Glossary
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This glossary includes definitions of terms, concepts, historical events, as well as the names of individuals, organizations, and schools of thought, that will be referenced throughout our 2023 Revolutionary Summer School: Pan Africanism and the Struggle for Our Future. The glossary is organized into three categories: terms, organizations, and people. To fully understand the content within all the courses of our summer school, it is essential that we familiarize ourselves with important terms for understanding history, political economy, and the leaders and ideas that have shaped the present.
This is a working document with definitions that have been developed through discussion, debate, and study, and that will continue to be revised and added to as we continue learning from the experience of this course and others.
Definitions are an important starting point for revolutionary study, that help us build and deepen our understanding of history, theory and political economy. We hope this glossary is a tool to begin this study!
| Term | Definition | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Abahlali baseMjondolo | Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM),or the Shack Dwellers Movement, is a grassroots movement in South Africa that organizes land occupations, builds communes, and campaigns against evictions and for land sovereignty and dignity. The group has faced severe repression in South Africa, citing that over 20 activists have been murdered in the past 10 years. Despite this, AbM recently won a significant court case that ruled forced evictions from their eKhenana Commune as illegal. | Organization |
| Abolitionism | Abolitionism, throughout history, has been the movement against inequality, oppression, exploitation, and class distinction. In the US, Europe, and the Western hemisphere, abolition was first used widely to define the movement to abolish the system of chattel slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and the plantation economy. Since slavery of non-convicted criminals was formally ended with the 13th Amendment, abolition has been used to define the movement to dismantle the police, prisons, the military, and the courts in the US. More broadly, abolition means the overthrow of core institutions of the capitalist state and the end to private property. | Term |
| African Blood Brotherhood | The African Blood Brotherhood was a radical Black liberation organization with ties to the Communist Party, with around 3,000 estimated members. Founded by Cyril Briggs in 1919, members of A.B.B. went on to be early, key Black cadre of the Communist Party, enabling them to recruit thousands of Black members in the 1930s and 1940s, and to lead a militant struggle for Black liberation in those decades. | Organization |
| African National Congress | The African National Congress (ANC) has been South Africa’s ruling political party since its first democratic elections in 1994. Originally formed in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) to fight for the rights of Black South Africans, the ANC was forced underground after the establishment of the apartheid government and began a prolonged armed resistance struggle alongside the South African Communist Party. (Source) | Organization |
| African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC) | The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC),was first formed as the African Party for Independence (PAI) in 1956 by Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral to unify the two countries under one independence movement against Portuguese colonialization. | Organization |
| Amilcar Cabral | Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973) was born in Portuguese-ruled Guinea and fought his entire life for the liberation of his country. Cabral was one of the founders and Secretary-General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC). In 1963, the struggle had advanced to outright war with the Portuguese military and, in 1972, Cabral established the Guinean People’s National Assembly to consolidate the political power and the land regions that had been won over by the PAIGC. In 1973, Cabral was assassinated outside his home, one year before Guinea-Bissau won full independence. | People |
| Antonio Maceo | Antonio Maceo (1845-1896),the “Titan of Bronze,” was a military leader in the Cuban struggle for independence. Known for his heroic will and military acumen, Maceo rose to second-in-command in the Cuban army of independence. In a meeting with Spanish General Martínez-Campos, known as the protest at Baragua, he refused to accept any terms ending the 1878 Ten Years War against Spain without the inclusion of the complete abolition of slavery in Cuba and true independence from colonizers. | People |
| Apartheid | A system of racialized political and economic domination. In South Africa, it was a form of colonialism through extreme measures of racial segregation in order not only to limit the social life and political rights of Black people but, most significantly, to ensure to maximaise labour exploitation by cheap labour through the subordination of a racialised working-class majority. Though it was constructed over decades in th elate 19th century and early 20th century, it reached its height following the 1948 electoral victory of the right-wing white Afrikaner National Party, whose leaders, such as John Vorster, had direct connections to German fascism. | Term |
| Base | The base refers to the economy, or the realm of production, distribution, and how people relate to one another and property in production. The base is the foundation on which the superstructure is built but the superstructure also reacts to and upon the base, influencing its development. (Marxist Glossary - Expanded Edition: 3.0 by Darryl "Waistline" Mitchell) | Term |
| Battle of Ideas | The term 'battle of ideas' was first coined by Fidel Castro in a speech he gave in 1999 and he used this term to describe the ideological struggle to defend socialism at a time when the socialist bloc was weakend with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The battle of ideas is a multidimensional struggle that continues to this day and is an essential part of any process of revolution. (Source) | Term |
| bell hooks | Gloria Jean Watkins (1952-2021),who adopted the pseudonym of bell hooks, is a writer of many and important influential texts, such as Killing Rage (1995),Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981),All About Love (2000),and others. bell hooks wrote about an expansive and intersectional feminism from a Black, working-class perspective in resistance to a mainstream focus on only the perspectives of white affluent women. (Source) | People |
| Bernice Johnson Reagon | Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942- ) was a singer, songwriter, civil rights activist, and militant organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Having already been involved in Albany’s NAACP Youth Council, Johnson was already embedded in the civil rights movement but quickly recognized her talent for singing and performing could be tools for lifelong struggle. In 1962 she joined SNCC’s newly formed Freedom Singers and she would eventually go on to found other radical music formations, including Harambee Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, known for the popularization of music that uplifted working class struggles and Black liberation. (Source) | People |
| Black Panther Party | Started out of a program of principled self-defense in Black communities in Oakland, California, chapters of the Black Panther Party formed all across the country and soon became one of the largest mass organizations of its time. The Panthers organized a number of different kinds of programs across regions, including breakfast programs for children in local communities, political education courses and schools, actions and rallies around local campaigns, and others. The organization came under severe persecution by the United States government through the FBI-created COINTELPRO surveillance and infiltration program, which led to the state-sponsored murder of Fred Hampton and arrest of many other Panther members. (Source) | Organization |
| Bourgeoisie | The bourgeoisie is the modern capitalist class, the ruling class of capitalist society. This class is the owners of the means of production and employ members of the proletariat as wage laborers. The term originated to describe a section of the landowning class under feudalism who played an intermediary role between the lords and the serfs. As production and society evolved, primarily due to the Industrial Revolution in Europe, this emerging capitalist class took political power over the falling feudal class. | Term |
| C.L.R. James | Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989),historian, artist, and author, was an influential Marxist of the 20th century born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. James reported and wrote on current struggles and the history of Black liberation and independence movements in the Caribbean, arguing that enslaved people waged some of the earliest pre-industrial class struggles. One of his earliest books, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, is renowned as a landmark study of the slave revolts that led to the independence of Haiti. | People |
| Capital | Capital consists of the means of subsistence, instruments of labor, and raw materials, not only as material products; it consists also of exchange values. However, these things alone do not make capital. Capital is historically the bourgeois ownership of the means of production, the appropriation of the surplus product, and conversion of money into money-capital. (Marxist Glossary - Expanded Edition: 3.0 by Darryl "Waistline" Mitchell) | Term |
| Capitalist crisis | Capitalist crisis is the result of capitalist private property, which periodically plunges society into mass unemployment, poverty, and destitution. More specifically, crises evolve from the inherent nature of capitalism to overproduce – the act of producing blindly and irrationally without regard for the consuming capacity of the working class. (Marxist Glossary - Expanded Edition: 3.0 by Darryl "Waistline" Mitchell) | Term |
| Carlota | Carlota (c. 1844),an enslaved African woman of Yoruba heritage, planned and led an uprising in 1843 of enslaved Africans at the Triumvirato sugar mill in Matanzas Province of Cuba. Her name was given to Cuba’s “Black Carlota'' operation in South Africa in 1980, which culminated into a battle that defeated the South African pro-apartheid forces. | People |
| Cedric Robinson | Cedric Robinson (1940-2017) was a political theorist and anthropologist. Robinson is commonly referred to as "the father of the Black Radical Tradition," defining it in his most prominent work, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) as the long history of resistance and rebllion by black and enslaved people from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century. In this text, he also pushes the limits of and challenges Marx's traditional definitions of class and class-based society, arguing that race distinction existed before the rise of capitalism and informed its the very foundation. | People |
| Cheikh Anta Diop | Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and African culture. He was a pioneer in the decolonisation of history and the revaluation of the African historical narrative. | People |
| Chris Hani | Hani was a leader of the South African Communist Party and Umkontho We Sizwe (MK, military wing of the ANC). He was an important figure of National Liberation Marxism. He was assasinated in April 1993. Hani's death came at a critical time for South Africa. The SACP was on the brink of gaining significant status as an independent political party. It now found itself bereft of funds (due to collapse in Europe) and without a strong leader. | People |
| Civil Rights Congress | The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) arose from three other organizations: the International Labor Defense (ILD),the National Negro Congress, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. Led by William L. Patterson, CRC focused on mass movements and education through the legal defense and freedom campaigns. Some of its more noteworthy cases include the cases of Willie McGee, the Martinsville Seven, the Trenton Six, Rosa Lee Graham, and the role it played in publicizing the lynching of Emmett Till. CRC also lead the We Charge Genocide campaign, which connected the U.N. definition of "genocide" to build a case of genocide against Black people within the United States and brought these charges to an international audience. | Organization |
| Civil Rights Movement | The civil rights movement of the 1960s was characterized by the great galvanization and mobilization of Black people in the United States to fight against Jim Crow and achieve formal democratic rights. Although the civil rights movement was a nationwide movement, the leadership and energy of the struggle was concentrated in the U.S. South. Although the legacy of the movement has been largely blunted of its radical edge in the mainstream historical record, the civil rights movement contained many revolutionary currents for its time and sparked the creation of a number of organizations that would go on to embrace Black national liberation and Marxist ideas. | Term |
| Class struggle | Class struggle is the rising and subsiding manifestations of antagonisms between two classes in a class-based society. Under capitalism, the ruling (capitalist) class has the ultimate goal of increasing profits, which it does, amongst other methods, through keeping the costs of labor low. Workers, who must earn a wage to survive, are forced to purchase every single thing they need for their existence. Therefore, their interests are in direct opposition and this conflict is the foundation of class struggle. (Source) | Term |
| Claudia Jones | Claudia Jones (1915-1964) was a Trinidadian activist and writer who became involved with the Communist Party USA through the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys and was a leader in some of their anti-racist organizing campaigns. An ardent internationalist, she traveled to both the Soviet Union and China after its revolution in 1949. She was heavily persecuted by the United States government and, in 1955, she was deported to England. While there, she was heavily involved in organizing Afro-Caribbean communities and played a leading role in establishing the Notting Hill Carnival. (Source) | People |
| Combahee River Collective | Based out of Boston, the Combahee River Collective brought together a group of Black socialist, feminist leaders whose legacy of critically addressing patriarchy within the fight for Black liberation is still celebrated today. In their groundbreaking 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, the collective put forward an analysis that identified the three pillars of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as interwoven forces of oppression. In this statement, they also developed the concept of ‘intersectionality’ – the idea that multiple forces of oppression can interlock and combine to create unique experiences of suffering. (Source) | Organization |
| Communist Party of Kenya | The Communist Party of Kenya (CPK) was established in 1992 as the Social Democratic Party and in 2019 publicly adopted a Marxist-Leninist ideology and the new name of the organization. The CPK identifies itself as part of the continuation of the social and national liberation struggle that brought about independence from British colonialism in 1963. (Source) | Organization |
| Communist Party of South Africa | The South African Communist Party (SACP) was first established in 1921 as the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) but changed its name after being forced underground in 1953 by the apartheid government. The SACP was a leading organization, along with the African National Congress, in the armed struggle to free South Africa from apartheid. Both the SACP and the ANC remained banned until 1990. (Source) | Organization |
| Communist Party USA | The Communist Party USA was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution in 1917. The CPUSA reached its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, yet suffered severe decline and isolation due to the anti-communist persecution of the McCarthy Period. At its height, the CPUSA had influence in many different struggles across the nation and distinguished itself from other radical groups and parties by putting antiracism at the forefront of its national organizing. A number of noteworthy organizers and celebrities were once members or associated with the Communist Party, including Louise Thompson, Claudia Jones, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and others. | Organization |