Cedric Robinson wrote that revolutionary movements are a signifier of a broader cultural orientation towards resistance. Values such as group solidarity, sharing of resources, communal ethics, and so on, while not revolutionary in and of themselves, provided the foundation for the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
This reflected Cabral’s thesis that the culture of a people is the principle basis upon which the struggle for independence is sustained, as well as the need for cultural dissimilarity between the oppressor and the oppressed. The latter serves as a point of demarcation in terms of the values, practices, and beliefs of a people—elements which also stimulates a people’s consciousness of the need for struggle—not only for the establishment of territorial sovereignty, but also to create those social conditions wherein their culture can thrive.
Values of the kind noted above, once salient in the culture of Africans in the US, have been thoroughly corrupted and eroded over the last six decades. The last three decades in particular have evidenced a thrust towards cultural assimilation (one that is couched in discourse of progressivism of late), which is nonetheless destructive to our ethos and social capacity.
Consequently, I do not believe that the cultural conditions exist to create leaders like Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Assata Shakur, or Robert Williams today, not on a mass scale in any event. The emergence of critical intelligence of that kind is augmented by the extant organizational and communal infrastructure, and this infrastructure has been systematically dismantled in recent decades. It has been supplanted by atomistic individualism, the celebration of material excess, the valorization of amorality, and neoliberalism. In short, a culture of counterrevolutionary norms and values.