James-Nkrumah-Ghana-Revolution.pdf
Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories by Amilcar Cabral (In particular, the chapter from this book called The Weapon of Theory is an excellent and concise piece for your reading group).
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm
The State and Revolution and What Is To Be Done? by VI Lenin (These are two of the most essential reading group texts in my opinion, they're concise and direct and cover a lot of the fundamentals of revolutionary organization).
The Russian Revolution by Walter Rodney (If you were drawn to James' Nkrumah book, I would actually recommend this more if what you're looking for is a book on theory rather than history. Rodney comes to a lot of the same kinds of conclusions as James when it comes to the masses leading the way and revolutionary organizations trying to coordinate and direct the masses towards maximum impact).
Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton (not necessarily a book about revolutionary theory per se, but Burton's book about the Long Attica Uprising of the early 70's has a lot of valuable lessons about revolutionary organizations in the prison system and the state's methods of suppressing these rebellions. I think that in our current predicament, with increasing ICE captivity in US prisons and the threat of incarceration being aimed at political dissidents, considering the implications of this book could be important for anyone who ends up within the machine. The methods the state has used to separate political radicals within prisons might become weakened with an influx of political prisoners and understanding the successes and failures of the Attica uprisings and the backlash to it could be vital for future political prisoners).
Blood In My Eye by George Jackson (Jackson's theory of fascism, which he describes as essentially a method of reform for the in-groups in society, is pretty crucial right now).
Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci (This is one of the more theoretical things that I think is worth really taking some time with right now. Gramsci contributed a lot to developing ideas of "base and superstructure", the theory of how economic and material foundations in society (the base) create and reinforce the culture, like religion, art, sports, education, and ideology (the superstructure). All of which tend to promote a positive view of the base relations. In our case, the rich have power in the base (the economic relations in society) and "our" culture is really mostly their culture, because a lot of it is designed by and for the ruling class to promote their worldview. We have to know how this mutual reinforcement works in order to fight the ruling class ideology and culture that gets implanted into the working class by osmosis if we want to organize the working class).
On Contradiction, On Practice, and Combat Liberalism by Mao Tse Tung (again, these are all great reading group material because they're short and concise, but powerful. On Contradiction + On Practice should probably be read together as they're complementary. Combat Liberalism would likely surprise a lot of people, as its not really a piece about the ideological tenets of liberalism, it identifies behaviors like conflict avoidance as liberal traits, and I think the behaviors it speaks out against are all important things to try to keep out of organizations. We need healthy organizations and Combat Liberalism has a lot of important things to say to that effect).
Ready for Revolution by Kwame Ture (FKA Stokely Carmichael)(This whole book is a wealth of knowledge and inspiration but its long and probably not your best bet for a reading group in its entirety, but the sections about his time in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in particular have a ton of important lessons about organizational structures and dynamics when working in the messy world of a real movement. If you wanna incorporate this knowledge, I would suggest having one of your members read it and report back at a Teaching Circle -- more about Teaching Circle in the video)
Leave more revolutionary book recommendations in the comments! I'm hoping to do a live stream follow up to this so let me know what kind of questions you have and what things you'd like us to talk about on that live stream, or if you'd like to participate!
