REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE: THE WAY OF LIBERATION
"Only the People Can Create the Revolution"
Let a new earth rise. Let another world
be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation
full of courage issue forth, let a people loving freedom come to growth,
let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the
pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written,
let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control!
– Margaret Walker
For twenty-two months in the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo,
after my first trial for the death of Patrolman John Frey, I was almost
continually in solitary confinement. There, in a four-by-six, except for
books and papers relating to my case, I was allowed no reading material.
Despite the rigid enforcement of this rule, inmates sometimes slipped magazines
under my door when the guards were not looking.
One that reached me was the May, 1970, issue of Ebony magazine.
It contained an article written by Lacy Banko summarizing the work of Dr.
Herbert Hendin, who had done a comparative study in suicide among black
people in the major American cities. Dr. Hendlin found that the suicide
rate among Black men between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five had doubled
in the past ten to fifteen years, surpassing the rate for whites in the
same age range. The article had—and still has—a profound effect on me.
I have thought long and hard about its implications.
The Ebony article brought to mind Durkheim’s classic study Suicide,
a book I had read earlier while studying sociology at Oakland City College.
To Durkheim all types of suicide are related to social conditions. He maintains
that the primary cause of suicide is not individual temperament but forces
in the social environment.
In other words, suicide is caused primarily by external factors, not internal
ones. As I thought about the conditions of Black people and about Dr. Hendlin’s
study, I began to develop Durkheim’s analysis and apply it to the Black
experience in the United States. This eventually led to the concept of
“revolutionary suicide.”
To understand revolutionary suicide it is first necessary to have an idea
of reactionary suicide, for the two are very different. Dr. Hendlin was
describing reactionary suicide: the reaction of a man who takes his own
life in response to social conditions that overwhelm him and condemn him
to helplessness. The young Black men in his study had been deprived of
human dignity, crushed by oppressive forces, and denied their right to
live as proud and free human beings.
A section in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment provides a good
analogy. One of his characters, Mameladov, a very poor man, argues that
poverty is not a vice. In poverty, he says, a man can attain the innate
nobility of soul that is not possible in beggary; for while society may
drive the poor man out with a stick, the beggar will be swept out with
a broom. Why? Because the beggar is totally demeaned, his dignity lost.
Finally, bereft of self-respect, immobilized by fear and despair, he sinks
into self-murder. This is reactionary suicide.
Connected to reactionary suicide, although even more painful and degrading,
is a spiritual death that has been the experience of millions of Black
people in the United States. This death is found everywhere today in the
Black community. Its victims have ceased to fight the forms of oppression
that drink their blood. The common attitude has long been: What’s the use?
If a man rises up against a power as great as the United States, he will
not survive. Believing this, many Blacks have been driven to a death of
the spirit rather than of the flesh, lapsing into lives of quite desperation.
Yet all the while, in the heart of every Black, there is the hope that
life will somehow change in the future.
I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault
on the Establishment [The power structure, based on the economic infrastructure,
propped up and reinforced by the media and all the secondary educational
and cultural institutions.], which goes on exploiting the wretched of the
earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide.
Thus it is better to oppose forces that would drive me to self-murder than
to endure them.
Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility,
if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. This possibility
is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without
any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are all—Black and white
alike—ill in the same way, mortally ill. But before we die, how shall we
live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result,
that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the
price of self-respect.
Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death
wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live
with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.
When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even
at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.
Che Guevara said that to a revolutionary death is the reality and victory
the dream. Because the revolutionary lives so dangerously, his survival
is a miracle. Bakunin, who spoke for the most militant wing of the First
International, made a similar statement in his Revolutionary Catechism.
To him, the first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed
man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning
of his life.
When Fidel Castro and his small band were in Mexico preparing for the Cuban
Revolution, many of the comrades had little understanding of Bakunin’s
rule. A few hours before they set sail, Fidel went from man to man asking
who should be notified in case of death. Only then did the deadly seriousness
of the revolution hit home. Their struggle was no longer romantic. The
scene had been exciting and animated but when the simple, overwhelming
question of death arose everyone fell silent.
Many so-called revolutionaries in this country, black and white, are not
prepared to accept this reality. The Black Panthers are not suicidal; neither
do we romanticize the consequences of revolution in our lifetime. Other
so-called revolutionaries cling to an illusion that they might have their
revolution and die of old age. That cannot be.
I do not expect to live through our revolution, and most serious comrades
probably share my realism. Therefore, the expression “revolution in our
lifetime” means something different to me than it does to other people
who sue it. I think the revolution will grow in my lifetimes, but I do
not expect to enjoy its fruits. That would be a contradiction. The reality
will be grimmer.
I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world
will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism,
capitalism, reactionary intercommunalism—reactionary suicide. The people
will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution,
I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries in America, whose lives
are in constant danger from the evils of a colonial society. Considering
how we must live, it is not hard to except the concept of revolutionary
suicide. In this we are different from white radicals. They are not faced
with genocide.
The greater, more immediate problem is the survival of the entire world.
If the world does not change, all its people will be threatened by the
greed, exploitation, and violence of the power structure in the American
empire. The handwriting is on the wall. The United States is jeopardizing
its own existence and the existence of all humanity. If Americans knew
the disasters that lay ahead, they would transform this society tomorrow
for their own preservation. The Black Panther Party is in the vanguard
of the revolution that seeks to relieve this country of its crushing burden
of guilt. We are determined to establish true equality and the means for
creative work.
Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks.
Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation.
They fail to perceive differences. Jumping off a bridge is not the same
as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army. When
scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent
and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus
the American colonialists, the French of the late eighteenth century, the
Russians of 1917, the Jews of Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the North Vietnamese—any
people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force—are suicidal.
Also, if the Black Panthers symbolize the suicidal trend among Blacks,
then the whole Third World is suicidal, because the Third World fully intends
to resist and overcome the ruling class of the United States. If scholars
wish to carry their analysis further, they must come to terms with that
four-fifths of the world which is bent on wiping out the power of the empire.
In those terms the Third World would be transformed from suicidal to homicidal,
although homicide is the unlawful taking of life, and the Third World is
involved only in defense. Is the coin then turned? Is the government of
the United States suicidal? I think so.
With the redefinition, the term “revolutionary suicide” is not as simplistic
as it might seem initially. In coining the phrase, I took two knowns and
combined them to make an unknown, a neoteric phrase in which the word “revolutionary”
transforms the word “suicide” in to a idea that has different dimensions
and meanings, applicable to a new and complex situations.
My prison experience is a good example of revolutionary suicide in action,
for prison is a microcosm of the outside world. From the beginning of my
sentence I defied the authorities by refusing to cooperate; as a result,
I was confined to “lock-up,” a solitary cell. As the months passed and
I remained steadfast, they came to regard my behavior as suicidal. I was
told that I would crack and break under the strain. I did not break, nor
did I retreat from my position, I grew strong.
If we had submitted to their exploitation and done their will, it would
have killed my spirit and condemned me to a living death. To cooperate
in prison meant reactionary suicide to me. While solitary confinement can
be physically and mentally destructive, my actions were taken with an understanding
of the risk. I had to suffer through a certain situation; by doing so,
my resistance told them that I rejected all they stood for. Even though
my struggle might have harmed my health, even killed me, I looked upon
it as a way of raising the consciousness of the other inmates, as a contribution
to the ongoing revolution. Only resistance can destroy the pressures that
cause reactionary suicide.
The concept of revolutionary is not defeatist or fatalistic. On the contrary,
it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility
of hope—reality because the revolutionary must always be prepared to face
death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determination to bring
about change. Above all, it demands that the revolutionary see his death
and his life as one piece. Chairman Mao says that death comes to all of
us, but it varies in its significance; to die for the reactionary is lighter
than a feather; to die for the revolution is heavier than Mount Tai.