Liberation Struggle and the Critique of Ideological Imperialism by Assata Shakur

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#23,JUNE-AUGUST/2026

Well, I think it’s logical, and I also think it’s correct that the people that are most oppressed, in any given country, should have a great deal to say about the direction that a movement must take, should take etc.  Logically, the most oppressed people should have a great deal of influence in what happens.  If that doesn’t happen, then what you have is a very elitist, racist movement.  

So, if the Black Liberation Movement, the Movement for Puerto Rican Independence, the movement of oppressed people in general, the movement for the liberation of the Indigenous people; if these movements are not in first focus, are not up front in the movement as a whole, then something is wrong.  I think that necessarily the “working class” movement has to deal with the most oppressed workers, workers who are dealing with an oppression that is much greater.  Those workers must be heard.  Those workers must have some kind of role in leadership of the movement as a whole.  Because without that you have a distortion, you have something that does not reflect the reality.  It just disintegrates into something that is arrogant, racist, and Eurocentric.  I think that for too many years the ideological input into the movement has been Eurocentric.  The ideas and the revolutionary examples of Third World people have been ignored, minimalized, minimized.  The contributions of so many revolutionary people have just been overlooked by the European movement, by the white left in the United States.  This has not been studied with any seriousness, that trend must be changed.  I think that for a revolutionary ideology to evolve, that is truly scientific in nature, it must come from the experiences not of Europe, but from all of the world; the experience of Afrikans, the experiences of Asians, Latin Americans, and of Europeans.  But it must reflect a body of knowledge that comes from the whole world, and a theory of history that is based on the experiences of the whole world, not just Europe.  That is one of the errors that must be corrected at this time.

The bankrupt kind of ideology, the kind of stagnation that has been coming out of the European experience, for the last years, shows that something else must be developed.  The most oppressed people in the world right now are Afrikans, Asians, and Latin Americans.  So, the ideological input of Afrikans, Asians, and Latin Americans is not only important, it is essential.  It’s necessary because imperialism has reached such a state it’s really difficult to separate racism from imperialism; Eurocentrism from imperialism, because they’re connected.  By perpetuating an ideology that is Eurocentric, is also perpetuating an ideological imperialism.

So, in order to destroy imperialism, there must be an ideological movement from the people who are victimized by imperialism.  This is not to say that other experiences are not important, and not to say the contributions of European revolutionaries – Marx, Engels, Lenin – are not valid, not important.  You don’t throw them out.  But, that must be expanded.

A science, to be a science, cannot be stagnant; it has to grow.  If it does not grow, then it becomes a dogma.  A science must be something that is constantly expanding, constantly growing, and one of the problems has been that there has been no systematic way in which socialist theory could grow because of the dogmatism has just dominated – for years – the ideological, and in many ways, practical aspects of the left.  That has to be re-thought, and those tendencies have to be thrown out the window, because they don’t help and they’ve done a lot to hinder people’s freedom.

 

*Excerpted from an interview with Meg Starr of the Free Puerto Rico Committee and Matt Meyer of the War Resister’s League that was originally published in Crossroad, A New African Combatant Newsletter, Vol.3, No.4, Spring 1992.