And yet as brutal, raw and violent as it was, it didn't threaten the very future of humankind and the planet. Rosa Luxembourg said that the choices facing humanity at that time were either socialism or barbarism, but even the brilliant Rosa did not anticipate the new dangers that are in store for humankind as it begins the 21st century.
Sam Webb
Communism and history.
Everyone familiar with the methodology of Marx that allowed him to formulate the thesis concerning the science of society traveled an individual path to arrive at his or her particular point of view. Most people I have met in life interested in and supportive of the writing of Marx expressed a deep compassion for the plight of their fellow human being and utilize the method of Marx to make sense of what appeared to be a chaotic world - at least for me.
Our home was always agitated with lively debate about politics and race and much of this had to do with dad having hand built a stereo system - vacuum tubes and all, in the late 1950s and early 60s and had made a decision to get into the skilled trades as an electrician at the Ford Motor Company. Father had fought in the Philippines - one moment on the side of the "Huks" (the communist) and with a change in government policy, against the "Huks," and in the post Second Imperialist War atmosphere of America, grasped the logic of the reform movement opened on the basis of restructuring industrial relations and promoting Civil Rights. Our residency was the Jefferies Project in Detroit, one of the first major government sponsored housing projects in America, dedicated at its opening by Eleanor Roosevelt and a testimony to the efforts of the Roosevelt Coalition to stabilize class relations in America.
American capital was poised to dominate the world through the rebuilding of Europe, the reformulation of monetary policy by way of the Bretton Wood Agreement and the dismantling of the colonial world structure that inhibited the flow of capital. The need to reformulate the social contract between owners of property and broad section of the laboring class was the necessary ingredient to stabilize the productive forces and allow the US to assume world leadership in opposition to Soviet Power. It was if the workingman had found a friend in Roosevelt.
Well, much water has passed under the bridge and one can assess the waves of change in retrospect. Roosevelt and Hitler came to power at roughly the same time and it became apparent to "our" imperialism that Hitler's crusade against Bolshevism entailed colonialization of Eastern Europe. Wall Street had profound feeling about this matter, in as much as the areas coal fields, budding oil field and municipal bonds - and other investments, was owned by some of Wall Street and Roosevelt was the representative of financial capital - Wall Street.
Back then the Democrats were the reactionary party of the Solid South and had no mass base North or South. The A f of L was securely tied to the Republicans. The mass vote of Roosevelt in 1932 was a repudiation of the starvation policy of Hoover and the depression. Roosevelt had to construct a mass base for the Democratic Party, stop Hitler re- division of the world and Wall Streets money as a basis to pull the economy out of crisis or experience World War 1 on a higher level.
Without question the communist and revolutionary forces in America were desperately mobilizing the masses in the fight for food, shelter and clothing - and the communist fought extremely hard and were making headway and the masses were responding. The victories of social security, unemployment compensation, social welfare, the youth act, old age pensions, etc. were the compromise Wall Street Democrats were prepared to make to build a mass base, stave off the reemergence of crisis, defeat Hitler and push the quantitative boundary of the system. It appeared to the communist that the mass movement forced Roosevelt into its camp. The CIO (Committee of Industrial Organization) could not have been built the way it was unless a strong section of capital and the administration agreed with such building.
By the time Earl Browder - then head of the CPUSA, had his famous dinner with Roosevelt the communist felt they had a secret ally in Roosevelt or he had been won over to their position. Unfortunately, Roosevelt died and proved the Shakespeare wasn't totally correct. Here the good of the man lived after his death and the evil was interned with his bones. To this day a section of our comrades cling to the most subjective and personalized view of history, as if the death of Roosevelt meant the death of the Roosevelt Coalition and all that is need is another Roosevelt to overpower the "ultra-right." The Roosevelt Coalition served its purpose and politics transformed on the basis of the completion of the quantitative expansion of the industrial infrastructure.
This of course meant completing the mechanization of agriculture and consolidating the most incredibly vast migration in American history - the movement of a people from South to North. Wall Street is of course about money and restructuring the social and industrial infrastructure to conform to whatever quantitative boundaries in capital exist.
The Civil Rights movement exploded as part of the general anti-colonial movement that was launched from the defeat of Hitler throughout the world. Expanding the quantitative boundary of capital, final liquidation of lingering feudal and economic structure, collapsing the old colonial structure intersected with the demands of a people against lynch rope violence, the blade, boot and the bullet.
Dad understood he was a pawn in a bigger battle and the world of politics was reduced to the life of his family and struggle in the immediate political arena. Mother was more rebellious than Dad, who would bring his communist party papers home slipped to him at the plant gate. Dad was a semi-pro boxer in the armed forces and had no particular love for Roosevelt or his legacy. He did have what would seem strange today, a particular admiration for Henry Ford who would let you work for a living, although he disliked the fact that the only thing that prevented him and his partners from repeatedly being pulled off the street and beat by the police was their Ford badge. Dad fought the police, which would scare the hell of the neighbors and kids. Dad never stopped being a soldier and warrior.
Dad's behavior also cause mother acute problems because the women in the neighborhood would come and get dad when their husband, boy friends and sons were acting up and folks would end up in the living room eating up all the food, playing card games, drinking and playing the good record player. Some of the woman who would come complaining didn't have husbands or boyfriends or children. Although I hated it when dad would make me go to the local Drug Store with vacuum tubes in my front and back pockets - they had a "tube testing machine," to check which tube on his broad of primitive transistors and circuits was bad, I would watch in amazement as he ran down two flights of steps everyday to catch his ride to work. At 6'4, there were times he would jump a whole flight of stairs.
Twenty years ago (1982) at the Extraordinary Conference of the CPUSA held April 23-25, the following was stated, in lamentation over the death of Roosevelt:
"In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a prophetic declaration. He declared that in this modern age the inalienable right of all our people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence - cannot be realized unless their basic economic rights are guaranteed. He called for the implementation of an Economic Bill of Rights that would secure for all the people their basic human rights."
"The bright promise of Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights has never been fulfilled."
This was written almost twenty years ago to the date - OK, April is still a month or 50 some days away. The idea that the fight is focused on the "ultra-right" - whatever that means and for an abstract socialism is a tad bit much. What about this phase of the decay of capital and the boundaries that we currently operate within?
One would think that Birmingham 1963 never happened and that Watts 1965 didn't carry the struggle to another level. I grew up in Detroit and remember July 1967 like it was yesterday. Liberty City and the repeated explosions in Miami, California and Cincinnati was not the voice of the lowest section of the working class but the philosophic "other."
Comrade Sam Webb, who doesn't claim a Marxist approach to the economy or society has reformulated the line of the clinging to the old Roosevelt Coalition under conditions where there are no more reforms left in capital. Comrade Sam would do well to revisit Marx in as much as his party is called communist and find his individual way to common sense.
Karl Marx "Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy," states the following:
"Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather form the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.
"No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
"In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of one arising form the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close.
"Frederick Engels, with whom I maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence since the publication of his brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories (printed in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, arrived by another road (compare his History of the Working Class in England) at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience."
"No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself."
"for which there is room" = completion of all the quantitative boundaries.
"Frederick Engels, . . . arrived by another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) at the same result as I,"
"the same result as I" = determination of the evolution of value and the end of society moving in antagonism.
Apparently comrade Webb has repudiated Marx in favor of Rosa who was a Marxist. What did Marx say? Strange days.
End of part 1
Melvin P.
