Brother U clueless . . . concerning the presentation of the national colonial question as it applies to the African American people.
Below is your exchange:
>In relation to the post someone made about Negroes in the USA being a 'nation'
>and using the old 4 part definition of Stalin's (common language, territory,
>economic life and psychological make-up ). I have never seen this applied to
>Black Americans in that way before. What "common economic life" do they have
>that's different from other citizens? (I mean that would justify a claim to a
>separate state). A separate language? territory? even the cultural
>differences I would have read as those of an ethnic minority which would give
>rise to claims to equality but not to a separate nation. Not that equality
>would occur without a revolution but that's the point isn't it that Blacks
>need to fight to overthrow the US ruling class alongside white workers not for
>a separate state.
>Is this a common understanding in the US left (this is a post from Australia)
>or am I missing something?
^^^^^^^^^
CB: Briefly, the CPUSA from the 1920's to about 1950 or so held that Black people in the US had the right to self-determination in the Leninist sense. They had the right to secede from the U.S. if they so chose. If you are familiar with the Leninist approach to this, it implies not that the people in question are a nation , but that they have the right to chose to be one. Black people in the U.S. never decided to exercise that right to a separate nation. Then in the 50's the CPUSA changed its assessment , because a large part of the Black population had migrated out of the South , and there was no longer the territorial/population compactness for a "land".
Here Melvin P. criticizes the CPUSA for the changed assessment. I don't know whether that means he thinks that Black Americans still constitute a nation for purposes of the self-determination question.
<Most Marxists in the U.S. today do not hold that Black people constitute a <separate nation today, in direct answer to your question.
My criticism of the position of the CPUSA is not that they simply changed their position. My criticism is that their position on the so-called Negro Question was always wrong and their assessment of American history and the working class movement is wrong.
You speak as if I have asserted that black people constitute a nation when repeatedly I have stated the very opposite.
The African American people are not a nation.
The theoretical problem involves overcoming racial concepts, which exist in the ideological sphere and unraveling material categories. Class for instance is a historically evolved material category, that arise on the basis of the division of labor in human society and is "evolved" as an expression of the development of the productive forces. The African American people are not a race, but a historically evolved people. The African American people are not a nation but a historically evolved people.
As I explore the response to this question I become convinced we are dealing with imperial bribery and a profound fetish, wherein the historical social intercourse between the peoples and classes of the imperial centers of capital and their material relationship with the colonial masses and class structures, appear as a category called race.
The historical position of the CPUSA was forced on them by the prestige of Lenin and the Third International. It is necessary to examine a passage from the 1930 document of the Comintern on the Negro Question to unravel the fetish. The document states:
"Is the Southern region, thickly populated by Negroes to be looked upon as a colony, or as an "integral part of the national economy of the United States," where presumably a revolutionary situation cannot arise independent of the general revolutionary development in the United States?
"In the interest of the utmost clarity of ideas on this question, the Negro question in the United States must be viewed from the standpoint of its peculiarity, namely as the question of an oppressed nation, which is in a peculiar and extraordinary distressing situation of national oppression not only in view of the prominent racial distinction (marked difference in the color of skin, etc.) but above all, because of considerable social antagonism (remnants of slavery). This introduces in the American Negro Question an important, peculiar trait, which is absent from the national question of other oppressed people. Furthermore, it is necessary to face clearly the inevitable distinction between the position of the Negro in the South and in the North, owing to the fact that at least three-fourths of the entire Negro population in the United States (12,000,000) live in the compact masses in the South, most of them being peasants and agricultural laborers in a state of s! emi-serfdom, settled in the "Black Belt" and constituting the majority of the population, whereas the Negroes in the northern states are for the most part industrial workers of the lowest categories who have recently come to the various industrial centers fro the South (having often fled from them)."
The above is taken from the last sentence of the first paragraph of the Comintern document and the immediately following second paragraph.
"Is the Southern region . . . to be looked upon as a colony?" The answer to this question unfolds the Negro Question. The Comintern document accurately grasps the distinction and economic logic that drives national formation. The question posed is not if the Negro people are to be looked upon as a colony, but the historic area of the slave oligarchy. In the historic area of the slave oligarchy it is "thickly populated by Negroes." To this very day this area remains a colony of Wall Street imperialism. The colonial status of this area has noting to do with any theory of race. What is involved is the military defeat of the slave oligarchy during the Civil War.
It is not amusing in the least that my Yankee comrade Marxists - skin color has nothing to do with this point, refuse to grasp this most elementary material reality of American history. In the 1920 and the 1930's it appeared that the Negro people were the colony to the Marxist in the CPUSA, because of their overwhelming predominance in the old slave holding South. The colony was the entire area and this most certainly included the historically evolved Southern whites that lived across the track from the Negro sharecropper.
A colony is most certainly composed of people. When the people who live in a colony immigrate somewhere else the colony does not disappear or Ireland would not exist, in as much as more of the Irish have immigrated than the current residents. Is Ireland still a colony? The CPUSA was always incorrect in their understanding of the Comintern document.
Let us further explore the document which is very rich in the Marxist presentation of the question.
"Furthermore, it is necessary to face clearly the inevitable distinction between the position of the Negro in the South and in the North . . ." What is this distinction according to the Marxist presentation of the question? Skin color or less racial antagonism or industrialization? No, No , No!
The distinction is between the status of the colonial worker in the areas that is colonized and the status of the colonial worker in the imperial center. In other words the difference is between that of the Irish workers in England and that of the Irish workers in Ireland. The Marxist concept and word for this difference in respect to the colonial worker who immigrates to the imperial center is "national minority" - not racial minority. The Nigerian - who is most certainly black, immigrates to America and does not become a national minority because Nigeria was not colonized by America. If I move to France I do not become an African American national minority in France because France did not colonized the area of my emergence. I am simply an African American or Negro.
The bourgeoisie uses the concept of racial minorities to obscure imperialist relations and national colonial oppression.
The Comintern document speaks of "a peculiar and extraordinary distressing situation of national oppression not only in view of the prominent racial distinction (marked difference in the color of skin, etc.) but above all, because of considerable social antagonism (remnants of slavery)."
From this the CPUSA understood this to mean a theory of race. Reread the passage. Racial distinction for the Comintern document meant skin color and in my estimate acknowledges the backwardness of the revolutionaries in grasping the impact of the bourgeoisie in the ideological sphere. To insure no misunderstanding the document contains the words "but above all, because of considerable social antagonism (remnants of slavery)." "But above all" means more importantly or "what is fundamental" is the "remnants of slavery" - not skin color.
Once slavery is grasped as a form of capitalist production carry out by slaves - that is feudal like social structures, and the defeat of Reconstruction the picture begins to unfold. The defeat of Reconstruction was not the defeat of a "race" of people but a class of workers and farmers whose skin color is black.
>Here Melvin P. criticizes the CPUSA for the changed assessment. I don't know whether that >means he thinks that Black Americans still constitute a nation for purposes of the self->determination question.
I do not criticize the CPUSA currently or in history for changing their position because it was always wrong. I have written about the further degeneration of a wrong assessment, - an assessment, which Charles repeats in his statement. Do I support self determination - in our era a clarion call for proletarian revolution, for all colonized people on earth? Unconditionally yes.
However we must ground ourselves in the document of the Comintern as the basis for examining the Negro Question and apply Marxism concretely. This means "it is necessary to face clearly the inevitable distinction between the position of the Negro in the South and in the North . . ." Self determination for Negroes in the North or the Anglo-American nation proper is reactionary bourgeois nationalism or what was called community control in the 1970s.
Charles specific point of view is that of the CPUSA from more than a half a century ago and speaks of all African American people without the necessity "to face clearly the inevitable distinction between the position of the Negro in the South and in the North." Here is why "my brand" of Marxism rejects the "all power to the people" slogan and the all African American peoples are brother thesis as the voice of reaction within the African American National Liberation Movement.
All "Black Americans (have never) constitute(de) a nation for purposes of the self-determination question." What the African American people face is the logic of imperial relations and not theories of race and concepts of racial antagonism that exist in the ideological superstructure.
The struggle by the black masses in the North - Anglo American nation proper remains to this day one against police violence and their status as national minority workers, which mirror the status of the Algerian in France and the Irish in England. Racial theory - the "authentic Marxist concept of race" confuses elementary Leninism.
Stinking race theories and concepts of racial minorities prevents Charles as it did the CPUSA from facing "the inevitable distinction between the position of the Negro in the South and in the North . . ." I cannot prove to the subjective idealist that nothing unreal exist. Race is an ideological category not a material relationship. I cannot cleanse disease from ones mind and ideological constructs that are devoid of materiality. Therefore, my appeal to the men of race is to " face clearly the inevitable distinction between the position of the (Irish) Negro in (Ireland) the South and in (England) the North . . ."
Because the Irish are in deed very white the men of race can now understand the national colonial question in respect to the African American people.
Actually these Marxist of an authentic concept of race are outright chauvinist and white chauvinist who ideology is an inverted expression of imperial aggression. In the ideological realm they appear as petty bourgeois nationalist.
Do I "think that Black Americans still constitute a nation for purposes of the self-determination question," is the voice of the bourgeoisie spoken through the petty bourgeois intellectual. First of all self-determination for any colony of imperialism is standard elementary democracy and the South - specifically the historically evolved area of slavery, or rather Ireland, remains a colony.
I am in the damn North or rather a "damn Yankee" - of the Anglo-American proletariat, and cannot tell the colonial masses how to enact their fate, without being an imperialist minded bourgeois. As a communist I support and will fight for the laboring classes of the South to seize their fate on any basis up to and including the dismantling of the USNA multi-national state or what is called by communist self-determination.
Now, do African Americans still constitute the majority of the areas of the old slave holding South and not the South as a region, which in the lexicon of Marxism is called the border region? Brother, you need to do some homework.
Perhaps it is necessary to speak about the specific development of the African American people as a people, which is not the same as saying the development and emergence of the nation in the slaveholding area. Both developmental processes are interactive but not the same. The people developed within the general structure of the evolution of the nation, the same way the Anglo-American people of the North developed within the framework of the transition from manufacture to industry.
The Negro People, as a historically evolved people, developed before the emergence of the national formation in the South and underwent further evolution with the mechanization of agriculture and the destruction of legal segregation.
