*Joe Turner Get Away From My Door- August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come And Gone"

Click On Title To Link To August Wilson Homepage.

Play Review

Joe Turner’s Come And Gone, August Wilson, New American Library, New York, 1988

The first couple of paragraphs of this review have been used as introduction to other August Wilson Century Cycle plays as well.

Okay, blame it on the recently departed Studs Terkel and his damn interview books. I had just been reading his "The Spectator", a compilation of some of his interviews of various authors, actors and other celebrities from his long-running Chicago radio program when I came across an interview that he had with the playwright under review here, August Wilson. Of course, that interview dealt with things near and dear to their hearts on the cultural front and mine as well. Our mutual love of the blues, our concerns about the history and fate of black people and the other oppressed of capitalist society and our need to express ourselves politically in the best way we can. For Studs it was the incessant interviews, for me it is incessant political activity and for the late August Wilson it was his incessant devotion to his century cycle of ten plays that covered a range of black experiences over the 20th century.


The old blues song "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" is a familiar one to me. I have heard it in many versions, some where Joe is a good guy and others, as here with August Wilson's concept of Joe, bad. Bad, indeed, for black people who tried in the second decade of the 20th century to try to make a decent life for themselves and their families. The specific case highlighted in the play is the fate of one Herald Loomis (and his daughter). Herald, having come up against Joe Turner's justice (read white Jim Crow justice) and paid the price with the lost of his wife, as well as part of his sanity, is searching to find his roots.

In the opening play of this series "Gem of the Ocean" we find the characters there trying to figure out what to do with their new found freedom. Here were are involved in a search to find meaning for the black family, the black man and anyone else who is confounded by the race question, circa 1910. One of the most dramatic lines in the whole play is when one of the boarders at Seth's Holly's house, Molly, who is about to go off with fellow boarder Jeremy for parts unknown in order to have fun or just to get a fresh start. She says- "I will go anywhere with you-except the South". That, my friends, says as much about this play as anything else. Of course, as always with Wilson one gets a deep dialogue, a very real feel for the confined space that the whites, North or South have left for blacks and with the exception of the link with the white travelling salesman Selig are not part of the flow of national capitalist society. Yes, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone", circa 1911 style, is gone but are we so sure that he is gone for good? As always, kudos, Brother Wilson.

*A Look At The Racial Fault Line In America- Studs Terkel Style

Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page.

Division Street Revisited- Stud Terkel’s America

BOOK REVIEW

Division Street: America, Studs Terkel, The New Press, New York, 2004

As I have done on other occasion when I am reviewing more than one work by an author I am using some of the same comments, where they are pertinent, here as I did in earlier reviews. In this series the first Studs Terkel book reviewed was that of his “The Good War”: an Oral History of World War II.

Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. As with other authors once I get started I tend to like to review several works that are relevant to see where their work goes. In the present case the review, his first serious effort at plebeian oral history, Division Street: America, despite the metaphorically nature of that title, focuses on a serves a narrower milieu, his “Sweet Home, Chicago” and more local concerns than his later works.

Mainly, this oral history is Studs’ effort to reflect on the lives of working people (circa 1970 here but the relevant points could be articulated, as well, in 2008) from Studs’ own generation who survived that event, fought World War II and did or did not benefit from the fact of American military victory and world economic preeminence, including those blacks and mountain whites who made the internal migratory trek from the South to the North. Moreover, this book presents the first telltale signs that those defining events for that generation were not unalloyed gold. As channeled through the most important interviewee in this book, Frances Scala, who led an unsuccessful but important 1960’s fight against indiscriminate “urban renewal” of her neighborhood (the old Hull House of Jane Addams fame area) Studs make his argument that the sense of social solidarity, in many cases virtually necessary for survival, was eroding.

Studs includes other stories, including the lumpen proletarian extraordinaire Kid Pharaoh who will be met later in Hard Times and the atypical Chicago character who gladly joins the John Birch Society in order to assert his manhood, who do not easily fit into any of those patterns but who nevertheless have stories to tell. And grievances, just, unjust or whimsical, to spill.

One thing that I noticed immediately after reading this book, and as is true of the majority of Terkel’s interview books, is that he is not the dominant presence but is a rather light, if intensely interested, interloper in these stories. For better or worse the interviewees get to tell their stories, unchained. In this age of 24/7 media coverage with every half-baked journalist or wannabe interjecting his or her personality into somebody else’s story this was, and is, rather refreshing. Of course this journalistic virtue does not mean that Studs did not have control over who got to tell their stories and who didn’t to fit his preoccupations and sense of order. He has a point he wants to make and that is that although most “ordinary” people do not make the history books they certainly make history, if not always of their own accord or to their own liking. Again, kudos and adieu Studs.

*Ma Rainey Don't Bite Her Tongue, And Neither Does Playwright August Wilson

Click On Title To Link To August Wilson Homepage.

Commentary

February Is Black History Month

I had originally intended to review all of the late August Wilson's Century Cycle plays at the same time. On reflection this is such an important series about sketches of black cultural life in the 20th century that I decided to review each one separately. Below is a list of the ten plays to be reviewed over the next several months.

Play Reviews

The August Wilson Century Cycle

Gem Of The Ocean (1904)

Joe Turner's Come And Gone (1911)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1927)

The Piano Lesson(1936)

Seven Guitars (1948)

Fences(1957)

Two Trains Running(1969)

Jitney(1977)

King Hedley II (1985)

Radio Golf(1997)
*************************************************

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1927), August Wilson, New American Library, New York, 1981

Readers of this space know that over the past year or so I have highlighted the musical works of various acoustic and electric black blues performers, mainly the former. The hidden question posed by those performers and subsequently by this reviewer is- "What are the blues?" The answers I have given have ranged from the perennial- "the blues is the dues" to old Lightnin' Hopkins' refrain- "the blues ain't nothing but a good woman on your mind". Playwright August Wilson posed this very question in this his first, I believe, play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom". His answer is far more profound that mine could ever be when he has Ma say the blues are "way of understanding life". And then proceeds in his little beauty of a play to give a black version of the way that life played out.

The story line of this play is fairly straight forward, although probably an unusually theme for a serious play, about the trails and tribulations of blacks recording blues records in Chicago in the mid-1920's. And not just any blues singer off the farm, but the most famous female blues singer of her day, Ma Rainey, and her band. But that is not the half of it. In that small physical space and musical universe of the recording studio and with her motley group of band members that seemingly represented every possible black musician type that Wilson could image, Ma Rainey, the Mother of The Blues and the whites in charge of production (and who will reap the disproportionate share of the profits) has raised every timely issue for blacks in the 1920's, the 1980's when he wrote the play and, notwithstanding the Obama presidential victory, now.

Wilson's conceptual framework is impeccable. Placing the scene in 1920's Chicago permits him to work with the migration of blacks out of the south in the post-World War I period in order to show the contrasts (and similarities) between the `country boys' (Toledo) and the `assimilated' city boys (Levee). Moreover, he is able to succinctly draw in the questions of white racism (powerfully so in the story of Levee's mother's rape by white men) , black self- help (Levee's father's response to his wife's rape), black hatred of whites, black self-hatred, black illusions (that of Ma in her `queenly' relationships with the profiting whites), black pride, the influence of the black church (good and bad), black folk wisdom ( as portrayed by Cutler, the senior band member) and, in the end, the rage behind black on black violence (Levee) resulting from a world that was not made by the characters in this play but took no notice of their long suppressed rage that turned in on itself. Like I said above Wilson provides a very profound answer to the question posed in my first paragraph. So if anyone asks you what the blues are you now know what to say- read and see Mr. Wilson's play.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom- The Blues Of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Ma Rainey, Yazoo Records, 1990

One of the interesting facts about the development of the blues is that in the early days the recorded music and the bulk of the live performances were done by women, at least they were the most popular exponents of the genre. That time, the early 1920's to the 1930's, was the classic age of women blues performers. Of course, when one thinks about that period the name that comes up is the legendary Bessie Smith. Beyond that, maybe some know Ethel Waters. And beyond that-a blank.

Except maybe I have to take that back a little in the case of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, at least as to her name if not her music that has gotten more recent publicity through the work of playwright August Wilson’s Century Cycle play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”. Notwithstanding that possibility, in the CD compilation under review we have what amounts to the best of Ma Rainey during her short but productive recording career in the 1920’s. Upon hearing her on this CD women’s blues aficionados are going to want to know how she stacks up against the heavy competition of Bessie Smith. In many ways there are comparable since they worked much the same milieu but, in the end Bessie’s wider range and more heartfelt ‘feel’ for a song wins out. A case in point is the classic “Oh Papa Blues” done by both. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Ma’s version as entertainment but Bessie’s version comes out as if she had just been shot in the heart by some two-timin’ man. That difference is reflected throughout.

As is highlighted in Wilson’s play Ma however was no fool , unlike Bessie, when it came to business and that included making sure she got her just desserts (and credit) for songs that she wrote (somewhat unusual for a singer in the days of Tin Pan Alley). Moreover, some of the best songs here have some legendary blues sidemen on them. For example, Fletcher Henderson on piano on “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”. Coleman Hawkins on “Blues Oh Blues”. And both Georgia Tom Dorsey (who later went on to a successful gospel career) and Tampa Red on “Sleep Talking Blues”. Wow.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- The Fight For School Integration In Boston -A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated September 26, 2008, concerning the historic struggle to achieve school integration in America, and in Boston in particular.

Markin comment:

I will defer to the commentator in the linked article for now. I have my own memories and comments on this subject which I will place in this space when I get a chance. Overall though, as to the tasks necessary for the defense of the black school children in Boston, and the responses of most of the left to those tasks, it is pretty accurate.

*From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”-Supreme Court: Retooling the Machinery of Death-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.


Markin comment:

As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-'Down With The Racist Purge Of The Universities"

Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"Abolish The Racist Death Penalty"

Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

*From The Archives- Black Oppression And The Great Mississippi Flood Of 1927

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

*The Work Of Marxist Richard Fraser On The Black Question- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, to read Part Two of the Richard Fraser article mentioned in the headline.


Workers Vanguard No. 864
17 February 2006

The Legacy of Richard S. Fraser

Revolutionary Integrationism: The Road to Black Freedom

Black History and the Class Struggle

Part One

When Hurricane Katrina left untold thousands of poor, overwhelmingly black people either dead or homeless, the reality of black oppression in the U.S. was laid bare. Half a century after the outbreak of the mass struggles for black civil rights, official Jim Crow segregation in the South is long gone. But the conditions of black life in this country—North and South—have worsened, from jobs and wages to housing and education, while cop terror runs rampant in the ghettos and masses of young black men have been relegated to years in prison. The situation cries out for massive class and social struggle against the racist U.S. capitalist rulers, based on a firm understanding of the roots of black oppression and the lessons of past struggles for social equality.

From the formation of the Spartacist tendency in the early 1960s, we have stood for the perspective and program of revolutionary integrationism. This position is counterposed to both the liberal reformist response to black oppression and to all political expressions of black separatism. The liberation of black people from conditions of racial oppression and impoverishment—conditions inherent to the U.S. capitalist system—can be achieved only in an egalitarian socialist society. And such a society can be achieved only through the overthrow of the capitalist system by the working class and its allies. As we wrote in “Black and Red—Class-Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” a document adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League in September 1966 and subsequently printed in Marxist Bulletin No. 9, “Basic Documents of the Spartacist League”: “Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution.”

We have described the black population in the U.S. as an oppressed race-color caste. We noted in “Black and Red” that “from their arrival in this country, the Negro people have been an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom of this society.” Thus blacks face discrimination, in different degrees, regardless of social status, wealth or class position. Despite the increasing destruction of industrial jobs and erosion of union strength in recent decades, black workers, whose rate of union membership is a third higher than that of white workers, continue to be integrated into strategic sectors of the industrial proletariat, such as urban transit, longshore, auto and steel. Blacks also make up a large percentage of unionized government and public workers. Won to a revolutionary program, black workers will be the living link fusing the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses with the social power of the multiracial proletariat under the leadership of a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party. Labor/black mobilizations initiated by the Spartacist League and its fraternal organizations, which defeated fascist Klan and Nazi provocations in a number of major cities over the past quarter-century, were concrete demonstrations of the fight for revolutionary integrationism.

The current expression of the concept of revolutionary integrationism derives from the ideas of Richard S. Fraser, a veteran Trotskyist who made a unique Marxist contribution to the understanding of American black oppression and struggle, particularly through his lectures and written documents in the 1950s. James Robertson, a founding leader of the Spartacist tendency, was won to Fraser’s views on the black question when both were members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the historic party of American Trotskyism which, however, underwent a process of rightward degeneration beginning in the late 1950s. Comrade Robertson later recounted that when he stayed a few days at Fraser’s home in Seattle, the latter pounded him incessantly with his views on the black question.

In 1963, the SWP leadership expelled the Revolutionary Tendency, a left opposition that was the forerunner of the Spartacist League. In 1964, within the first months of our existence as an organizationally independent tendency, we published Fraser’s “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question” (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [revised], “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism”). This document provided our members and supporters with the historical depth and Marxist understanding to combat the resurgence of black nationalism and its ersatz, bourgeois-sponsored offshoots like “community control,” which was adopted wholesale by most of the left.

Fraser accepted our invitation to be a co-reporter on the black question at our founding conference. While Fraser rejected our use of the term “caste” as applied to the American black population, he agreed in substance with the description of black oppression captured in this term. By the time of our conference, Fraser and his co-thinkers had left the SWP and formed their own organization, the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP). In 2004, the FSP published a book titled Revolutionary Integration: A Marxist Analysis of African American Liberation. It consists of two documents: “Dialectics of Black Liberation,” written by Fraser in 1963 when he was still in the SWP, and “Revolutionary Integration: Yesterday and Today,” written by Tom Boot and adopted by the FSP’s 1982 national conference.

While the FSP claims to be in Fraser’s tradition, Boot’s views are fundamentally contrary not only to the Spartacist League’s understanding of revolutionary integrationism but also to the main ideas of Fraser himself, who was cut off from the FSP by a split in 1967. The FSP saps the strong points of Fraser’s revolutionary integrationist perspective, exacerbates the weak points and, finally, distorts the entirety with the FSP’s own brand of eclectic reformism. It is necessary to examine and explain what revolutionary integrationism is and what it is not. In particular, we want to emphasize the strategic centrality of this concept in building a revolutionary vanguard party to lead the multiracial U.S. working class to power.

Marxism and the Fight
for Black Freedom

The October 1917 workers revolution in Russia, led by the Bolshevik party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, was a declaration of war upon the world capitalist system and a clarion call for all the exploited and oppressed to prepare for battle. This call was heard in all corners of the globe—Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and North America. In the U.S. it found a sympathetic response among workers and black people.

Within the early American socialist movement, the aim of black equality was treated with, at best, benign indifference, typified by Eugene V. Debs’ statement that socialism had “nothing special to offer the Negro,” ranging to outright hostility on the part of racists like Victor Berger. In The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962), James P. Cannon—a veteran of the revolutionary-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, a leader of the early Communist Party (CP) in the U.S. and later the founding leader of American Trotskyism—described the crucial intervention of Lenin and Trotsky’s Communist International in driving home the centrality of the fight for black freedom to proletarian revolution in the U.S. Cannon emphasized that Lenin and the Russian Revolution “contributed more than any other influence from any source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special problem of American society—a problem which cannot simply be subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor” (emphasis in original).

The Trotskyist movement debated the black question beginning with the founding conference of the Communist League of America (CLA), formed by supporters of Trotsky expelled from the Stalinized Communist Party by 1928. Leading CLA member Arne Swabeck also discussed the black question when he visited Trotsky in exile in Turkey in 1933. Swabeck argued against the CP’s demand for “self-determination for the Black Belt” (a swath of majority-black counties across the Deep South), asserting that the race question was integral to the class question in the U.S. and that the main demand should be for full “social, political and economic equality” for black people.

Trotsky was inclined to support the self-determination slogan based on his experience with the national question in Europe. He admitted, however, that he had not studied the question and suggested, for instance, that Southern blacks might have their own suppressed “Negro language” (see “In Defense of Revolutionary Integrationism,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 49-50, Winter 1993-94). Trotsky was primarily concerned that the American Trotskyists have a serious orientation to the black question lest they capitulate to the backward consciousness of the working class. He returned to this question in 1939 discussions with American Trotskyist leaders, underscoring that without such an orientation, it would not be possible to make a revolution in the U.S.

Most of the CLA leadership adopted an integrationist, anti-nationalist position, which was the line of a lengthy 1933 document by Max Shachtman titled “Communism and the Negro” (recently reprinted in Race and Revolution, Verso [2003]). However, the CLA’s inchoate position was not theoretically grounded and developed. Unfortunately, Shachtman’s document was not widely distributed or discussed outside the leadership in the CLA. A 1939 convention of the SWP, which had been founded the year before, adopted two resolutions on the black question. While both were written by the West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James, they were contradictory in their basic thrust. The first, “The SWP and Negro Work,” stated that black people “are designated by their whole historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution.” The second resolution, “The Right of Self-Determination and the Negro in the United States and North America,” argued the theoretical possibility of the awakening of a national consciousness and mass demands for a “Negro state.”

In practice, the SWP was guided by an integrationist, class-struggle perspective. The party was able to recruit several hundred black workers during World War II by acting as the most militant fighters against racist oppression in the factories, armed forces and American society at large. The SWP’s courageous work, carried out in the face of government repression, was in the starkest contrast to the Communist Party, which, in line with its support to the Allied imperialist “democracies,” explicitly opposed struggles for black equality during the war.

Dick Fraser joined the Trotskyist movement in 1934. He was a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party, serving on its National Committee from 1940 to 1966. He began a study of the black question in the late 1940s in response to the loss of hundreds of black worker recruits with the onset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. He concluded that the problem was not with the SWP’s practical, day-to-day work fighting discrimination and victimization of blacks but with the party’s inadequate theoretical understanding. Vital to the development and consolidation of a black Trotskyist cadre is a scientific (materialist) understanding of black oppression and a program corresponding to the actual living struggle for integration and equality.

Fraser began from the premise that black people, whom he described as “the most completely ‘Americanized’ section of the population,” were not an oppressed nation or nationality in any sense. Crucially, black people lacked any material basis for a separate political economy. Whereas the oppressed nations and nationalities of Europe (e.g., in the pre-1917 Russian tsarist empire) were subjected to forced assimilation, American blacks faced the opposite: forcible segregation. Hence, in the struggle against black oppression, the democratic demand for self-determination—separation into an independent nation-state—does not apply. As Fraser wrote in “Dialectics of Black Liberation”:

“The Black Question is a unique racial, not national, question, embodied in a movement marked by integration, not self-determination, as its logical and historical motive force and goal. The demand for integration produces a struggle that is necessarily transitional to socialism and creates a revolutionary Black vanguard for the entire working class.”

He had earlier noted in “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question”:

“The goals which history has dictated to [black people] are to achieve complete equality through the elimination of racial segregation, discrimination, and prejudice. That is, the overthrow of the race system. It is from these historically conditioned conclusions that the Negro struggle, whatever its forms, has taken the path for direct assimilation. All that we can add to this is that these goals cannot be accomplished except through the socialist revolution.”

Separatism or Social Equality?

Fraser emphasized that the entire history of mass black struggle—from the abolitionists through the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction to the civil rights movement—was in the direction of integration, not separatism. Radical Reconstruction in the South following the Civil War was a period of racial equality and black political empowerment unique in American history. In the 1930s, black workers participated in and often played leading roles in the great labor battles that created powerful, racially integrated industrial unions. The civil rights movement was directed against legalized segregation in the South and de facto segregation in housing and education, along with job discrimination, in the North.

Significant political expressions of black separatism have come in the aftermath of defeats and consequent demoralization in the face of a seemingly intractable racist capitalist order. Marcus Garvey’s ephemeral “Back to Africa” movement, which peaked in the early 1920s, was conditioned by the violent anti-black reaction at that time. Many black workers who had gained employment during the industrial boom of the First World War lost their jobs, the victims of racist discrimination and harder economic times. This period saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and in a number of cities, white racist mobs attacked and terrorized black communities.

The upsurge of “revolutionary” black nationalism in the late 1960s, best represented by the Black Panther Party, was a response to the frustrated expectations of the Northern civil rights struggles. Those struggles promised much but left unchanged the hellish conditions of life in the inner-city ghettos that are rooted in the capitalist profit system. As an expression of despair, black nationalism, or separatism, would deny blacks their birthright: the wealth and culture their labor has played a decisive role in creating.

Fraser pointed out that the whole notion of “race” has been proven to be scientifically absurd. There is only one “race,” the human race. But he also noted that any black person in the U.S. would laugh if you said that race does not exist, and he would be right. Race is a scientific absurdity but a social fact.

The color bar is the American social measuring stick ranging from blacks on the bottom to whites on the top. The social standing and prospects of all “people of color” are largely determined by this measuring stick, with dark-skinned people tending toward the black end and lighter-skinned toward the white end. This is clearly indicated by the extent of intermarriage (the basic mechanism of social integration) across racial and ethnic lines. The level of intermarriage between whites and Latinos or Asian Americans is far higher than that between whites and blacks. The U.S.-born daughter of a Chinese immigrant family is far more likely to have a white husband than is a young black woman whose ancestors were brought to this country in chains three centuries ago.

The racial division of black and white is the fundamental fact that defines American culture and shapes political discourse, even though black people constitute a relatively small minority of the population (roughly 12 percent). Of course, the fundamental economic relationships operating in the U.S. are the same as in all other capitalist class societies: the basis of oppression, including racial oppression, is the exploitation of labor by capital. Anti-black racism is the greatest obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S., providing an illusion of common interests between white workers and their class enemy, the white capitalist exploiters.

Until the substantial entry of blacks into industry in World War I, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic bigotry was the capitalists’ chief weapon in dividing and holding back the working class and impeding the development of a strong, politically conscious workers movement. Since that time, anti-black racism has been the most prominent factor in the lack of even a reformist mass political party of the working class organized separately from the capitalist parties, such as exists in all other advanced capitalist countries (and many not-so-advanced countries with a substantial working class). In the U.S., workers remain chained to the “liberal” capitalist Democratic Party. Anti-black racism is at the root of the backwardness of the working class and, in general, of the reactionary features of U.S. society. It is on this basis that the centrality of the black question to the American workers revolution must be understood.

The Legacy of Slavery

The racial divide between black and white is the legacy of slavery and the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. Fraser held that blacks on the slave plantations of the Old South had developed a democratic and egalitarian subculture that enabled them to play a key role in the second American bourgeois-democratic revolution: the Civil War that smashed the system of chattel slavery and the period of Radical Reconstruction following the war. Fraser wrote in “Dialectics of Black Liberation” that the cultural attitudes of the black slaves

“inundated the transplanted Anglo-Saxon culture of the slave owners. In the rest of the country a cultural vacuum prevailed, born of the melting pot, of class fluidity, of constant migration and immigration. The vacuum acted like a sponge in absorbing Black folk culture. It was readily apparent that the chief barriers between Black and white were sociopolitical, not cultural, and that whites basically needed and responded to the Black culture.”

The War of Independence—this country’s first bourgeois-democratic revolution—freed the American colonial mercantile capitalists and farmers from subordination to the British ruling class in the late 18th century. The Civil War was a social revolution that freed an oppressed, exploited class—the black slaves—and destroyed the South’s basic ruling-class institution, the slave plantation. The ensuing period of Radical Reconstruction brought such gains as political enfranchisement and public education for black freedmen and poor whites alike. This period also saw an enormous expansion of democratic rights for immigrant and native-born white workers in the North as well. For example, the extension of citizenship rights to all those born in this country, codified in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and now challenged by anti-immigrant bigots, was a direct result of the revolutionary destruction of the Southern slavocracy.

Spearheaded by the Ku Klux Klan, the white propertied classes of the South waged a war of terror against the Reconstruction governments and the black communities that were their core base of support. The fate of the post-Civil War South was determined by the now-dominant Northern capitalist class, whose members shared no fundamental interest with the black freedmen and poor whites of the region. Quite the contrary. Black labor was vital to the Southern agricultural economy that was, in turn, vital to the national capitalist economy. A renewed alliance of the propertied classes in the North and South was built on the broken back of black labor.

The former black chattel in his freedom was reduced to peonage. As slaves, blacks owned nothing, not even their own bodies, and worked collectively on large plantations. Black sharecroppers owned their bodies and a share of the crop, but not the land they worked individually on divided lots of the former plantations. Whereas the slave was held as property to the plantation owners, the sharecropper was held in debt to the white landlords and financiers, many of them members of the former slavocracy. In New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture (1915), Lenin polemicized against the notion that the U.S., which had never known feudalism, was free from its economic survivals, noting: “The economic survivals of slavery are not in any way distinguishable from those of feudalism, and in the former slave-owning South of the U.S.A. these survivals are still very powerful” (emphasis in original).

As Fraser explained in “Dialectics of Black Liberation”:

“After the Civil War and Reconstruction destroyed the old slave-owning class, northern capital, from economic and political motives, betrayed its promises and created a revised, capitalist form of race relations based upon many of the traditions and social relations of slavery. Segregation took the place of the chattel slave as the main prop of the new racist order.” [emphasis in original]

Fraser also pointed out in the same piece that the re-establishment of white- supremacist rule in the South, supplemented by the extralegal violence of the KKK, and the violent and complete suppression of black democratic rights had a profoundly reactionary effect on American political culture as a whole:

“What was original to U.S. culture were certain progressive institutions—the plebeian folk-hero, democratic and informal manners, the relatively advanced position of women, unionism, the public school, individualism and free speech, and many more…. But these were all corrupted by the victory of Jim Crow and segregation following Reconstruction.

“Denied the opportunity to further absorb Black creativity, white American culture was left in a feeble state. The mores and habits of the imperialist ‘robber barons” took over. This new capitalist class, produced by the Civil War, stamped its ruthless, vulgar and Philistine image on American thought. A new house of culture was built upon White Supremacy and American Superiority.”

The End of Legalized Segregation in the South

With the benefit of hindsight, a serious analytical error on Fraser’s part—exploited and vulgarized by the latter-day Freedom Socialist Party—was his belief that Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution was applicable to the American South. Briefly stated, this concept is that in backward capitalist countries the historic tasks of the bourgeois revolution—i.e., removing the obstacles to socio-economic modernization, centrally imperialist domination and feudal-derived survivals in economic relations and political structure—could be achieved only through a proletarian revolution. Such a revolution would replace the capitalist system of production by a planned, collectivized economy, leading, through the international extension of proletarian revolution, to a socialist order.

In Fraser’s view, the struggle against the white-supremacist regimes in the South, which he described as “fascist-like,” was an uncompleted task of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the U.S.—an advanced capitalist society despite the backward conditions reigning in the South:

“The permanent revolution in America reveals itself in the following manner: the Southern system represents massive survivals of chattel slavery. These survivals take the form of great social problems unsolved by the Civil War and Reconstruction: an antiquated system of land tenure, the absence of democratic rights, segregation and racial discrimination….

“This circumstance leads to the inescapable conclusion that although the tasks of the liberation of the South are of an elementary democratic nature, they have no solution within the framework of American capitalism: they become part of the socialist struggle of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist system of production.”

—“Resolution on the Negro Question” (1957), reprinted in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of His Work,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990

Additionally, Fraser argued that the black middle class had a direct material interest in the preservation of segregation. Hence the black working class would be propelled into the leadership of the struggle for democratic rights. To be sure, black businessmen, such as the owners of local department stores and funeral parlors, wanted to retain a monopoly of commercial trade in the segregated black communities South and North. However, by the late 1950s, the social character of the black petty bourgeoisie was undergoing a significant change. A college-educated managerial/professional stratum wanted access to government, corporate and educational bureaucracies on the same footing as their white counterparts. And it was this stratum, which used to be called “the talented tenth,” that was the main beneficiary of the civil rights movement. The sons and daughters of black businessmen typically became government functionaries and middle-level corporate managers.

In general, Fraser did not fully recognize the substantial changes in the socio-economic structure of the South at the onset of the civil rights movement. The white-supremacist regimes had as their basic purpose the suppression of the mass of black rural toilers, typically sharecroppers. The increasing urbanization of the South and the modernization of its agriculture in the 1940s and ’50s eroded the social and economic basis of the Jim Crow system. These were the fundamental developments that gave rise to the civil rights movement: the mobilization of the black populace in the struggle for basic democratic rights. Additionally, legally enforced white supremacy in the South had become an embarrassment for the U.S. imperialist rulers in their global Cold War against the Soviet Union, especially among the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Between the 1960s and the late 1970s, the legal-political structure of the South was brought into alignment with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. This development underscores the fact that the root cause of black oppression lies in the workings of the U.S. capitalist economy, not the legal sanctions of the bourgeois state. Today, blacks possess at least formal equality under the law, although this is pervasively violated in practice. The past two or three decades have seen increased segregation, particularly in Northern urban areas, along with higher black unemployment and homelessness, a racist purge in higher education, the scourge of AIDS and the massive imprisonment of young black men carried out in the name of “the war on drugs.” Black pockets of the rural South are still marked by deep poverty and vicious repression, to say nothing of the plight of black New Orleans. These conditions cannot be eradicated by a new civil rights movement and a new Civil Rights Act but only by the overthrow of the capitalist system through proletarian socialist revolution.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- The Fight For Black Liberation- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to an article from "Workers Vanguard" on the question of the black liberation struggle and the road forward as part of the struggle for socialism in America, and internationally.