Re: [Marxism] If You Want to Let Freedom Ring, Hammer on Economic Injustice
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Louis Proyect wrote: This must be a first. A NYT op-ed that cites James Boggs, a black Marxist auto worker. I don't know about New York Times op-eds citing James Boggs. But, on Sept. 23, 1972, the Times published "Beyond Rebellion", an op-ed _by_ James Boggs. DETROIT—The black movement has gone through a number of stages in the last 15 years. First, there was the civil rights movement which reached a critical stage with the Birmingham confrontations of 1963, and which fi nally collapsed with the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Then, there has been the black power movement which began to rise with Malcolm in 1963–4; and which mushroomed into a national movement following the Watts uprising of 1965 and the Newark and Detroit rebellions of 1967. Today we are still in the stage of trying to clarify what black power means. At the present time most “movement” people are still in the purely nationalist stage of black power. That is to say, most of those who call themselves black power advocates are trying to find a solution for blacks separate from a solution for the contradictions of the entire United States. Actually this is impossible. Therefore, many black nationalists are going off into all kinds of fantasies and dreams about what black power means — like heading for Africa, or isolating themselves in a few states, or whites just vanishing into thin air and leaving this country to blacks. We have yet to come face to face with our contradiction that just as it has been on the backs of the black masses that this country has advanced economically, so it is only under the revolutionary political leadership of black people that this country will be able to get out of its contradictions. We are hesitant to face up to this truth because it is too challenging. We have the fear which always haunts the revolutionary social forces, the fear of not knowing whether they can win, the lack of confidence in themselves and in their ability to create a better society. This is not a fear that is unique to blacks. All revolutionary social forces have this fear as they come face to face with their real conditions of life and the growing realization that they must assume the revolutionary responsibility of changing the whole society, so that their lives as well, as those of others in the society can be funda mentally changed. Because the task is so great, it becomes much easier to evade the tremendous challenge and responsibility for disciplined scientific thinking and disciplined political organization which are necessary to lead revolutionary struggle. Confronted with this political choice, many of those who have been frustrated by the failure of the civil rights movement and the succeeding rebellions to solve all our problems have begun to put forward all kinds of fantastic ideas as to what we should now do. Some say we should separate and return to Africa. Some say we should separate but should remain here and try to build a new black capitalist economy from scratch inside the most advanced and powerful capitalist economy in the world! Some say we should join the Pan‐African movement of the African peoples in Africa and build a military base in Africa from which we will eventually be able to attack the U.S.A. Others say we should just struggle for survival from day to day, doing whatever has to be done for survival. And finally, others have just given up struggling for anything at all, and have turned to astrology or drugs or religion in the old‐time belief that some metaphysical force out there in the twilight zone will rescue us from our dilemma. We have to examine all these theories realistically and scientifically —whatever their origin and whosoever is proposing them—whether they are our friends or our relatives; whether or not they are old comrades with whom we have demonstrated and gone to jail in the past; whether or not we admire them for their past deeds or for their charismatic personalities or because they make us feel good when we hear them rapping against “the man.” All these personal considerations are irrelevant measured against the real miseries of our present conditions in this country and the real future which we must create for ourselves and our posterity in this country. We live in this country, our labors have laid the foundation for the growth of this country. Our contradictions are rooted in this country's unique development and can only be resolved by struggles under our leadership to eliminate the roots of these contradictions in this country. As we look at our communities, looking more and more each day like wastelands and fortresses, as we look at o
[Marxism] If You Want to Let Freedom Ring, Hammer on Economic Injustice
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (This must be a first. A NYT op-ed that cites James Boggs, a black Marxist auto worker.) NY Times Op-Ed, June 26, 2020 If You Want to Let Freedom Ring, Hammer on Economic Injustice There’s far more work to do than changing the way we police. By Jamelle Bouie Since it emerged seven years ago in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement has produced a sea change in attitudes, politics and policy. In 2016, 43 percent of Americans supported Black Lives Matter and its claims about the criminal justice system; now, it’s up to 67 percent, with 60 percent support among white Americans, compared with 40 percent four years ago. Whereas Democratic politicians once stumbled over the issue, now even Republicans are falling over themselves to say that “black lives matter.” And where the policy conversation was formerly focused on body cameras and chokehold bans, now mainstream outlets are debating and taking seriously calls to demilitarize and defund police departments or to abolish them outright. But the Black Lives Matter platform isn’t just about criminal justice. From the start, activists have articulated a broad, inclusive vision for the entire country. This, in fact, has been true of each of the nation’s major movements for racial equality. Among black Americans and their Radical Republican allies, Reconstruction — which was still ongoing as of 150 years ago — was as much a fight to fundamentally reorder Southern economic life as it was a struggle for political inclusion. The struggle against Jim Crow, likewise, was also a struggle for economic equality and the transformation of society. “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in “A Testament of Hope”: It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws — racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced. Our society was built on the racial segmentation of personhood. Some people were full humans, guaranteed non-enslavement, secured from expropriation and given the protection of law, and some people — blacks, Natives and other nonwhites — were not. That unequal distribution of personhood was an economic reality as well. It shaped your access to employment and capital; determined whether you would be doomed to the margins of labor or given access to its elevated ranks; marked who might share in the bounty of capitalist production and who would most likely be cast out as disposable. In our society, in other words, the fight for equal personhood can’t help but also be a struggle for economic justice. And what we see, past and present, is how that fight against the privileges and distinctions of race can also lay the foundations for a broader assault on the privileges and distinctions of class. As soon as the Civil War came to a close, it was clear there could be no actual freedom for the formerly enslaved without a fundamental transformation of economic relations. “We must see that the freedman are established on the soil, and that they may become proprietors,” Charles Sumner, the Radical Republican senator from Massachusetts, wrote in March 1865. “The great plantations, which have been so many nurseries of the rebellion, must be broken up, and the freedmen must have the pieces.” Likewise, said the Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens in September 1865, “The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost.” The foundations of their institutions, he continued, “must be broken up and re-laid, or all of our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.” Presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, would immediately undermine any means to this end, as he restored defeated Confederates to citizenship and gave them free rein to impose laws, like the Black Codes, which sought to reestablish the economic and social conditions of slavery. But Republicans in Congress were eventually able to wrest control of Reconstruction from the administration, and just as importantly, black Americans were actively taking steps to secure their political freedom against white reactionary opposition. Working through the Union Army, postwar Union Leagues and the Republican Party, freed and free blacks worked toward a common goal of political equality. And once t
