>>TONC also takes the Millions More Movement’s march on Wash. DC on October 15 very seriously and we are already beginning to strategize as to how we can best unite the struggle against the war with that effort. We don’t want the two dates, October 15, and Sept. 24, just three weeks apart, to compete with each other. Central to TONC’s strategy will be to utilize Sept. 24 to build the Millions More Movement events in mid Oct. <<
(and also . . . . ) >>An important part of forging any meaningful unity will, of necessity, require that the anti-war movement both acknowledges and unites with the struggle of people of color and the events that carry their message. The call for a "Millions More March" on the tenth anniversary of the "Million Man March" has gone out far and wide. The Millions More March will extend over 3 days next fall, October 14, 15 and 16, including a massive march on Washington DC. It goes without saying that many of us will be pre-occupied with this important mobilization. This is something that needs to be respected. << Comment Marxism and the National Factor - June 2005 Juneteenth is June 19. Part 1 The Millions More Movement celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March. The Million Man March set in motion - trek, and brought to Washington, DC the better part of 2 million men, overwhelmingly proletarian in their economic facts of life and outlook. The better part of 2 million men means well over 1.5 million folks. The Million Man March and the Million More Movement is the face of the proletarian social revolution in America. What are the concrete demands of the Millions More Movement? The answer reveals the logic of the movement. I watched the "Call" issued from the Millions More Movement "organizing committee" on C-Span. Everyone/anyone oppressed and exploited by imperial bourgeois relations, without regard to color, nationality, gender, sexual preference or class station was invited to participate. "Working class," "Proletarian revolution," "trade union movement" and concepts like "labor movement," has more often than not meant white people and white workers in our history and this kind of thinking is fraught with danger and no longer express the economic and social reality of American society. Yet, it is a fact of our lives that our industrial working was formed from successive waves of European immigrants and it was only after the 1920s that the American family farmers - (European immigrants forming and coalescing into the Anglo American People), began a social process roughly equivalent to the destruction of the agriculture population as serf and their transformation into proletarians during an earlier phase of "European history" or the transition from agriculture to industry. Marxism and the National Question has never faired well in America. A dynamic section of the African American Liberation Movement, galvanized on the basis of the battle against the state; with a huge section of insurgents won over to the brilliance of Marxism and the National Question, stepped forward and re-articulated this burning social question on the basis of American history and in the image of the proletariat. This happened in the late 1960 and early 1970s. The period of the National Question (roughly the period of the First and Second Communist International), then the era of National-Colonial Question (corresponding and forming the political and theory basis of the Third Communist International) have exhausted themselves in history. What stands before us is the National Factor, having shed its previous class and segregated institutional framework that cast it simply as a question of those colonized by imperialism on the basis of the closed colonial system. In the past the program of the left and the Marx sector of communism assigned the industrial proletariat in the imperial centers the task of liberating the oppressed peoples on the basis of the overthrow of their own imperial bourgeoisie. Having sustained a 30 year defeat on the Leninist presentation of the National Factor in America and having entered a new era of history, we communists workers generated on the wave of rebellion and direct combat with the state authority expressed in first Birmingham, Alabama 1963, then the political juncture that was Watts 1965; and then the Detroit 1967 (at the time the greatest uprising against the state authority since the Civil War in America), took to heart the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and took note of its distinct multinational character as the descendants of the Chicano Moratorium cemented our material political alignment through Mexico and into "Central" and "South" "America" and added (expressed) something new to the social equation. Then there was Cincinnati 2000 and Battle Creek Michigan 2002. The Millions More Movement proves conclusively that the day of the black leader as black leader rather than a leader who is African American, has definitively ended. There will always be leaders that are black and/or African America, because there are upwards of 40 million African Americans, who as a people are indigenousness to America. In addition, there are many millions of black skin immigrants in America. Over the past few years, I have attempted to articlate this political concept of a dynamic change wave in our history by coining the expression "the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader." The peculiar phenomenon of the black leader is only an aspect of a broader vision of the opening of a new era in human history expressing a real revolution in the material power of production. This new era ushers in a new epochal of human history as different as the industrial revolution and the industrial epoch was from the agricultural economic and social relations associated with the political term feudalism. The peculiar phenomenon of the black leader embodying the multi-class sentiments of the African American People as a people has ground to an end because the economic, social and political relations of capital that cast them as a historically evolved people have changed, or leaped to a new basis and began restructuring the entire environment of our lives. The Watts Rebellion of 1965 is an important political juncture in American history, signaling a breach with the petty bourgeois compromised leadership of a section of Black leaders. What happened was that an angry participant of a gathering to protest injustice during the Rebellion shot one of the black leaders advocating appeasement to imperial authority. Watts 1965 is a political juncture misunderstood in its political consequences by many on the left and the bulk of the previous generation of communists. Interestingly, the author Walter Mosley (Devil In the Blue Dress) has created a set of characters (Easy R. and Mouse) and stories revolving around Watts as a political juncture in American History. Forty years after the fact, Watts 1965 has to be placed in its historical context and understood. Rather than a "black riot" or "rebellion of the lumpen proletariat" (which is how this event has been treated by virtually ever social group on the left and within communism, especially during the period of 1965 - 1972) the Watts uprising objectively linked the struggle of the Anglo-American workers of the North to the national liberation movement in the old plantation South - on the basis of the black worker, and completed the encirclement of American imperialism by the colonial masses of earth. The Watts Rebellion of 1965 is an important political juncture as a spontaneous rebellion against the state authority and the definitive event altering the social movement of the 1960s. This view stands in sharp contrast to history's revisionists that attach primary importance to the anti-war movement of the 1960s as defining the social process. What radicalized the peoples of America and reawakened an interest in revolutionary Marxism was the African American Liberation Movement, (Montgomery Alabama, 1954) which galvanized the country, sparking a black student-youth movement and then a powerful current among all students and youth. Detroit 1967 went further and effected the political separation of the black workers and the black bourgeoisie, in what at the time was the greatest uprising against the state since the Civil War. In Detroit the participation of Southern Anglo American workers - immigrants from the South, was for the ruling class a terrible harbinger of the future. Every social group in America was forced to reassess its approach and conception of the African American Liberation Movement or be rendered irrelevant. The battle hardened African American peoples, whose enslavement and evolution as a people, is rooted in the world historic formation of the capitalist class and was so necessary for the formation, expansion and growth of capitalism, were completing the encirclement of imperialism of the USNA State and shaking it to its foundations. Nevertheless, this is only one aspect of the National Question in our history or rather the National Factor. The peculiar phenomenon of the black leader is rooted in our peculiar and specific history. The history of this peculiar phenomenon of the black leader, spans not from the outbreak of the Civil War or the defeat of the reactionary fascist like front-runners of the Southern Secessionist slaveholders rebellion, but rather gyrates around events of the 1890 and the defeat of Reconstruction. Being a leader in a social sphere and having a black face is not the meaning of "black leader." The Black Leader is a historically specific product of the system of Jim Crow and as such his political and economic life span is tied to and was depended upon Jim Crow's existence. Jim Crow is a creation of the North - Northern capital, rather than the plantation South and the Slave Oligarchy. To this very day the most segregated communities and cities in America remain in the North, rather than the South. It has never been different. The spread of the system of Jim Crow from the North beginning in 1790 (not the plantation South) and its universal implementation throughout the USNA State as state policy, signaled what after the Civil War (1865) turned out to be 90 years of unrelenting violence and terror against the former slave and the Northern blacks. The segregation of the African Americans as a people formed them as a people and was the social framework for the emergence of leaders that campaigns on behave of the peculiar demands of the blacks. Anti-Lynching laws was one of those peculiar demands of African Americans, although no one really wants to be lynched. This was a black demand. The demand for access to public institutions based on ones ability to pay for services rendered and say, the push for anti-discrimination legislation and Voting Rights was a black demand. Is this the character of the demands of the Millions More March planned for October? How can one demand something they has already fundamentally won and realize in their everyday life? Today, none of the leaders that evolved and consolidated their political basis amongst the black masses during the previous configuration of history can put forth exclusively black demands or demands of "people of color" that are not directly the voice of the most poverty stricken proletariat in America, without regard to color. Nor can the black masses put forth "black demands" as such because they has already been fundamentally won and because they are the heart of the most poverty stricken sector of the proletariat and female in their/its fundamentality. Sure the movement is going to retain its equality mode because the people of America are not equal in the class and social meaning of life. And their is still plenty of white chauvinism and national chauvinism left in our society and the world. Thus, the Millions More March is founded on the necessity to open the doors to all those exploited and oppressed and this is not a clever maneuver by "opportunists" leaders but bourgeois leaders grasping the historical moment and fighting a life and death battle to stay in front of the wheels of history. African American Liberation and Social Revolution is not a question of proletarian revolution from the standpoint of "the workers of the imperial North liberating the oppressed people" or peoples of color. African American Liberation is the salient form that the proletarian social revolution is taking in America in 2005. The old formulations belong to a period of history long gone. Nor can the proletarian social revolution cast off the equality expression because the most proletarian core of the working class (which remains majority white) are not economically equal in society. Now the majority of poverty stricken proletarians in America are Anglo American but the beating heart of the sector thrown into battle with the state is not Anglo American at this stage of the unfolding social process. This apparent contradiction requires no explanation, only the ability of one to listen and hear what this poverty stricken mass is fighting to articulate and how they are articulating their concerns. It is the task of communists to win the workers to the cause of communism or the demand for distribution of socially necessary means of subsistence outside the purchase and sale of labor power. It is a fact however, that we communist workers - who never for a moment forsake Stalin's brilliance on the National Question, National Colonial Question and National Factor, sustained a harsh theoretical defeat in America that compelled us to "flip the script" and describe the evolution of the Anglo American people as proof of the validity of Marxism and the National Question. Anytime one speaks of "black people" everyone becomes confused and nothing happens. This mass of poverty stricken proletarians are conceived and understood as a massive lumpen proletariat, rather than a new class of working poor, temporary workers and unemployable workers. This is all right because life solves real problems of logic and clarifies observation as history creation. We are not resentful because we understand why our history blinded every generation before us to the certain facts of life in America. A historical error is a historical error because most are incapable of transcending an outdated or incorrect conception that history evolution later clarifies. The formation of our industrial working class was not on the basis of the shattering of the family farmers or the dislocation of agriculture mirroring the flow of serfs into towns and their formation into the industrial class or on the basis of the shattering of the slave system and the conversion of the freemen into industrial proletarians. Life itself, at least our life in America, mitigated against a general Marxists framework of understanding of the National Question. >From the standpoint of the slave and their descendant, we understand our individual social position to be that of slaves that crossed each successive boundary of the industrial system and then fought our way into positions of leaders in every active and dynamics sphere of the social struggle, including the industrial proletariat. Many of us in the North were two and three generations industrial proletariat in the 1960 and 1970s. In the most personal sense, I have spoken of my dad as a skilled worker - electrician, at the Ford Motor Company and his dad as a small businessman in Detroit. Some of us did not have sharecropping parents, or grandparents or great grandparents. The two threads of our history are 1790 in the North (New England states) and chattel slavery in the plantation South. In 1830 for example, the African American people as a people did not exist as such. What existed was what all the black writers of this period call the "Colored Citizens of America." The period of segregation welded the African American people into a people rather than various "black" ethnic groups from Africa and dissolved their identity as a mass of colored peoples during a 90 years social process called Jim Crow. No one would dare call the African American people a tribe and "colored people" refers to blacks in our history, rather than Indians, Mexicans or Chicano's. The African American people define themselves no longer as Negro, New Negroes or Colored and their existence as a people is not subject to debate, only description. "Not subject to debate" does not mean "not subject to discourse" but rather the riveting point of discourse is admission of the system of Jim Crow and why no author in the entire history of the American Union has ever mistaken the Anglo American people for African Americans. What's the problem? Now most of us of my generation and those like me, did not come out of the antiwar movement of the 1960's, but the industrial working class proper, taking to heart lessons and knowledge transmitted to us by the leading section of the industrial class that dominated the social movement before being cast aside by history - us. These workers were primarily Slavic in their core and their battle shall live throughout the ages. Our Red Banner is forever bent in their honor. Yet . . . no one in America, when referring to the industrial upsurge and trade union battles of the 1930s and 1940s called this movement "Slavic Revolts" as acknowledgment of the role of the Slavic workers. Many of the modern history revisionists call the industrial social movement of the 1960s and 1970s - as it was inherited and dominated by African Americans, "the black trade union caucus movement" and fail to understand that the mechanics of capital have always thrown the unskilled section of the trade union movement in combat with the skilled sector over the direction of the union and its form of organization. In a previous period of history (1930s & 1940s) it was the Slavic workers that made up the dynamic core of the unskilled workers driving the formation of the industrial union movement and providing the subjective material of the transition from craft to industrial unionism. In fact, to a considerable degree, the African Americans literally moved into the slums housing the Slavic workers as a community as the fact of the melting pot conception of American society. Why does elementary political Marxism becomes confusing when the real poverty stricken proletariat - so-called "people of color," in the imperial centers assert themselves? Why is this not the face of the proletarian revolution as it is taking place in real time? History is crazy baby and "is what it is" and does not require our ideological agreement or confirmation. Allow me to present the most basic outline of American history without a "bunch of oue bla dee" Marxist sounding double talk. America was Southern in its economic centers of gravity, culture and political institutions and possessed more wealth than the North up to the Civil War. Just the slaves represented something like four billion dollars in capital expenditure and what made the slave chattel, was the very same thing that make machinery capital - both status as a commodity bought and sold on/in/as the market relations. There is of course the massive infrastructure projects undertaken by the Slave Oligarchy as it attempted to prepare to leap to an industrial form of capital, made understandable by tracing the development of the transportation system or railway building in the post ivil War period. Most of the left and roughly 90% of the communist movement in the history of America has disagreed with this proposition for the past one hundred years. The proposition is simple: "America was basically a Southern country in its economic centers of gravity, culture and political institutions up to the Civil War." Today, this essentially chauvinist denial of the facts of American history is unsustainable. Waistline _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
