[Marxism-Thaxis] Who's Turning Their Back? The Black Bourgeois
Snip: The political landscape of Black America has changed dramatically since the 80s because a new bread of Black people in America have separated themselves from the masses. A new breed of Black folks who consistently judge and sometimes treat other Black people more harshly than they judge and treat those of other races. Unless you live under a rock, you must notice the harsh criticism of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume and other African American political figures; you must notice the people who look down upon those who suffer in low income communities; and you must also notice that a large percentage of this criticism is dished out by Black folks that have more self-hatred than a little bit. Lil Joe comment: Actually, there is no Black bourgeoisie because there is no Black nation: Blacks in the US are either capitalists, professionals, working class or and chronically unemployed, and in these economic categories the Black capitalists no different from White capitalists, Black workers the same class with common class interests with White workers. Therefore, understanding that politically organizations of classes represent class interests, it is evident that Jesse Jackson, Sharpton and Mfume are Democrats qua Democrats, representing the class faction of capitalists represented by the Democratic Party. I therefore disagree with the authors conclusions, snip: What this all means is that the American society is moving away from racism and moving toward classism which puts the future of the Black community in the hands of the Black Bourgeois. Until they make major changes in their attitude as a overall group, the African American community will continue down this road to destruction. Lil Joe: This is untrue, because the 'moving away from racism and to classism' means only that American workers are beginning to see beyond their socialized ideologies of 'race matters', to discussing class matters which unite all working class activists regardless of race, creed, color or national origin into a single class party, Labor Party. It is a good thing, not a bad thing to be attacked by the enemy, so by the attacks by Bill Cosby and Black Democrats, representing the thinking of their social base, it is not 'race self-hatred' but class hatred attacking those of us who are working class, as 'lower socioeconomic rungs of society'. This is good! This makes it easier for people like me to dismiss nationalistic and racialist false consciousness, along with patriotism as bourgeois ideological ploys to keep workers stupid and at each others throats. I think the new consciousness of Black working class thinkers and social critics was represented in the movie Barbershop, the dismissal of the Democrat's Black icons Rosa Parks and Jesse Jackson: Fuck Jesse Jackson meant: Fuck the Democratic Party. - www.emergingminds.org/aug0 3/politics.html Who's Turning Their Back? The Black Bourgeois by Saadiq Mance The political landscape of Black America has changed dramatically since the 80s because a new bread of Black people in America have separated themselves from the masses. A new breed of Black folks who consistently judge and sometimes treat other Black people more harshly than they judge and treat those of other races. Unless you live under a rock, you must notice the harsh criticism of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume and other African American political figures; you must notice the people who look down upon those who suffer in low income communities; and you must also notice that a large percentage of this criticism is dished out by Black folks that have more self-hatred than a little bit. The Bourgeois within the Black community are the ones who display this attitude most often, and are ultimately the ones who have changed the politics within the Black community so much since the 80s. Often times these individuals or their parents grew up in poor Black communities and through hard work, moved up the social latter. This sounds great for the Black community on the surface, but the fact is most of these hard working Black folks move out of the Black community once they make the move to the middle class, and start few businesses that employ and pay African Americans high wages. If you understand this you should now be able to see why the African American community has a weaker position in American politics today then they had 25 yrs ago. The Black Talented Tenth or Black Bourgeois has dispersed throughout majority White middle and upper class neighborhoods instead of concentrated in communities where Blacks are the majority. In addition, the Black people who society considers successful are the same Black Folks who display the most self-hatred (hating on the Black activist, community and culture) causing other races to discredit and hate on Black folks right along with them. Now the
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Who's Turning Their Back? The Black Bourgeois
Lil Joe comment: Actually, there is no Black bourgeoisie because there is no Black nation: Blacks in the US are either capitalists, professionals, working class or and chronically unemployed, and in these economic categories the Black capitalists no different from White capitalists, Black workers the same class with common class interests with White workers. Therefore, understanding that politically organizations of classes represent class interests, it is evident that Jesse Jackson, Sharpton and Mfume are Democrats qua Democrats, representing the class faction of capitalists represented by the Democratic Party. Comment There of course is no white nation within the state that is the multi-national state of the American Union. The issue should be looked at outside the politics and ideology of race. Is there an African American bourgeoisie or a class of African American capitalist or a distinct group of African Americans regarded as capitalist in relationship to our bourgeois property relations? Is there a bourgeoisie in America? The question of class interest has never been abstract in the American Union and as an abstraction African Americans and Anglo Americans - as well as Mexicans, Chicano, Indian, Asian, various African National, Irish, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Alaskan, Chinese, and all proletarians within our multinational state system, have the same class interest. This tells us next to nothing about our history as it is playing itself out today and in yesteryear. Huge sections of the working class in our country have always moved in different direction and often in opposing directions. Not simply the working class proper but also other sections of the laboring masses, like the sharecroppers of the past. In our history the Anglo American sharecropper behaved as an Anglo American and the African American sharecropper behaved as an African American in asserting their class positions. Who can deny that a considerable amount of energy was expended by the African American workers as a mass fighting their Anglo American counterparts? To tell the truth of the matter the Anglo American workers within the worker class do not have the same class interest because they are stratified. Who on earth have women proletarians been fighting for the past 400 years if not men proletarians - in the flesh? The point is that the working class can never be united based on class interest as an abstraction. If history is any indication of the logic of social motion or the political struggle what actually happens is that a politically active section of the working class is drawn into engagement with their counterparts within capital they are organically bond with, as in the case of the past industrial union movement. This political motion serves as a basis to galvanize and propagate class ideas amongst the workers and allows communist workers to fight to teach the working masses the important and need to take a class stand. In the case of the immediate past period the African American people as a people embracing all classes were in political motion to reformulate the social contract between the capitalist and workers and the working class itself. This political motion allowed communist to raise class ideas on the basic of the immediacy of the struggle for equality. It would of course be interesting to understand your particular meaning of the word bourgeoisie, which is used interchangeable with the modern capitalist class. I do believe that Don Barden is most certainly a real bourgeoisie and remember fairly clearly how he accumulated his capital as well as the fascistic former owner of BET who took the lion share of about $3 billion when it was sold. There is of course Claud Anderson who has emerged as the theoretical and political leader of a faction of this capitalist class. Anderson's 1994 book - Black Labor-White Wealth is their programmatic doctrine. The African American elite is not the African American capitalist class. The former recruited Al Sharpton and cleaned him up - got him out of his jumpt suits, and groomed him to run for President. If we do not understand our peculiar history we cannot win any one over to a class stance, a precondition providing the ideological basis for a Labor Party. Further, the equality struggle is and will remain the cutting edge of the emerging class struggle. How this social form of struggle is emerging is witnessed in not just the separation of the black workers and black capitalist from one another and the polarization within the African American elite, but also the sharpening struggle for Voting Rights which is a class demand of the workers. Voting Rights in the pre-1965 era and Voting Rights today cannot but display new qualitative features emerging in the social struggle. Actually, this same social process first emerged in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, when a vast segment of Southern whites were won
