>>Angela DAVIS: Actually we've had a black bourgeoisie or the makings of a black bourgeoisie for many more decades.... if we look at one of our great leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois, he was associated with a very minuscule black bourgeoisie in the 19th century so this is not something that is substantively new although the numbers of black people who now count themselves among the black bourgeoisie certainly does make an enormous difference.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the US has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.<< ************* WL: "To Angela Davis, my tender experience . . . " These words are forever carved in my memory as they were written by George Jackson, the most famous of the Soledad Brothers and were written as part of his book, "Prison Letters of George Jackson." I remember the night George was murdered, what I was doing and who I was with. I remember the incredible sorry. "If I leave here alive, I'll leave nothing behind. They'll never count me among the broken men ... but I can't say I'm normal either." George words linger in my mind . . . Nay, are pressed into the interior of brain convolutions. Angela was his tender experience and meaningful connection with the outside world. Angela was on her way to becoming an authentic iconoclast. She remains to this day my wife hero and symbol of all that is truly human, woman and revolutionary. My mind drifts . . . It was 1971, when we sent Ken Crockrel to the West Coast to made a bid to and for Angela Davis to entrust her defense to an all African American United Front, under our political leadership and with our attorney's, headed by Ken. Ken had about the most impressive credentials of an attorney in America and our concerted assault on the legal system in Michigan and Detroit reverberated throughout America. We had redefined the meaning of "a jury of ones peers" to not simply included blacks but class as a material attribute. Who but us demanded that juries be taken to the actual factories and industrial prison-production combines where the industrial slaves of capital rendered their daily toil? Angela refused our services and there was no hard feelings. Towards Angela . . . with her pretty ass. Everyone already understood she was amongst the most serious of revolutionaries, having a "European slant" towards Marxism, but she was the kind of women I would have most certainly joined the CPUSA to be close to or associated with. Her "European slants" means she studied in Europe, rather than a racial concept of the abstraction called "white." We were the extreme class polarity within the African American People's Movement and everyone understood that. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers meant exactly that. We were a federation rather than a Leninist form of organization with an uneasy alignment of the most diverse forces possible in American society, riveted to a Marxist-communist core. While one sector of the League screamed bloody murder against "white journalism" and declared Marx a honkie advocating "pro-let-Aryan dreams" alongside those studying Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin of course and Leon Trotsky, another sector advocating Marxism wanted to convert the League into a parliamentary organization to fuel a political projection to win the upcoming mayoral race. Those of us in the League and around the league held the Black Panther Party in political contempt and basically considered Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton political fools, whose antics would lead to the need less death of young militants. Our attitude was recorded in the book "Detroit I Do Mind Dying" - written at the time the events above were actually occurring. My narratives are not a revision of history and can be independently verified and authenticated. In Detroit we actually formed the local chapter of the Black Panther Party, placing John Williams and Cassandra Smith in the key leadership positions. Given the publicity and attraction of the Panthers promoted by the media, we placed two panthers at the top of the "South End" newspaper once we took control of it and then proceeded to impart a form of Marxism - as we understood it, to our coverage of events in the community and throughout the world. We also demanded no Black jackets and talk about a lumpen proletariat being the vanguard of revolution in America. Nor did we have any intentions of creating one massive solidarity organization. Even back then we were not anti-Stalin and clearly different from everyone on the left. We were not hostile towards the CPUSA or the SWP but considered the former to be a mirror of a previous period of the working class movement and the latter to be basically Anglo American college type young peoples. As I write this the name Jim Pita comes to mind. A man who I enjoyed knowing and talking with. An industrial worker of Local 51 - "my local," working as the Lynch Road Assembly plant, while I worked at the Mound Engine plant. I would love it when he smiled and would say, "Uncle Joe stuck it to them." Both of us would beam a broad smile and folks would ask what the hell we were smiling about. Wait . . . a minute. Something . . . a lost memory about Jim's son being arrested for either being a Black Panther Party member or their United Front Against Fascism or BPP activity in Detroit. Someone was cussing Jim out about being white and he stopped the discussion to explain that he had to go get his son out of jail for Panther activity. Ole . . . Jim Pita. Life is indeed strange. I would run into Angela Davis a decade later in Gainesville Georgia during the trail of Charlene Mitchell, as editor of the Southern Advocate. And send them some of the photos I took of the event . . . to which they used and refused to give me or the Advocate credit. There was no hard feelings, although I clearly got on the nerve of some of their people handling Angela's security with my photo taking and always being there. Some of us had come from as far away as Tchula Mississippi to support Charlene and no one gave a damn about her party affiliations. OK . . . I can see they coming out of the Court House in my mind. Angela was still a stunning woman to look at and brilliant way beyond my intellectual capacity. Yea . . . she looked tired with an inner strength that is all women. To this very day we would probably recall events very different and the contextual framework is in fact a profound split within the old Stalin polarity. The fact of the matter is that we - in the flesh, supplanted that section of the historic American industrial working class in motion and with this material act claim the right to alter the form of Marxism to express who we are. We have no inclination, desire or thought to ask permission of anyone. America in its political, economic, cultural, literature, music, art, dance, laughing and crying and psychological generis was a Southern country. Here is where the modern presentation of the National Question begins. Period. To hell with Yankee chauvinists! We - I, concede not one molecule on the National Question in American history and our reshaping of its presentation. On the other hand intellectual agreement has never been our calling card for collective insurgence. We concede not one molecule on our presentation of antagonism as a concept it its line of development as presentation spanning the period of the Second and Third International. We have no inclination, desire or thought to ask permission of anyone. What we do is endlessly explain. We concede not one molecule on our presentation of the "new class" and this stage of the technological revolution and our conception of that section of the proletariat that is not us. It stands to reason that if we were 95% industrial proletariat in places like Detroit and actual leaders of working people on the level of unions and other organizations, and even a state representative later in Georgia, we would know who we were not. Our leading core of activists did not emerge from the lowest strata of the proletariat for complex reasons of American history and the fact that Marxism is a science that must be studied. Marxism always travel through the intelligencia and into the working class . . . period. Such was its previous history. Today Marxism travels from the industrial sector of the proletariat into the most destitute sector. Here is the significance of Watts 1965, Detroit 1967 and Los Angeles 1992, that most of the Marxist movement in America has never grasped. And then there is Angela. Hounded and scorned by the bourgeois state for a life time. Doing what she does best. She is not just my wife hero but an authentic working class hero. It is the real Angela Davis that inspired and shaped a generation of women who would become authentic heroes of the industrial working class. Here's to you . . . baby. Waistline _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
