Black History Month: The legacy and past generations of communists. Some debts are hard to pay, but if you dance to the music, you must pay the piper. I choose to pay and not default on my personal debt to history. When the selfless creditor leaves the flesh and enters history, one is left with legacy. Such is the case with the former Soviet Union. The mere existence of the Soviet Power opened doors for the colonial masses that probably would have taken another 50 - 100 years to open. This is so because the proletariat in the advanced countries were unable and often unwilling to consider emancipation of “their colonials.” Marx and Engels noted this tendency in the relation of the English proletariat with the Irish. Soviet power also indirectly impacted the struggles of the working class in the advanced countries in securing reform and concessions as efforts to maintain the loyalty of the working class with capitalists. Each generation owes a debt to its dead. Paying the debt requires sifting through and rearticulating ones own history with fresh data and new insights, expressing ones location in history, as this history describes the progressive accumulation of productive forces. Thus, this new narrative consolidates the experience of a previously advanced fighting section of the American proletariat during the last phase of development of the industrial system and the first phase of the post-industrial world order. . The October Revolution 1917 happened. The October Revolution ushered in the general crisis of capital, by withdrawing one-sixth of the earth from capital imperialist exploitation and erecting barricades beyond which capital could not advance on earth. The fortress (garrison state) of Soviet Power became an economic and political gravity well that the slaves of imperialism could enter to escape the ravages of world imperialism. History became divided into before and after October. After October the national question was bound up with the general question of the colonies of imperialism or reshaped by Lenin mouth into the national-colonial question. Lenin embraced change producing a new analysis when the world changed, and Lenin knew the world had changed because he led the change. Lenin‘s party fostered the formation of the Third Communist International as means to protect the October Revolution and regroup the world communist insurgency. At the moment of its birth, it was understood that the Soviet workers and peasants were the cherish child of the world proletariat. We protect our children at all cost. Lenin called forth the Communist International for protection because he understood that we understood. The Comintern played an exemplary role in the struggles of the colonial peoples of earth. The Comintern’s contribution to the national-colonial question in America lives forever in in our hearts and mind in America, provoking profound emotions. The seminal theoretical presentation of the issue was J.V. Stalin’s “ Marxism and the National Question written 1913. To this day, no literature of single text for this period of time comes close to his presentation. To understand this text, one must travel back to the state of Mississippi in 1914 or the era in which this text was written. Try mentally reading this text in a town called Tchula, 20 minutes outside the states capitol of Jackson . . . . in 1914. Standing on the back of this text the Comintern’s October 26, 1928 and October 1930 resolutions on the Negro Question have attained a statue bordering on the sacred. To awaken one day in the 300 year war and discover you are no longer along is a profound emotion. The mere mention of the Comintern creates humility, loyalty and an irresistible impulse to dip one Red Banner in honor of those whose shoulders we stand upon. The Comintern documents changed the orientation of the communist movement world wide. This was not a bad thing. The emotion should not be lost to history. In America the black was the “Negro Problem.” The Comintern said, “No, you mean the Negro Question, or the issue of the slaves of capital imperialism.” This was enough - in 1928, for many of us - generations, to swear loyalty and fight for at least a thousand years. Loyalty is a tricky endeavor and in practical politics gyrates with competence. We want to try the impossible and get the right mix of both. There are names - Americans, that should not be lost to history in our quest for a revolutionary conception of the colonial question. Harry Haywood - trained by the Comintern under the watchful eye of Stalin himself, produced Negro Liberation in 1949. James Allen, Claudia Jones, Pettis Perry and Nelson Peery. In this real history the role of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) contains much of that, which is honorable in our history. The CPUSA was the best that our history produced during this period and one should not “crap ” on their history, because they might disagree with a proposition 80 years later. Much has changed since the Comintern’s 1928 and 1930 documents on the Negro Question. Try reading these documents in 1930, Tchula Mississippi with the period of the Red Summer still in mind. What has changed is the national-colonial factor. Capital imperialism simultaneously amalgamate and disperse nations and peoples as the actual process of building and completing the infrastructure of a truly world market. A proposition that was true during one boundary of development of the industrial system and capital, might not necessarily hold the same force at another point of development. In 1950, the employed industrial workers in the Midwest were on the cutting edge of the social struggle. In the 1960's, Chrysler Motors alone had about 26 plants in and around Detroit. This configuration no longer exists. We can argue over what happened but something did happen and Chrysler has very few plants in Detroit today, with one of its two engine plants on Mack Ave., slated to close. Black History Month 2010 is the story of the rise and decay of the industrial working class and the death of the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader. History has a form and content, which the colonial question is not immune to. Form and content simultaneously provides the environment and condition for the other. One must always specify what one is talking about. The content of history refers to the ceaseless development of the productive forces; tools, instruments, machinery and energy source and deployment. Engels called this “the progressive accumulation of productive forces.“ The form of history, as used in this article, speaks of property relations and thus one ends up with a capitalist society, a feudal society or in the case of the Soviets, a socialist society. The content - essence of the industrial revolution, was the formation of industrial classes founded on a society infrastructure of electro-mechanical machines. In this meaning the Soviet Union was an industrial society as was America. Each society expressed a different property form of class and wealth. Classes decay - rise and fall, in their form and content as a normal process of evolution. The ultimate and fundamental impulse of society change from one mode to another begins as revolution or a qualitative change in productive forces. Qualitative change in the productive forces is a process unto itself. A process is the totality of stages of development of dialectical motion. For instance, Henry Ford Sr. production methods marked a distinct quantitative boundary in the development of the quality isolated as “the industrial system” and capitalism in America, and socialism in the Soviet Union. Capitalism or socialism did not change qualitatively as society leaped from one quantitative boundary to the next. Nor did the industrial system become non-industrial based on crossing a quantitative boundary. Henry Ford Sr. or “ Fordism” exists as a bookmark denoting a quantitative boundary in the development of the industrial revolution. Capitalism did expand quantitatively, witnessed as expansion, deepening the market and expanding heavy industry. WL
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