Re: A Question for the Moderator

[Waistline2]

In a message dated 7/31/2004 8:22:28 AM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:   >In 1991, Grozny's population was about 50% non-Chechen. The Nautsky district in Chechnya was about 75% non-Chechen, mostly Russians, Ukrainians and Cossacks who lived there since the 15th century. Those people have almost entirely fled, been forced out, or killed. None of them would have voted for an independent Chechnya. Do their voices matter?   If not that, then who? Ethnic Chechens? What about the Chechen Diaspora? There are more Chechens who live outside Chechnya than inside it, and most of them have family members, and certainly have tribal ties, in Chechnya. What about the 100,000 Chechen Akkins living in Dagestan? What will they say?<   Comment   In my estimate the American Marxists are the least qualified amongst world Marxists when dealing with the national factor. Between 1973 and I978 I had compiled much of the writings on the national factor in our history using a collection of roughly 30 years of Political Affairs as the core material. In terms of the Trotskyists position my base material had been the writings of CLR James. Members of his Facing Reality group had played a role in the formation of the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers . . . notably James Boggs.   In our history the national factor has basically meant the color factor. Self determination of nations up to an including the formation of an independent state means exactly that. Self determination as a political slogan and policy meant  . . . a nation . . . as opposed to a historically evolved people. For instance the African American people are a historically evolved people and not a nation. Nations are not something one can build. Nations evolve as the historical _expression_  of a community of people, culture, land and economic intercourse at a certain stage in development of commodity production.   Self determination for nations mean exactly that . . . the political determination . . . will . . . of a nation not simply a people. Whether a group of people are a nation defines the form of resolution of the national question and national factor for the Bolsheviks.   The various Indian nations are not nations in the modern Marxists sense of the word. In my estimate they are advanced national groups whose formation and gestation spans centuries. This is not the case with the African American peoples.   The formation of the African American people is unique. Their consolidation was not based on common land or religion. The words "common land" is not simply a geographic description of the land mass called America for instance. Common land embraces a distinct economic center of gravity with a division between town and country and their economic intercourse that welds a nation together.   In respects to the African American people there is no internal dynamic to hold them together as a people . . . yet they are a people . . . in transition. The current transition taking place is the result of the destruction of segregation - Jim Crow, and this stage of passing from the industrial system.   The force that held them together and formed them as a people is not color or racism but the legal and extra legal pressure of the whites. The most brutal social and political oppression was necessary to carry out the extreme level of economic exploitation of the blacks. After the Civil War and the defeat of Reconstruction the sharecropping blacks were cheated by the landlords, brutalized by the legal authorities, terrorized by the extralegal forces and basically reduced to the level of peasants in India.   The near total isolation of the blacks through segregation law and Southern custom was necessary for the level of exploitation they faced and institutionalized. The era of segregation, lasting about 95 years, isolated the mass of African Americans to a greater degree than did slavery. This isolation and oppression based on and institutionalized as the color factor was the condition for the final stage of their development as a people . . . not a nation . . . and self determination is a political solution involving nations.   During the 1960s into the 1980s and even today one hears advocacy of self determination for African Americans and it makes no sense. Even a modern scheme for regional autonomy in respects to African Americans make no sense because of their dispersal throughout the American Union.   These so-called modern national movements within the former Soviet Union are not national movements or colonial revolts. Very real grievances exist but applying Lenin's pre First Imperial World War slogan prevents the Marxists from understanding the economic logic of nations . . . not peoples . . . and dismiss the class content of these more than less reactionary bourgeois movements. The national factor is a factor operating on the basis of a fundamentally different realignment on earth today.   The national movement in history is and have always fundamentally been a peasant movement asserting itself during the transition from feudalism to industrial society. Chechnya is not the meaning of the national question or the national-colonial question . . . although it is a national factor.   Nor is it a question of how many Chechens live outside Chechnya than inside it . . . and I suspect that more Irish live outside Ireland than in.   We play with fire on the national factor and simply cannot see beyond the color factor in America and end up jumping to the wrong political conclusions. In respects to the world  . . . American Marxists have a tendency to export their conception of democracy around the world and scream self determination for nations up to and including the formation of an independent state and do not understand the differences in political approaches deployed by the Russian Communists and the mandatory and different polices the communists in oppressing and oppressed nations must deploy.   In respects to the African American people the national factor is solvable on the basis of administrative acts . . . for a lengthy period of time . . . after the overthrow of the bourgeois property relations that enforces and holds them in their intractable social position in society.   Is Chechnya a nation?   Let me end on that note before I exceed the boundary.   Melvin P.