“Walter Rodney Speaks”: A Revolutionary Autopsy of the Guerilla Intellectual (Part 2 of 2)

Introduction to Part II: Revolutionary Clarity in a World of Contradictions

This second part of our review of Walter Rodney Speaks continues our engagement with a revolutionary thinker whose clarity remains unmatched. These conversations, held in the spring of 1976, were not academic musings or nostalgic recollections—they were live assessments conducted at a moment of global rupture. The United States was reeling from military defeat in Vietnam. Portugal’s colonies were winning independence. Neocolonial regimes in Africa were consolidating. Black radical movements in the U.S. were being repressed, co-opted, and reorganized. In short, the world system was shifting—and Rodney was actively mapping the fault lines.

The context is essential. These interviews emerged from a two-day roundtable convened by the Institute of the Black World, an Atlanta-based formation of radical Black scholars and activists committed to Pan-Africanist and socialist liberation. Rodney had already electrified the world with his seminal text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Now, in the aftermath of his banishment from Guyanese academia and under state surveillance, he sat down to reflect on the global contradictions of race, class, nationalism, and socialism.

As Howard Dodson explained in the introduction to the volume, this dialogue was part of a broader effort to confront “the relationship between race and class in Black political and social development”—a theme that had moved to the center of ideological struggle by the mid-1970s. But as Rodney emphasized, this was not an abstract debate: it was a direct response to a deepening crisis in global capitalism and imperialism. The old explanations no longer sufficed. Revolutionary movements across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States were searching for new strategies, new alignments, and new political clarity. Rodney was among the few capable of offering it.

In this moment of crisis and reorganization, Rodney spoke not only to the Black world—but to all who seek revolutionary transformation. His method—rooted in historical materialism, sharpened by anti-colonial struggle, and committed to the oppressed—offers strategic insights that remain urgently relevant. Especially now, as we enter a new phase of imperial crisis defined by the consolidation of technofascism at home and hyper-imperialism abroad, Rodney’s revolutionary synthesis is not a historical artifact—it is a roadmap for militant praxis in the present.

This second part of our review focuses on the ideological backbone of Rodney’s politics: his confrontation with neocolonialism, his dialectical synthesis of nationalism and socialism, and his commitment to Marxism not as dogma, but as method. What emerges is a portrait of an intellectual who did not retreat from contradiction—but moved through it with principled audacity. For those of us writing and organizing from within the belly of empire, Rodney’s example serves as both compass and call to action.

Let this be clear: we do not engage this text as neutral observers. At Weaponized Information, we approach Rodney’s legacy as comrades in a common struggle. His revolutionary clarity cuts through the fog of liberalism, opportunism, and imperialist distortion. It is in that spirit that we offer this analysis—grounded in historical materialism, loyal to the wretched of the earth, and armed with the fierce belief that another world is not only possible—it is necessary.

I. The Guerrilla Intellectual: Entering the Academy to Burn It Down

The university is not neutral ground. It is not a temple of truth or a sacred space for learning. It is the think-tank of empire, the ideological barracks of capitalism, where class domination is theorized, polished, and passed off as objective knowledge. The role of the intellectual within this machine is clear: serve the ruling class, manage the workers, and explain away their misery in footnotes. But Walter Rodney chose a different path. He didn’t enter the academy to climb it—he entered to sabotage it.

Rodney gave us a blueprint for what he called the guerrilla intellectual. Not a metaphorical rebel, but a tactical insurgent who moves through the enemy’s ideological infrastructure with purpose and precision. This figure doesn’t simply critique power—they operate behind its lines. They do not seek recognition; they seek rupture. The guerrilla intellectual doesn’t aim to be published in elite journals or win tenure from settler deans. They aim to decolonize thought by politicizing knowledge—by turning every classroom, archive, and lecture hall into a site of struggle.

This is not about posturing. It’s about combat. The student who enters the university from the colonized ghetto or the working-class backstreets is already surrounded. Every textbook is loaded. Every theory is a containment strategy. Every credential is a leash. The point is not to avoid this terrain—but to engage it strategically. To study, not for prestige, but for war. To mine their institutions for tools, then turn those tools against them.

Too often, radicals entering academia are seduced by the trap of legitimacy. They believe their presence within the institution proves that the institution is changing. But Rodney’s warning is clear: when the system lets you in, it’s not because you’ve won—it’s because they’ve calculated your containment. The guerrilla intellectual rejects this bargain. They do not adapt to the institution; they wage asymmetrical warfare from within it.

This kind of work is lonely, slow, and dangerous. It means rejecting the applause of liberal colleagues and refusing the comfort of neutral scholarship. It means facing the reality that most universities are not engines of enlightenment, but factories of imperial loyalty. And it means remembering that knowledge, like land, must be reclaimed—not merely debated.

The guerrilla intellectual enters the institution without reverence. They carry no illusions. They are not there to be civilized. They are there to arm the people. To expropriate the tools of empire and redistribute them as weapons of liberation. They read Marx and Fanon not to cite them—but to apply them. They study capitalism not to describe it—but to destroy it.

Rodney reminds us that the real credential is not a diploma—it’s revolutionary clarity. That the most dangerous scholar is not the one with the highest degree, but the one who dares to teach the oppressed that they can think, organize, and fight for themselves. That is the guerrilla intellectual. And that is the legacy we inherit.

II. Race and Class: Beyond False Binaries and Academic Puzzles

There is a tired debate—mostly rehearsed in university seminars and sterile leftist conferences—that asks whether race or class is more fundamental. As if history were a game of priority. As if the slave ship and the assembly line could be disentangled by academic vote. Walter Rodney rejects this framework outright. He doesn’t choose between race and class. He shows how capitalism racializes class, and how race becomes a structure of exploitation, not just a social label.

Race is not a distraction from class. It is how class has been lived and enforced in the colonized world. You cannot understand the accumulation of capital without understanding the colonial division of humanity into racialized strata of labor. The plantation, the ghetto, the reservation, the detention center—these are not deviations from capitalism; they are the architecture of its survival. And to pretend otherwise is not just dishonest—it is suicidal.

Rodney’s method is not to collapse race into class or to reduce class to race. He examines their entanglement, their mutual constitution, and their historical production. He shows how racism was systematically organized by the needs of capital—not just as ideology, but as a tool of labor control, wealth extraction, and political discipline. This is not abstract theory. It is the material reality of colonized life.

The white left has long resisted this analysis. For them, race is either a divisive distraction or an unfortunate attitude that will dissolve after the revolution. But Rodney forces us to confront a different truth: that race is not just a feeling or a prejudice—it is a system of organized violence that shapes the global division of labor and access to power. To ignore it is not to be scientific. It is to be complicit.

At the same time, he challenges those within nationalist currents who treat race as a self-evident essence, divorced from the political economy that reproduces it. Blackness is not revolutionary by default. It is not a moral category. It must be situated inside class struggle. The question is not simply who is oppressed—but how, and by whom, and through what mechanisms of power. Rodney compels us to move beyond slogans and into structure.

This is why the old binaries fail. Not because they are too radical—but because they are too shallow. The real task is not to pick a side between race and class, but to grasp their dialectic: how racial hierarchies are produced and maintained by capitalist relations, and how class domination is racialized in its form, content, and enforcement. This understanding is not academic. It is strategic.

Rodney doesn’t pose the question of race and class to win a debate. He poses it to sharpen the struggle. And he reminds us that any analysis which cannot guide revolutionary practice is worse than useless—it is counterrevolutionary. Our task is not to choose between categories, but to break the system that made them.

III. Racial Contradictions Within the U.S. Working Class

Nowhere is the myth of working-class unity more violently exposed than in the United States. Here, the class struggle has never been colorblind. It has been colored in blood. Walter Rodney does not romanticize the working class as a homogenous revolutionary subject. He interrogates its formation, its privileges, and its betrayals—especially in the imperial core, where white workers have historically functioned as a buffer between capital and the colonized.

This is not an accusation. It is a structural analysis. The white working class in the U.S. has not merely failed to unite with Black and Brown workers. It has actively policed the color line to preserve material advantages—jobs, wages, housing, political power. The settler republic rewarded this loyalty with inclusion: in unions, in suburbs, in police forces, in narratives of national identity. Even their poverty was elevated above the condition of the colonized.

Rodney points to something deeper than prejudice. He identifies historical privilege—what some call the “wages of whiteness”—as a material relation. This is not reducible to income alone. It includes access to the state, insulation from militarized policing, the benefit of the doubt in courtrooms, and the ability to see oneself reflected in the institutions of power. In short, a social wage backed by imperial plunder.

When white workers are offered a minor share in empire, they are no longer just exploited—they are enlisted. Their role becomes contradictory: they are both victims of capital and defenders of a racial order that maintains capital’s rule. To ignore this contradiction is to misread the battlefield. Any revolutionary strategy in the U.S. must begin not with calls for abstract unity, but with a sober assessment of these stratifications within the working class.

Rodney doesn’t dismiss solidarity—he deepens the criteria. He refuses to build alliances on fantasy. Real solidarity can only emerge through rupture: when white workers defect from racial capitalism, reject their historical privileges, and align materially—not rhetorically—with the colonized and exploited. Until that happens, the question is not if we can unite, but on what terms, and toward whose liberation.

The Black working class, meanwhile, has never been merely a subclass. It is a distinct formation produced through slavery, segregation, and dispossession—a proletariat racialized into internal colonial status. Its revolutionary potential lies not just in its exploitation, but in its long tradition of rebellion. From slave revolts to wildcat strikes, from sharecropper unions to prison uprisings, it has waged class war from the underside of empire.

Rodney’s challenge remains: to those who speak of class struggle in the U.S., ask which class, ask which history, and ask who is positioned where in relation to the means of production, the police, and the project of empire. If your answer treats all workers as equal while ignoring the racial scaffolding of this settler state, then you are not building socialism. You are repackaging imperialism in worker’s clothes.

IV. Nationalism and Socialism: Toward a Revolutionary Synthesis

The struggle between nationalism and socialism is often posed as a choice—as if the colonized must decide between dignity and liberation, between cultural affirmation and material transformation. But Walter Rodney refuses this false dichotomy. He insists the question is not whether we choose nationalism or socialism, but what kind of nationalism, and whose socialism.

For Rodney, nationalism is not inherently revolutionary. In the hands of the petty bourgeoisie, it becomes a mask for neocolonialism—a way to change the color of the oppressor without altering the structure of oppression. Flags are raised, anthems sung, parliaments formed—but the banks remain foreign, the land remains stolen, and the poor remain hungry. Nationalism without socialism is a passport to nowhere.

And yet, Rodney also rejects the dismissal of national consciousness by doctrinaire Marxists who fail to grasp the lived experience of colonialism. For the colonized, national identity is not a luxury—it is a battlefield. It is the terrain upon which people resist erasure, reclaim history, and fight for self-determination. Socialism that cannot speak to this national experience is not revolutionary—it is abstract internationalism with no base.

The synthesis Rodney points toward is not rhetorical—it is strategic. Nationalism becomes revolutionary when it is rooted in the working class, when it does not stop at replacing elites but aims to abolish exploitation. Socialism becomes relevant when it takes the nation as a real formation—not a fantasy of unity, but a colonial wound that must be healed through collective power.

This synthesis must be forged in struggle, not theory alone. It cannot be imposed from outside or above. It must emerge from the masses themselves—from the peasant in Tanzania to the sugar worker in Guyana, from the prisoner in Attica to the student in Soweto. Rodney does not give us a blueprint. He gives us a method: to ask, in every context, what forces are in motion, who leads, who benefits, and what direction the struggle is taking.

The real debate is not whether nationalism and socialism can coexist. The real debate is over class leadership within the national struggle. Will it be the comprador class managing empire in native dress? Or will it be the workers and poor reshaping the nation in their image? Rodney’s answer is clear: the only nationalism worth defending is one that arms the oppressed, abolishes class rule, and links its fate to the global project of socialism.

The slogans must evolve. Not “Black Power” or “Class Power” in the abstract—but people’s power, built from below, rooted in place, and aimed at transformation. This is not a compromise. It is clarity. And for those of us organizing in the heart of empire, it is a reminder that we do not get to choose what the oppressed struggle for. We get to decide whether we serve that struggle—or stand in its way.

V. Neocolonialism: The Mask That Smiles While It Strangles

Empire no longer needs to wear boots and medals to conquer. Today it smiles in three-piece suits, signs grants instead of orders, and governs through NGOs, trade agreements, and election monitors. Neocolonialism is not the retreat of empire—it is its evolution. And Walter Rodney understood it not as a metaphor, but as a mode of rule: the continuation of imperialist domination through native intermediaries and the illusion of national sovereignty.

In post-independence Africa and the Caribbean, Rodney watched as revolutionary aspirations were funneled into bureaucratic development plans overseen by technocrats loyal not to the people, but to donors. Ministries were staffed, not with comrades of the masses, but with consultants trained in colonial universities and calibrated to IMF timetables. What emerged was not socialism, but managerial capitalism draped in Pan-African colors.

Neocolonialism survives by convincing the oppressed that their rulers look like them. It thrives on confusion—dressing up dependency as development, submission as cooperation, and class betrayal as national unity. It operates through black generals trained in Sandhurst, Afro-Caribbean economists who quote Keynes, and “third-world” presidents who govern in English and answer to Washington.

The same logic holds inside the imperial core. In the U.S., neocolonialism takes the form of Black mayors who manage police terror, senators who vote for wars in Africa, CEOs who donate to both parties while laying off entire neighborhoods. These figures do not represent progress—they represent cooptation. They do not signal liberation—they signal absorption into the machinery of imperial rule.

Rodney’s analysis cuts through this spectacle. He makes clear: the test of political legitimacy is not who governs, but who benefits. If the masses are still poor, if the landlords still rule, if foreign capital still drains the wealth of the land, then it is not independence—it is neocolonialism. And if our movements are not oriented toward dismantling this structure, then we are not revolutionaries—we are its administrators.

This clarity is crucial for organizing in the belly of the beast. Here, we are not just confronting capitalist exploitation—we are confronting the internal architecture of global empire. Every city budget passed, every liberal policy endorsed, every elite institution diversified but left intact, becomes a mechanism for stabilizing the system. The face changes. The function does not.

The only antidote to neocolonialism is revolutionary consciousness—an understanding that the enemy is not just external, but embedded in every institution, every compromise, every career path that leads us away from the masses and into the arms of power. Rodney teaches us that struggle must begin where we are, but never end with reform. It must aim not to navigate neocolonialism, but to destroy it—utterly and completely.

VI. Marxism as a Method of Analysis and Revolutionary Praxis

Marxism is not a brand to be worn or a vocabulary to impress seminar rooms. It is a method—a weapon. And like all weapons, it must be sharpened through practice, adapted to terrain, and wielded with discipline. Walter Rodney never treated Marxism as dogma. He treated it as a living tool forged in struggle, meant to be applied, tested, and developed in service of the oppressed. Not in abstraction, but in motion.

He warned that many so-called Marxists adopt the language without the labor. They cite Capital but ignore context. They memorize the symptoms of imperialism without diagnosing its local mutations. They repeat phrases like “base and superstructure” while failing to ask the most important question: for whom does this analysis prepare us to fight, and with whom do we fight it?

Marxism is not a shortcut to revolutionary status. It is a responsibility. It demands study—but not study as consumption. Study as a process of demystification. Study as political preparation. Study as service. The goal is not to become fluent in theory for its own sake, but to become accountable to the working class—not rhetorically, but materially, organizationally, ideologically.

In the U.S., Rodney recognized that Marxism could not be copy-pasted from Europe. The categories required reexamination. What does proletariat mean in a settler empire? What is the role of the Black working class, forged in slavery and segregation, excluded from stable labor markets and enclosed in racialized zones of surplus labor? What of the white worker, who has often functioned as both laborer and accomplice in racial domination? These are not semantic quibbles. They are strategic questions.

He understood that theory without rootedness becomes farce. That the task is not to perform Marxism, but to apply it. That revolutionary analysis must begin where we are—not with purity, but with clarity. And clarity comes from struggle. It comes from listening to workers, walking with the unemployed, studying the state, and interrogating one’s own role inside the system.

Rodney offered no shortcuts. No “correct line” to memorize. No schematic. Instead, he offered a political ethic: humility, rigor, militancy, and accountability. He demanded we reject both bourgeois liberalism and performative radicalism. He insisted that we ground theory in the lives of the people, and that we treat political education not as a debate club, but as a process of mass weaponization.

Marxism, for Rodney, is not merely a critique of capitalism—it is a commitment to its destruction. Not a worldview, but a plan of action. A compass in the dark. And above all, a discipline that must earn its place not through proclamations, but through its ability to transform consciousness and guide struggle. Anything less is counterfeit.

Conclusion: To Teach Is to Fight—The Guerrilla Intellectual Lives

Across two parts of this review, we have traced the evolution of Walter Rodney—not simply as a historian or theoretician, but as a revolutionary combatant in the realm of ideas. Part I followed his trajectory from the colonial classrooms of Guyana to the radical corridors of the University of the West Indies, through the trenches of Brixton and the socialist laboratories of Tanzania. Part II delved deeper into the ideological battles he waged: against neocolonial masks, against mechanical Marxism, against race-blind class reductionism, and against the academic aristocracy that seeks to defang liberation struggles through theory without teeth.

What Rodney left us is not merely a body of work—it is a method, a posture, and a political imperative. His concept of the guerrilla intellectual is not academic flair. It is a call to arms. It demands that we enter institutions of bourgeois knowledge not to become their servants, but to sabotage their function. To convert the lecture hall into a staging ground for revolution. To make theory dangerous again.

At Weaponized Information, we affirm our commitment to this tradition. We do not aim to be objective. We aim to be accountable: to the colonized, to the poor, to the incarcerated and dispossessed, to the rebel, the worker, and the revolutionary student. In an era of rising technofascism at home and escalating hyper-imperialism abroad, the need for disciplined, rooted, militant analysis has never been greater. We take Rodney’s lessons seriously: study deeply, speak clearly, fight alongside the people, and never seek safety in ideas that do not serve the struggle.

We are not here to be recognized by empire. We are here to be feared by it. We write not to describe the world—but to arm those who would change it. In Rodney’s words and example, we find not just a mirror of our moment, but a machete. And with it, we cut through the illusions, betrayals, and compromises that surround us.

Walter Rodney was assassinated by the state because he refused to abandon the people. That is the highest honor an intellectual can receive in a world built on exploitation. Our task is not to mourn him, but to multiply him.

The guerrilla intellectual lives. And we at Weaponized Information vow to carry the weapon forward.