Re: A Question for the Moderator

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In a message dated 7/31/2004 7:33:32 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:   I would be interested to learn which articles in PA you considered valuable and those which you found unhelpful on the subject of the national question. As I recall DuBois and James Jackson produced the best articles on the national question (especially as it regarded African Americans) for PA in the 1950s, all of which broke with the "Black-belt thesis" and the concept of regional autonomy, though they continued to argue for self-determination. In fact, about 10 years before he officially joined the CPUSA, DuBois, according to some, is said to have authored the Party's official position on the question in an article he wrote in 1951 -- the title of which escapes me and I can't find my copy of it.   Joel Wendland       Reply   Perhaps my favorite author was sister Claudia Jones. Memory escapes me . . . but I had lifted the saying "behind the Cotton Curtain" an author who had wrote several articles on what was then called the Negro Question. Harry Haywood "Negro Liberation" is excellent as part of a series of historical documents. I seem to recall a couple articles by James Allen.   It of course fell to the lot of William Z. Foster - a great trade union leader and syndicalist, to import within American Marxist the concept of a nation within a nation in respects to African American Liberation.   Dr. James Jackson's "New Theoretical Aspects on the Negro Question" was always considered offensive to the communist in Detroit I was a part of. Dr. James Jackson as well as the beloved Dr. Dubios are in history militant representatives of a section of "Negro capital." Whereas Dubois was an authentic intellectual giant . . . . Dr. Jackson theoretical posturing is of no value whatsoever.   The color factor and white chauvinism obscures the National Colonial Question in American history. The Mexican national factor . . .  Puerto Rico . . . the various Indian nations . . . Appalachia . . . the Black Belt . . . the Aleutian and Hawaii peoples . . . and the list goes on.   If the African American people are not a nation and have never been a nation then Dr. Jackson's thesis makes no sense.  There is an element of confusion in history related to the original Comintern Documents on the Negro Question - 1928 and 1931 and even Lenin's writing on the Negro Question.   Nevertheless, one has to deal with the body of literature as constituting distinct historical time frames and opposing political and ideological tendencies. That is to say Harry Haywood "Negro Liberation" - 1949 and Dr. Jackson's "New Theoretical Aspects" -- around 1951, are grouped together as opposed to simply comparing them with the 1928 Comintern document . . . because the period of the 1920's was the battle for a Leninist approach to the national and colonial question.   The Comintern document was forced on the party under the threat of expulsion . . . as was the demand to dismantle the European language press.   The African American people as a historically evolved people and the Black Belt of the South as a colonial nation are distinct but interconnected historically evolved entities.   America was basically Southern in its inception and evolution up until the Civil War. Its core areas was Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. America was Southern . . . especially in all its political institutions. The New England states were shipping and manufacturing appendages of the slave plantation system.   By roughly the late 1840s, the political leaders of the South viewed the population and 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 evolving nation in the North was being formed as waves of European immigration created an industrial proletariat in what a few years earlier had been the North western frontier.   The evolving culture of the African American slaves is in the final instance what had made the South Southern  . . . as it existed in relationship to the evolving nation in North of the American Union. What made the North . . . Northern . . . was its working class formed on the basis of successive waves of European immigrants. That is to say the European immigrants did not remain Anglo-European but rather underwent a mechanical and chemical mixture that is the meaning of Anglo American.   One can now understand the importance of dismantling the European language press in a country whose primary language is English and Spanish. Plus . . . the language of the South is a Southern form of English rooted in a different development than the North. We have really faced some harsh political dynamics related to our developmental process in the North.   The Black Belt nation is called the Black Belt nation referring to its economic centers of gravity . . . not the color of the slaves. Black Belt refers to the rich fertile soil of the plantation belt and not the color of skin. Every history book in America points out our Southern inception and the large plantation owners and slave masters are acknowledged as the masters of economic and political America up to the Civil War.   The war was fought in the last instance to determine which nation would rule on behave of what primary classes.   The new nation that arose was in the North not the South. History records that the South was defeated in its striving to emerge as a consolidated nation of black and white peoples with an independent multinational state system.   The political form of control of the plantation South flows from the historical forms of control of the blacks or rather slaves - brutality, Jim Crow and segregation (and the roots of segregation were planted in the North and later the South) and outright terror.   The economic base of the planters came under attack after the Civil War . . . through direct and indirect financial control by Wall Street. Just as the Black Belt had been the political base for the control of rest of the country by the planter elite, it now became the base of control of the country by emerging, aggressive and jingoist Wall Street financial imperialism.   Everyone in American understand the difference between the white people of the Mississippi Black Belt and the white people of Manhattan New York. Everyone in American understand the difference between the black people of the Mississippi Black Belt and the black people of Boston . . . Chicago . . .Detroit or East St. Louis.   The difference between the Anglo American of Manhattan New York and the Anglo American of Meridian Mississippi is the meaning of the national colonial question in respects to the Black Belt. One can always consult the Anglo American people of Mississippi on this question . . . or subscribe to Southern Exposure and read its back issues.   The African American people are a historically evolved people that were slaves. A class cannot evolve into a nation. Rather . . . classes corresponding to and expressing bourgeois production relations are the basis of modern nations.   In history Jim Crow and white chauvinism obscured the issue . . . along with a radical misunderstand of the meaning of the national and national-colonial question. Every group on the left has basically reduced the national question to the color factor or the ideology of racism. Racism is a commodity in America.   The reason for my bluntness concerning the national factor in our history is because the entire edifice of USNA imperialism rest on this relationship and we are prevented from striking at the imperial bourgeoisie because it control the entire country through control of the South.   Bush coup is based on the Southern relationship and . . . look at Florida. Look at Taft Hartley and every piece of legislation related to labor and it pivots on the South.   Dr. Jackson's "New Theoretical Aspects" set the basis to liquidate the national question from American Marxist history and covers the liquidation of the party organizations in the South . . . in violation of democratic centralism.   The National Colonial Question in respect to the South does not mean race . . . and the African American people are not a race to begin with. African American Liberation and social revolution in American is not the same as the question of the Black Belt and resolving questions related to the formation of America as Southern in its inception.   Our writing on both questions is a presentation of the issue from the standpoint of the proletariat in the North . . . not the standpoint of the Southern masses. The fact of the matter is that virtually all the communist groupings in our history have been organizations of the oppressing peoples in the North of the American Union and one can consult the white revolutionaries in the Deep South on this matter.   Me being African American does not exempt me from this relationship that is the material reality and impact of being a part and parcel of the oppressing nation and oppressing people.   What one generally encounters in discussing the history of the formation and Marxist presentation of the national factor in American history is a barrage of thinly disguised rotten white chauvinism that enforces the political isolation of the blacks and place the Southern white masses out of our reach.   Self determination for African Americans is political insanity and nothing more than bourgeois nationalism . . . in my opinion. Now the various Trotskyists formulations on this question cannot even be taken serious.   Dr. James Jackson was not more than a black political psychopath and bourgeois nationalist. We stated this directly well over 30 years ago. The party was derailed from the role it played in the African American Liberation Movement . . . and after Birmingham could never again catch up with events. After Watts 1965 and then Detroit 1967 . . . it was basically all over for the CPUSA . . . and I am not a hater of our mutual history.   I blame none of this on the Kremlin or the Comintern. We are dealing with a complexity rooted in our own history. No one is going to help us or save us except ourselves and until we come to grips with elementary American history we will never be taken serious.   I have incredible faith in our class because they are who they are and will be mobilized based on how they think things out using common sense. We have to learn how to stop serving the Southern white masses up to the fascists and take their sentiments very serious. Them are simply tired of us Yankees and our sublime nonsense about history.   Melvin P.