Black Revolution argued that political actors in the Third World, nominated here the “Black Underclass,” had shifted the gravity of revolution: colonial caste, not class, was now the “primary contradiction” of world revolution As well, the geographical coordinates of revolutionary strategy had undergone a profound adjustment. In an epochal shift, a “united front” of peoples from Africa to Asia had replaced Europe and the European proletariat as the vanguard of international struggle for human liberation. 1

Yet more than a statement on history’s changed telos, “World Black Revolution” was a critical exegesis, literally a reimagining, of the primary tenets of Marxist thought dating back to the 1848 publication of the Communist Manifesto. Its authors, members of a small cadre of trained black revolutionaries, sought to demonstrate that every majorpremise of western Marxist historiography and Communist history had failed to address what in Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois, who is cited in the document, called “the color line.” Racism, the authors argued, was in the historical DNA of the West: Greek slavery did not enslave black people, but predicted social relationships of a racial future; 19th-century Western history, reputedly a “golden age” of Marxist thought, engendered colonialism and the slave trade. The Enlightenment itself – as Paul Gilroy and others would later argue – was buoyed by bones strewn across the Black Atlantic. 2

No theory or practice of world revolution, RAM contended, could fail to account for these events. Thus, the World Black Revolution, elevated to the level of a strategic concept, aspired to define