Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity: The election of Barack Obama By Waistline2 Obama: Change or continuity? (Part III) By Elíades Acosta Matos raises a question whose answer is "both!" _http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=800&Ite_ (http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=800&Ite)
Part 3A As the saying goes, "the North won the Civil War and the South won the peace." The South "winning the peace" shapes all our political institutions to this very day. The violence of the counterrevolution against the blacks was the condition for condemning more whites than blacks to the sharecropping system,. By concentrating the attack against the blacks, the planters, acting with the open and hidden support of Wall Street financial imperialism, made it appear that the majority of poor whites were out of the line of fire. Centuries of white supremacy led most of the poor whites to believe that uniting on the basis of color would give them privileged status over the blacks. After the disfranchisement of the African American, the laws supposedly passed against the black tenant farmer were then applied to the white. The ever present North/South political divide, reemerge with a vengeance, now constituted as a fascist state structure in the South and a bourgeois democratic state form in the North, with the growing areas of Northern black concentrates ruled on the basis of a reactionary form of bourgeois democracy - police state violence. The color factor - white supremacy, buttressed by an indescribable bloody violence, made it seem as if there was a South African-like white settler regime dominating a black nation rather than Wall Street financial imperialism dominating and enslaving an area, politically and economically administrated by the shattered Slave Oligarchy reconstituted as a reactionary planter class. The hostility of most Southern whites to the Northern political establishment remains to this very day. In the core South - the old plantation system, rather than the South defined as a region, the tools productive forces, changed very little from 1870 - 1940. 1940 was one of the target dates in a compromised agreement Lincoln proposed for freeing the slaves. The invention of the cotton picker in that year, the mass production of the tractor and the development of weed killing chemicals in the early 1950’s was the economic legs - revolution, for the social and political revolution of 1864 to stand upon. The social revolution then moved forward to completion. The death of the sharecropping system was followed by a massive freedom movement and the outlawing of segregation and discrimination as a path was cleared for the entry of a mass of blacks into the lower bowels of the industrial system. The vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next. However for this dialectic of "the revolution in permanence" to unfold, and usher in the emancipation of a class, a revolution in the means of production, or the emergence of a new boundary in productive force development is required that displaces the energy of the labor force and changes the form of laboring. Classes are liberated - displaced, from history incrementally and always on the basis of changes in the means of production rather than by political fiat or "revolutionary ideology." The emancipation of the sharecropper as a class, or the so-called "liquidation of the small producer," take place on the basis of revolution in the machinery of society that literally "kicks" an entire class out of its circumstance that makes it a historically specific class. This "inner law" of revolution reveals itself as a theoretical axiom: no class can be fully liberated or fully emancipated until its labor can be fundamentally replaced by a more efficient form of energy. Political emancipation is not enough. Class are truly emancipated in correspondence to the development of the division of labor in society. Further, the political and ideological superstructure can swing and lurch between terrorist legal, extra-legal and illegal violence and democratic parliamentary form of rule without changing the underlying property form of a society. In a different way and under different economic and political conditions, this same law of social revolution played itself out in the Russian (Soviet) countryside during the exact same timeframe; between 1870 and 1940 into the early 1950s. Back to the Future II. To say all this is not yet enough in defining the specific domestic/political context of the Obama election and the sectarian wars in Congress being waged on the political axis of North/South. Today, the Republican Party is by all estimates a "Southern Party," with its core political/social base in the "Bible Belt" or the old plantation area. To no small degree, the unleashing of the Southern political establishment inexorably leads to unleashing the cutting edge of America’s historical fascist movement. The appeal to "small town America" is not an appeal to folks living in smaller towns but an euphemism for white supremacy and "the far/ultra right" - fascistic rule. And all of America understands this with most political fascists, scared to openly show their political hand. The North/South divide - axis, needs to be outlined. America was basically Southern at its inception. Its core areas were Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. The New England states were the shipping and manufacturing appendages of the slave system of the South. Economic and political interest and centers of gravity slowly shifted to the "lower South" as slavery became an industry of cotton and tobacco production. Seven "Deep" - core, South cotton states would secede from the Union by February 1861, starting with South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. These seven states formed the Confederate States of America (February 4, 1861), with Jefferson Davis as president, and a governmental structure closely modeled on the U.S. Constitution. The remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join the Confederacy. Later four states in the upper South (Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia), which had rejected Confederate overtures, declared their secession, and joined the Confederacy, bring the CSA to a total of eleven states. Here is the South in its owns words, aspiration, and historical configuration as a state . By the late 1840’s, the political leaders of America or rather the Southern political leaders of America, viewed the population and the industrial growth of the North with apprehension. They realized that the shift from manufacturing to industry was creating a new nation in the North. This new nation was being formed a waves of European immigration created an industrial proletariat in what a few years earlier had been the north western frontier. A new relationship was being formed as the industrial cities produced agricultural machinery; the necessities for the slave system and in turn were fed, not by the slave system and its production of cash crops, but the Anglo American family farmers. The North was different in its way of life from the South. The evolving culture of the slave labor force combined with a certain aristocratic Bourbon like sensibility of the South’s ruling class, with its ideological glorification of the "agrarian way of life," has already made the South "Southern." "Southern" is far more than a geographic description. It is a cultural disposition with its distinct linguistic rendering. The South was clearly culturally distinct from the North. As the US grew, the North entered into an economic revolution from manufacturing to industry. The South had a strangle hold on political power. It became known as the "slave power," not because it had slaves, but because of the constitutional provision that slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for appropriating representation in Congress. The growth of the North meant it would only be a little time before the political battle in America would be shifted from the House of Representatives to the Senate as the South‘s last stand. In the sixty-two years between Washington's election and the Compromise of 1850, for example, slaveholders controlled the presidency for fifty years, the Speaker's chair for forty-one years, and the chairmanship of House Ways and Means [the most important committee] for forty-two years. The only men to be reelected president - Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson - were all slaveholders. The men who sat in the Speaker's chair the longest - Henry Clay, Andrew Stevenson, and Nathaniel Macon - were slaveholders. Eighteen out of thirty-one Supreme Court justices were slaveholders. The "strong military and strong local police force," "little government," anti-government and anti-federal government" posturing was always the political calling card of the Slave Oligarchy, as it lost one political battle after another. The North fought to implement government and tariff policy advantage to the growth of Northern industry. _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War) The Southern political establishment began the preparation for the irrepressible political conflict. They understood that the mass of whites who did not have slaves would not fight simply to preserve slavery and the Constitutional right for the individual to own slaves; an economic institution that did not benefit them as a class. The southern whites could see with their own eyes this social relations of production, with the Slave Oligarchy possessing the rights to the best lands, the best of the limited roads, water ways and water rights. The Slave Oligarchy understood it had to separate from the Union and create a Southern nation with a distinct national-state based on slavery, but with social and cultural institutions benefiting all whites. Then the whites could be compelled to defend their institutions. Remarkable economic progress was made between 1850 and the outbreak of war and much of this progress can be traced on the basis of railroad lines - tracks, and the budding steel works in Alabama. More importantly was the opening up of the slave system as a realizable aspiration and means to get out of the grinding poverty with $250. The small and growing banking and insurance system was opened up. The state of Alabama guaranteed the loan to make basically any white man a small slave owner and tie him to the system. A man in Alabama with as little as $250 could buy a slave, a wagon, a mule and elementary framing equipment. The mortgage on the slave covered the whole damn thing. The harder the slave was driven the greater the productivity. If you had forty of fifty acres of cotton you were on your way to getting rich. There was so much money in cotton at that time. The whole industrial world revolved around cotton, which of course is why Marx "Capital" and most of his economic writing in riveted to the cotton industry and spinning gins. You had to do some pretty brutal things, but you could get rich and many a Northerner - Yankee, with means most certainly took advantage of this. One hundred years later, the Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, would emerged as the national spokesperson for preserving segregation under the banner of States Rights. The model for the Southern leaders and nation was to be the Greek and Roman slave democracies, pivoting on an ideology and body politics of "State Rights." The concept of democracy without liberty for all, and opposed to such, exactly suited their purpose. To this very day this conception of democracy and rights, which denies liberty for some - the ideological "other," is the ideological underpinning for much of the core political South and the hallmark of the Southern political establishment. (Constitution of the Confederate States of America at: _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSA_Constitution_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSA_Constitution) ) It is this specific ideology that Barack Obama acutely understands and finds himself in combat with. It is for good reason in his "Audacity of Hope," - written before becoming President, Obama reopens the question of population count as a basis for the Senate rather than simply two Senators from each state. The political argument and demand to place Senate seats upon a basis of population count, is aimed at breaking the historic fascists current in the Senate, by placing the core Southern states in an absolute minority. (Section 3A was added from the original on Marxist Debate. Information as source from taken from "The Future Is Up To Us" by Nelson Peery and "African American Liberation and Revolution in the United States," by Nelson Peery) **************Get a jump start on your taxes. Find a tax professional in your neighborhood today. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=Tax+Return+Preparation+%26+Filing&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000004) _______________________________________________ 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
