Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class con¬sciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Roosevelt and the New Deal: The Last Gasp The Last Time
DVD REVIEW
FDR: American Experience, four part series, PBS, 1994
The economic news of the past several months has created a virtual cottage industry of commentators whose comparative references to the Great Depression of the 1930’s has made it almost a commonplace. Also common are comparisons of the tasks that confronted the subject of this documentary, the 32nd President of The Unites States Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hereafter FDR), and those that confront the 2008 election victor the President-elect Barack Obama, who seemingly has that same kind of broad mandate,. Thus, as is my habit, I went scurrying to find a suitable documentary that would refresh my memory about the decisive role that FDR played back then as the last gasp “savior” of the American capitalist economic system.
An added impetus to do that search was the recent passing of the legendary oral historian, Studs Terkel, whose bread and butter was to capture the memories of the generation that was most influenced by FDR’s policies has been the subject of many reviews of late by this writer. Apparently then a biographic refresher on FDR seemed to be written in the stars. I found, for a quick overview of this subject, the perfect place to start is this American Experience four- part production on the life, loves, trials, tribulations and influence of this seminal American bourgeois politician.
That said, if one is looking for an in-depth analysis of the role that FDR played in saving the capitalist system in America in the 1930’s, or the concurrent rise of the imperial presidency under his guidance, or the increased role of the federal government through its various executive agencies or the role of his “brain trust” (Rexford Tugwell, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickles, etc.) in formulating policy then one should, and eventually must, look elsewhere. However, if one wants to capture visually the sense of the times and FDR’s (and his wife Eleanor’s, who is worthy of separate series in her own right) influence on them then this is the right address.
As is almost universally the case with American Experience productions one gets a technically very competent piece of work that moreover gets a boost here from the always welcome grave narrative skills of David McCullough, who as a historian in his own right has a grasp of the sense of such things. Of course, as always with PBS you get more than the necessary share of “talking heads” commentators who give their take on the meaning of each signpost in the long FDR trail to the presidency and beyond. Of note here is the commentary of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin whose recent book on the Lincoln presidency “Team Of Rivals” has received much notice in the lead up to the Obamiad.
And what are those signposts of FDR’s life that might have given an inkling that he was up to the task of the times? Other than the question of class (in his case upper class, old New York money) FDR’s appetite to be president is not an unfamiliar one, if somewhat unusual from someone of that set at the turn of the 20th century. Except for this little twist in FDR’s case, when one’s relative, if a distant one, was an idolized Teddy Roosevelt who was President as he entered into manhood. That, at least as presented in this film, is a key source of FDR’s presidential “fire in the belly” drive.
The unfolding of the saga of FDR’s “fire in the belly” ambitions takes up the first two parts of the series. Here we find out the early family history, the various schoolboy pursuits, the private schools, the obligatory Ivy League education, the courtship of the sublime distant cousin (and Teddy favorite) Eleanor, his first stab at elective office in New York, his apprenticeship in Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, his little extramarital love affairs, his selection as Vice Presidential candidate in 1920, the seemingly political career-ending bout with polio and the fight against its physical restrictions, the successful efforts to hide this from the public, thereafter the successful return to politics as Governor of New York and, finally, the nomination and election as the 32nd President of The United States. Plenty of material for thought here.
But that is only prelude. FDR faced a capitalist system that had lost like today, although for different specific reasons, its moorings and was in need of deep repair (or overthrow). It is not unfair, I do not believe, to say as I have said in the headline of this entry that FDR’s effort was the last gasp effort of capitalism to survive (although his fellow capitalists and their intellectual, political and media hangers-on shortsightedly called him a “traitor to his class”). The most glaring contrast in the whole documentary is that between an overwhelmed President Hoover’s abject defeatism and FDR’s strident confidence (a like comparison could be made, at least of the defeated presidential part, with the current Bush today).
Although we now know that the ultimate way out of that Great Depression was World War II in 1933 FDR applied, piecemeal and as triage, a whole series of economic programs to jump start the system, most famously the National Recovery Act (NRA, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). FDR’s first two terms were basically a fight to find ways, virtually any ways to keep the economy moving and get people back to work. He was running out of time and the public’s patience when the rumblings of WWII came on to the horizon in Europe.
The hard-bitten fight by FDR to get America into the European War against a public opinion that was essentially isolationist, mainly as a result of the WWI experience, takes up the last part of the series. The various efforts to aid England are highlighted here, including the various visits by and with British war time leader Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the fight to get America militarily mobilized including imposition of a military draft, the various conferences of the Big Three (the Soviet Union being the third) to carve up the post war world and FDR’s final illness round out the story. In our house when I was a kid the mere mention of the name FDR was said, by one and all, with some reverence for his efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression and for guiding it to victory in war. For a long time this writer has not had that youthful reverence but if you want to see why my parents and why I as a youth whispered that name with reverence watch here.
FDR: American Experience, four part series, PBS, 1994
The economic news of the past several months has created a virtual cottage industry of commentators whose comparative references to the Great Depression of the 1930’s has made it almost a commonplace. Also common are comparisons of the tasks that confronted the subject of this documentary, the 32nd President of The Unites States Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hereafter FDR), and those that confront the 2008 election victor the President-elect Barack Obama, who seemingly has that same kind of broad mandate,. Thus, as is my habit, I went scurrying to find a suitable documentary that would refresh my memory about the decisive role that FDR played back then as the last gasp “savior” of the American capitalist economic system.
An added impetus to do that search was the recent passing of the legendary oral historian, Studs Terkel, whose bread and butter was to capture the memories of the generation that was most influenced by FDR’s policies has been the subject of many reviews of late by this writer. Apparently then a biographic refresher on FDR seemed to be written in the stars. I found, for a quick overview of this subject, the perfect place to start is this American Experience four- part production on the life, loves, trials, tribulations and influence of this seminal American bourgeois politician.
That said, if one is looking for an in-depth analysis of the role that FDR played in saving the capitalist system in America in the 1930’s, or the concurrent rise of the imperial presidency under his guidance, or the increased role of the federal government through its various executive agencies or the role of his “brain trust” (Rexford Tugwell, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickles, etc.) in formulating policy then one should, and eventually must, look elsewhere. However, if one wants to capture visually the sense of the times and FDR’s (and his wife Eleanor’s, who is worthy of separate series in her own right) influence on them then this is the right address.
As is almost universally the case with American Experience productions one gets a technically very competent piece of work that moreover gets a boost here from the always welcome grave narrative skills of David McCullough, who as a historian in his own right has a grasp of the sense of such things. Of course, as always with PBS you get more than the necessary share of “talking heads” commentators who give their take on the meaning of each signpost in the long FDR trail to the presidency and beyond. Of note here is the commentary of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin whose recent book on the Lincoln presidency “Team Of Rivals” has received much notice in the lead up to the Obamiad.
And what are those signposts of FDR’s life that might have given an inkling that he was up to the task of the times? Other than the question of class (in his case upper class, old New York money) FDR’s appetite to be president is not an unfamiliar one, if somewhat unusual from someone of that set at the turn of the 20th century. Except for this little twist in FDR’s case, when one’s relative, if a distant one, was an idolized Teddy Roosevelt who was President as he entered into manhood. That, at least as presented in this film, is a key source of FDR’s presidential “fire in the belly” drive.
The unfolding of the saga of FDR’s “fire in the belly” ambitions takes up the first two parts of the series. Here we find out the early family history, the various schoolboy pursuits, the private schools, the obligatory Ivy League education, the courtship of the sublime distant cousin (and Teddy favorite) Eleanor, his first stab at elective office in New York, his apprenticeship in Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, his little extramarital love affairs, his selection as Vice Presidential candidate in 1920, the seemingly political career-ending bout with polio and the fight against its physical restrictions, the successful efforts to hide this from the public, thereafter the successful return to politics as Governor of New York and, finally, the nomination and election as the 32nd President of The United States. Plenty of material for thought here.
But that is only prelude. FDR faced a capitalist system that had lost like today, although for different specific reasons, its moorings and was in need of deep repair (or overthrow). It is not unfair, I do not believe, to say as I have said in the headline of this entry that FDR’s effort was the last gasp effort of capitalism to survive (although his fellow capitalists and their intellectual, political and media hangers-on shortsightedly called him a “traitor to his class”). The most glaring contrast in the whole documentary is that between an overwhelmed President Hoover’s abject defeatism and FDR’s strident confidence (a like comparison could be made, at least of the defeated presidential part, with the current Bush today).
Although we now know that the ultimate way out of that Great Depression was World War II in 1933 FDR applied, piecemeal and as triage, a whole series of economic programs to jump start the system, most famously the National Recovery Act (NRA, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). FDR’s first two terms were basically a fight to find ways, virtually any ways to keep the economy moving and get people back to work. He was running out of time and the public’s patience when the rumblings of WWII came on to the horizon in Europe.
The hard-bitten fight by FDR to get America into the European War against a public opinion that was essentially isolationist, mainly as a result of the WWI experience, takes up the last part of the series. The various efforts to aid England are highlighted here, including the various visits by and with British war time leader Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the fight to get America militarily mobilized including imposition of a military draft, the various conferences of the Big Three (the Soviet Union being the third) to carve up the post war world and FDR’s final illness round out the story. In our house when I was a kid the mere mention of the name FDR was said, by one and all, with some reverence for his efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression and for guiding it to victory in war. For a long time this writer has not had that youthful reverence but if you want to see why my parents and why I as a youth whispered that name with reverence watch here.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Obama Throws Down The Gauntlet On Afghanistan Troop Escalation- The Anti-War Movement Is Now On Notice
Commentary
Okay, the Obama “honeymoon” with the anti-imperialist section of the anti-war movement is officially over, or it should be. Any regular reader of this space knows that this writer had not, in any case, granted the new Commander-In-Chief any such “honeymoon” as a matter of course due the extreme distance in our respective political perspectives, but today he speaks to those who took Obama’s anti-war positions as good coin during last years run up to the presidential elections. Those who still want to give “Brother” Obama some additional 'quality' honeymoon time can wait until future events unfold on the slippery slope for those who venture in that god-forsaken part of the world.
And to those serious anti-war militants I will be short ands sweet as we have been down this road before. The news that Obama has given authorization for an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan is really old news. That Obama intended to make Afghanistan his war has been an ‘open’ secret for a while. What is interesting about this recent announcement is that the actual forces (mainly Marine and Army units) to be deployed later this year were originally scheduled to take a rotation in Iraq. Thus, by a rather nice sleigh-of- hand on his part Obama is able to draw down troops in Iraq and escalate their number in Afghanistan. Nice work. But again, if you had been paying even casual attention, this deployment was already laid out in last year’ campaign rhetoric. Here is one time at least that a bourgeois politician dose what he says he wants to do.
But that is neither here nor there for our purposes. Only a raw political neophyte would be shocked by such maneuvering. What is necessary to understand, even for those just mentioned political neophytes, is that this should be a wake up call for those who thought that Obama was going to dismantle the imperial war machine, turn swords in ploughshares or some such. You now have your notice. I will finish up by reposting a recent entry (Vote NO (With Both Hands) On The Obama Afghan War Budget):
“….. President Obama has already authorized an ‘intermediate’ troop escalation with more planned. He, moreover, has very publicly declared that Afghanistan, come hell or high water, is his signature war and has made Afghan policy a high priority. I have argued previously my belief that Obama intends to stake his administration, if not his place in history, on Afghanistan. In short, although he has proven he can raise fantastic sums of money for himself, since he is not going to pay for it personally he is coming to you looking for the loot. As the beginning of anti-war political wisdom therefore-“just say NO”. No money. Nada. I would urge every anti-war militant to sent e-mails, letters (does anyone do that anymore?) or call your representative and tell them the same thing. But here is the real anti-war ‘skinny’. Let’s get ready to, once again, go back into the streets and shout (and shout at least as loudly as we did at the unlamented Bush), Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan!”
Okay, the Obama “honeymoon” with the anti-imperialist section of the anti-war movement is officially over, or it should be. Any regular reader of this space knows that this writer had not, in any case, granted the new Commander-In-Chief any such “honeymoon” as a matter of course due the extreme distance in our respective political perspectives, but today he speaks to those who took Obama’s anti-war positions as good coin during last years run up to the presidential elections. Those who still want to give “Brother” Obama some additional 'quality' honeymoon time can wait until future events unfold on the slippery slope for those who venture in that god-forsaken part of the world.
And to those serious anti-war militants I will be short ands sweet as we have been down this road before. The news that Obama has given authorization for an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan is really old news. That Obama intended to make Afghanistan his war has been an ‘open’ secret for a while. What is interesting about this recent announcement is that the actual forces (mainly Marine and Army units) to be deployed later this year were originally scheduled to take a rotation in Iraq. Thus, by a rather nice sleigh-of- hand on his part Obama is able to draw down troops in Iraq and escalate their number in Afghanistan. Nice work. But again, if you had been paying even casual attention, this deployment was already laid out in last year’ campaign rhetoric. Here is one time at least that a bourgeois politician dose what he says he wants to do.
But that is neither here nor there for our purposes. Only a raw political neophyte would be shocked by such maneuvering. What is necessary to understand, even for those just mentioned political neophytes, is that this should be a wake up call for those who thought that Obama was going to dismantle the imperial war machine, turn swords in ploughshares or some such. You now have your notice. I will finish up by reposting a recent entry (Vote NO (With Both Hands) On The Obama Afghan War Budget):
“….. President Obama has already authorized an ‘intermediate’ troop escalation with more planned. He, moreover, has very publicly declared that Afghanistan, come hell or high water, is his signature war and has made Afghan policy a high priority. I have argued previously my belief that Obama intends to stake his administration, if not his place in history, on Afghanistan. In short, although he has proven he can raise fantastic sums of money for himself, since he is not going to pay for it personally he is coming to you looking for the loot. As the beginning of anti-war political wisdom therefore-“just say NO”. No money. Nada. I would urge every anti-war militant to sent e-mails, letters (does anyone do that anymore?) or call your representative and tell them the same thing. But here is the real anti-war ‘skinny’. Let’s get ready to, once again, go back into the streets and shout (and shout at least as loudly as we did at the unlamented Bush), Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan!”
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
"Freight Train" Coming Home- The Picking Of Elizabeth Cotten
DVD Review
February Is Black History Month
Elizabeth Cotton: In Concert: 1969, 1975 &1980, Elizabeth Cotten, Vestapol Productions, 2004
Most of the points that I made in a previous review, the first paragraph of which is reposted below, of Elizabeth Cotten’s CD album for Folkways apply here as well.
“There is something about these North Carolina style guitar pickers that is very appealing. And here I am thinking not only of the artist under review, the legendary Elizabeth Cotten, but also another female picker extraordinaire Etta Baker, as well. It is different from the Delta pick, for sure. They pick cleanly, simply but with verve. Ms. Cotten shows her stuff here on her first album from Folkways. Here we have the folk classic, no super-classic, “Freight Train” that was a rite of passage for every one from Peter, Paul and Mary to Dave Van Ronk to Tom Rush to record in the early 1960’s. Along with that tune we have some nice renditions of “I Don’t Love Nobody” and a few medleys like “Sweet Bye and Bye” combined with “What A Friend You Have in Jesus” (that I believe Blind Willie Johnson first recorded, or variation of it at least). Listen away but also save your money up to get the album with “Shake Sugaree’’ (get the one with her granddaughter singing along) on it. That’s the ticket.”
The same can be said here of Ms. Cotten’s work as Stefan Grossman, who has produced several other videos featuring legendary country blues singers and instrumentalists, grouped together several concerts and/or interviews that Ms. Cotton gave in 1969, 1975 and 1980. Moreover, this subtly engaging and seemingly modest performer is fairly forthcoming in describing her long struggle to become one of the great guitarists, male or female, of this genre. Parts of this material are slow, parts are repetitious (especially of repeated versions of “Freight Train”) but overall one can learn about folk history. Or about guitar playing for those so inclined. At the end of the last concert where she does a little different rendition of "Shake, Sugaree” with verve is worth the price of admission here.
February Is Black History Month
Elizabeth Cotton: In Concert: 1969, 1975 &1980, Elizabeth Cotten, Vestapol Productions, 2004
Most of the points that I made in a previous review, the first paragraph of which is reposted below, of Elizabeth Cotten’s CD album for Folkways apply here as well.
“There is something about these North Carolina style guitar pickers that is very appealing. And here I am thinking not only of the artist under review, the legendary Elizabeth Cotten, but also another female picker extraordinaire Etta Baker, as well. It is different from the Delta pick, for sure. They pick cleanly, simply but with verve. Ms. Cotten shows her stuff here on her first album from Folkways. Here we have the folk classic, no super-classic, “Freight Train” that was a rite of passage for every one from Peter, Paul and Mary to Dave Van Ronk to Tom Rush to record in the early 1960’s. Along with that tune we have some nice renditions of “I Don’t Love Nobody” and a few medleys like “Sweet Bye and Bye” combined with “What A Friend You Have in Jesus” (that I believe Blind Willie Johnson first recorded, or variation of it at least). Listen away but also save your money up to get the album with “Shake Sugaree’’ (get the one with her granddaughter singing along) on it. That’s the ticket.”
The same can be said here of Ms. Cotten’s work as Stefan Grossman, who has produced several other videos featuring legendary country blues singers and instrumentalists, grouped together several concerts and/or interviews that Ms. Cotton gave in 1969, 1975 and 1980. Moreover, this subtly engaging and seemingly modest performer is fairly forthcoming in describing her long struggle to become one of the great guitarists, male or female, of this genre. Parts of this material are slow, parts are repetitious (especially of repeated versions of “Freight Train”) but overall one can learn about folk history. Or about guitar playing for those so inclined. At the end of the last concert where she does a little different rendition of "Shake, Sugaree” with verve is worth the price of admission here.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Ar'n't I A Woman?- Female Slaves In The Ante-Bellum South
BOOK REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women’s History Month
Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves In The Plantation South, Deborah Gray White, W.W. Norton&Co. New York, 1985
I have mentioned more than once in this space, dedicated as it is to looking at material from American history and culture that may not be well-known or covered in the traditional canon, that the last couple of scholarly generations have done a great deal to enhance our knowledge of American micro-history. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the study of American slavery and its effects on subsequent history for the society and for the former slaves. The book under review represents one such effort in bringing the previously muddled and incomplete story of the triply-oppressed black women (race, gender and class) to the surface.
As the author, Deborah Gray White, has pointed out in her introduction the general subject of the American slave trade, its place in the culture and the general effects of plantation life on the slave has been covered rather fully since the 1950's and 1960's. However, she set as her task filling the gap left by the mainly male historians (Elkins, Genovese, Apteker,et. al) who tended to treat the plantation slave population as an undifferentiated mass. Ms. Gray White undertook to correct that situation with this 1985 initial attempt to amplify the historical record. Although other, later researches have expanded this field (as a sub-set of women's history, at the very least) this is definitely the place to start. I might add that copious footnotes and bibliography give plenty of ammunition for any argument that the female slave has been under-appreciated, under-studied and misunderstood within the context of the historical dispute of the effects of slavery on the structure of the black family and black cultural life.
Ms. Gray White set up a five pronged attack on the then current (up to 1985) conceptions about the role of the female slave: the always `hot button' and continuing controversy over her role as sexual "Jezebel" or asexual "Mother Earth" nurturing Mammy: her central economic role in the upkeep of the plantation and of the slave quarters: her critical role as "breeder" of children in order to maintain the laboring population and slave-owners' profits; her relationship to other females on the plantation and the division of labor among them by age, child-bearing status and health; and, the myths or misconceptions about black families, marriage and culture.
As part of Ms. Gray White's argument she has addressed the thorny issue of the female slave as a sexual object (to both white and black men) on the one hand and her critical role of 'nurturer' to the next generation of slaves on the other. This is a tension that in many ways has not been resolved even in post-slavery times and so was worthy of her attention (and ours today, as well). Moreover, this ambivalence flows over into the kinds of work the female slave was expected to perform at various stages of her life as a "breeder" and the differential treatment she received by the slave-owners at various stages of that cycle. Ms. Gray White also has some interesting things to say about female social solidarity (and rivalries) in the workplace and in the cabins. The age old question of social hierarchy between "house" and "field" slaves also gets her close attention.
Additionally, Ms. Gray covers a then relatively new topic (brought about by male historian's conception of the female slave as dominating the family structure and therefore producing the stereotypical "Sapphire"). Although she has not provided any really new information about the economic and social structure of plantation life (which drove Southern society in the ante-bellum period in everything from national politics to "correct" racial attitudes among non-slave-owning whites) her great achievement is to give voice to the differences between male and female slaves that had not been previously appreciated.
Perhaps the most important scholarly achievement in this little book however is her challenge to the orthodoxy about the female dominance of black family life on the plantation and its effects on post-slavery life. This additional `hot-button' issue gets fully outlined here. To seek further insight in this issue today look at other sources to see how the arguments have continued not only as a question of historical importance but national social policy.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women’s History Month
Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves In The Plantation South, Deborah Gray White, W.W. Norton&Co. New York, 1985
I have mentioned more than once in this space, dedicated as it is to looking at material from American history and culture that may not be well-known or covered in the traditional canon, that the last couple of scholarly generations have done a great deal to enhance our knowledge of American micro-history. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the study of American slavery and its effects on subsequent history for the society and for the former slaves. The book under review represents one such effort in bringing the previously muddled and incomplete story of the triply-oppressed black women (race, gender and class) to the surface.
As the author, Deborah Gray White, has pointed out in her introduction the general subject of the American slave trade, its place in the culture and the general effects of plantation life on the slave has been covered rather fully since the 1950's and 1960's. However, she set as her task filling the gap left by the mainly male historians (Elkins, Genovese, Apteker,et. al) who tended to treat the plantation slave population as an undifferentiated mass. Ms. Gray White undertook to correct that situation with this 1985 initial attempt to amplify the historical record. Although other, later researches have expanded this field (as a sub-set of women's history, at the very least) this is definitely the place to start. I might add that copious footnotes and bibliography give plenty of ammunition for any argument that the female slave has been under-appreciated, under-studied and misunderstood within the context of the historical dispute of the effects of slavery on the structure of the black family and black cultural life.
Ms. Gray White set up a five pronged attack on the then current (up to 1985) conceptions about the role of the female slave: the always `hot button' and continuing controversy over her role as sexual "Jezebel" or asexual "Mother Earth" nurturing Mammy: her central economic role in the upkeep of the plantation and of the slave quarters: her critical role as "breeder" of children in order to maintain the laboring population and slave-owners' profits; her relationship to other females on the plantation and the division of labor among them by age, child-bearing status and health; and, the myths or misconceptions about black families, marriage and culture.
As part of Ms. Gray White's argument she has addressed the thorny issue of the female slave as a sexual object (to both white and black men) on the one hand and her critical role of 'nurturer' to the next generation of slaves on the other. This is a tension that in many ways has not been resolved even in post-slavery times and so was worthy of her attention (and ours today, as well). Moreover, this ambivalence flows over into the kinds of work the female slave was expected to perform at various stages of her life as a "breeder" and the differential treatment she received by the slave-owners at various stages of that cycle. Ms. Gray White also has some interesting things to say about female social solidarity (and rivalries) in the workplace and in the cabins. The age old question of social hierarchy between "house" and "field" slaves also gets her close attention.
Additionally, Ms. Gray covers a then relatively new topic (brought about by male historian's conception of the female slave as dominating the family structure and therefore producing the stereotypical "Sapphire"). Although she has not provided any really new information about the economic and social structure of plantation life (which drove Southern society in the ante-bellum period in everything from national politics to "correct" racial attitudes among non-slave-owning whites) her great achievement is to give voice to the differences between male and female slaves that had not been previously appreciated.
Perhaps the most important scholarly achievement in this little book however is her challenge to the orthodoxy about the female dominance of black family life on the plantation and its effects on post-slavery life. This additional `hot-button' issue gets fully outlined here. To seek further insight in this issue today look at other sources to see how the arguments have continued not only as a question of historical importance but national social policy.
Friday, February 13, 2009
*From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”-Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom
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.
Workers Vanguard No. 930
13 February 2009
Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom
(Young Spartacus pages)
(Black History and the Class Struggle)
Correction Appended
To celebrate Black History Month, we print below an edited version of a public class given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour on 16 August 2008 for the Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club.
The subject of this educational, the black question and revolutionary integrationism, has a special significance for me personally. The program and especially the strategy of revolutionary integrationism was the single most important reason why I joined the Spartacist tendency (it was not yet a league) in 1965 at the age of 21. Like most young leftist radicals at the time, I started out as a liberal idealist. I was impelled ever further to the left by the contradiction between my liberal democratic ideals and the actual policies and practices of the U.S. government both at home and abroad, under both the Republicans and Democrats.
When I graduated high school in 1961, the American South was still a white racist police state in which blacks were deprived of all basic democratic rights and freedoms. In the North, blacks were concentrated in the impoverished inner-city ghettos. Internationally, the U.S. government was supporting right-wing dictatorships, for example, in Latin America; reactionary feudalist regimes like the Saudi Arabian monarchy; and European colonial rule, for example, the French in Algeria.
I was a member of the political generation called the New Left. Unlike the “Old Left,” the New Left viewed the basic conflict in the world, including in the U.S., not as one between the working class and the capitalist class but rather between the oppressed non-white masses—peasants, workers, the urban poor—and the white American ruling class. This worldview was conditioned by the major events and struggles in the world at the time, including in the U.S. American society was being disrupted and polarized by the civil rights movement, first in the South and then extending into the North. The Cuban Revolution had occurred a few years earlier. Algeria had just won its independence from the French after a prolonged and especially bloody national liberation struggle. And in South Vietnam, a Communist-led, peasant-based insurgency was threatening to overthrow the U.S. puppet regime.
During the early-mid 1960s, there was a widespread leftist radicalization among black youth, not only college students but also young black workers and lumpenized ghetto youth. In 1963 I was, for a few months, a member of the youth group of the Progressive Labor Movement, a recently formed Maoist-Stalinist organization. On one occasion I was selling its journal, the Marxist-Leninist Quarterly, and I approached a couple of young black guys. They waved me off, saying: “Man, we know all that. When the shooting starts, call us, we’ll be there.” In one sense they were just being smart alecks. But they were also in their own way expressing hostility to the racist capitalist-imperialist system as they understood it. At the time most blacks, especially young blacks, opposed the war in Vietnam while most whites, including white workers, supported it out of anti-Communism. The prevailing attitude toward the war among black youth was expressed a few years later by the boxing champion Muhammad Ali when he refused to be inducted into the armed forces. He said: “No Viet Cong”—that’s what the South Vietnamese Communists were usually called—“ever called me n----r.”
Insofar as New Left radicals had a strategy for establishing socialism on a world scale, it was by increasingly weakening and isolating American imperialism through mainly peasant-based revolutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This idea was expressed a few years later by Che Guevara in the slogan, “Two, three, many Vietnams.” Unlike most New Leftists, I didn’t see how it was possible to build socialist societies in Latin America, India and East Asia as long as the U.S. remained a capitalist-imperialist state. If the American ruling class felt its existence was seriously threatened by Communist-led revolutions and states in those regions, it could resort to nuclear weapons. At the same time, I couldn’t see how a socialist revolution was possible in the U.S. in a historically meaningful time period. The large majority of the working class was white. And most white workers had racial prejudices to some extent; they supported U.S. imperialist militarism out of anti-Communist sentiment and, in some cases, out of racist disdain for the peoples of what was later called the Third World.
I wrestled with this problem for a year or so. And the concept of revolutionary integrationism as put forward by the Spartacist tendency provided a solution, a key to unlocking the potential for a proletarian socialist revolution in the bastion of world imperialism. Black workers, with their generally higher level of political consciousness and greater opposition to U.S. imperialist militarism, could act as a lever to move the mass of more backward white workers toward a class-struggle program and outlook.
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
As Richard S. Fraser stated in his 1955 document, “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question”:
“One of the main factors which prevents the development of class consciousness in the American working class is race prejudice. Specifically: white chauvinism….
“Segregation is the foundation of prejudice. The Negroes, in their struggle against segregation are constantly clearing the ground for the emergence of class consciousness in the working class as a whole.
“It is the historical role of the Negro struggle to break down race prejudice in the working class and thereby to lead white workers toward class consciousness.
“If the Negro struggle should change its course and strike out for racial independence, it would deprive the working class of its most class conscious, and advanced segments.”
—reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” (September 1978)
This was restated by the early Spartacist League in our basic document on the black question, “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom”: “Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section [of the American working class], revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution” (Spartacist supplement, May-June 1967). Concretely, we put forward as a transitional demand directed at civil rights activists the formation of a South-wide Freedom Labor Party. Such a party would combine the struggle for black democratic rights and social equality with the struggle of labor against capital, for example, by promoting the unionization of the multiracial working class in the South.
Unlike in the 1960s, today there does not exist a mass black movement and there is relatively little working-class struggle of any kind. Nonetheless, black workers are generally politically to the left of the mass of white workers, for example, in their attitude toward U.S. military adventures abroad. Consider the current issue of Workers Vanguard with the headline “U.S. Imperialists Out of Afghanistan, Iraq!” (No. 918, 1 August 2008). In selling this to a group of mainly black workers, you would get a more positive or, at least, less negative response than in selling it to a group of predominantly white workers.
We describe blacks in the U.S. as an oppressed race-color caste integrated into the American capitalist economy while segregated at the bottom of American society. However, the idea that blacks are an embryonic nation was long discussed and debated within the American Trotskyist movement. Trotsky himself tentatively advanced this position in the 1930s. What is a nation and how is it different from a caste? What programmatic conclusions follow from recognizing that an oppressed people are a nation? These are the central themes addressed in Fraser’s 1955 document. Although he does not describe American blacks as a caste, that is the substance of his analysis.
A nation is a group of people who usually share a distinct language, culture and also territory. But the most basic character of a nation is the capacity to form a separate political economy, an independent system for the production and circulation of commodities. A nation can, under certain historical circumstances, become an independent bourgeois state with its own propertied and exploited classes. Our basic program with respect to an oppressed nation is the right of self-determination, that is, the right to secede from the state of the oppressor nation and form its own nation-state.
A caste is a group of people—who may be demarcated by race, ethnicity or some other factor—who occupy a certain position within the hierarchical structure of a given social and economic order. The concept of caste derives from Hindu society in India. All Hindus are born into castes that determine their future place in the social hierarchy. At the bottom of Hindu society are the so-called “untouchables.”
How many of you know who C. Vann Woodward is? He was a well-known white left-liberal historian of the American South. In his memoirs, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986), he recounted:
“A new and extraordinary foreign perspective came my way during the Second World War while I was on duty as a naval officer in India. With a letter of introduction in hand, I sought out Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, acclaimed leader of India’s millions of untouchables and later a figure of first importance in Indian constitutional history. He received me cordially at his home in New Delhi and plied me with questions about the black ‘untouchables’ of America and how their plight compared with that of his own people.”
As Fraser emphasized, blacks have always played an integral and important role in the American capitalist economy since its beginning as a British colony in the 17th century. Racial oppression has always been directly bound up with class exploitation—first for slaves, then for tenant farmers and then for a component of the industrial working class. Historically, the basic thrust of mass black struggle has been to remove the obstacles separating black people from the rest of American society in order to achieve social and economic as well as political equality with the white majority. But that equality can be achieved only through the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a planned socialist economy under a multiracial workers government. This is the crux of revolutionary integrationism.
Black Oppression: Bedrock of American Capitalism
Blacks were originally brought to this country from Africa as slaves to work the agricultural plantations of the Southern colonies of British North America. They became the main labor force producing the country’s major agricultural exports—tobacco, sugar and later cotton—during the colonial era and under the American bourgeois state until the Civil War in the 1860s. Thus black chattel slavery in the South was a central factor in the development of mercantile, financial and later industrial capitalism in the North.
However, eventually the conflicts of interest between the Northern capitalists and Southern plantation owners, mainly over control of the national government, led to the Civil War, which, when the North won, resulted in the abolition of slavery. Here I want to emphasize that blacks played an important role in their own emancipation. During the war, hundreds of thousands of blacks fled from the plantations and took refuge behind the lines of the Union Army. At first they served the Union forces mainly as laborers. But by the war’s end, nearly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors served in the Union Army and Navy.
In the decade following the war, the Northern ruling class carried out a policy called Radical Reconstruction in the South under the occupation of the Union Army. Black men (all women were disenfranchised at the time) were given the right to vote and played an active role in political life. There were black judges, state legislators, even U.S. Congressmen. However the Northern capitalists, given their basic economic interests, did not expropriate the land of the former slave plantations and distribute it to the black freedmen. Most blacks therefore became tenant farmers on land owned by whites and were exploited through sharecropping arrangements, debt peonage and other mechanisms. This formed the economic basis for the restoration of white-supremacist political rule in the South when the Union Army was withdrawn in 1877 to cement the renewed alliance between the Northern and Southern propertied classes. Blacks were subjected to legally enforced racial segregation and stripped of all democratic rights. They were held down by savage state repression reinforced by the racist terror of the Ku Klux Klan.
Prior to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the large majority of blacks lived in the rural South. During the war there was a substantial migration of blacks to the Northern cities where many found employment in major industries like steel and meatpacking. Racial prejudice among white workers therefore became a major obstacle to working-class organization and struggle even at the most basic trade-union level.
At the same time, the black question was posed for the early American Communist Party. The impetus for this came from Communist leaders in Russia like Lenin and Trotsky. The founding leaders of the American Communist Party like James P. Cannon had come out of the left wing of the Socialist Party and/or the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World. The position of these tendencies on the black question can be characterized as color-blind workerism. This was clearly expressed by prominent Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.”
The position of the Bolsheviks toward the many oppressed nationalities in tsarist Russia was very different. In order to combat and partly overcome the national divisions within the working class in the Russian empire, the Bolsheviks actively championed the rights and interests of the oppressed non-Russian peoples. And Communist leaders like Lenin and Trotsky applied similar principles to blacks in the U.S. They recognized and insisted that American Communists must actively fight against the oppression of black people in all its aspects. Not to do so would passively reinforce racial prejudices among white workers. And if the Communists did not fight against racial oppression, the mass of blacks would support liberal bourgeois parties that claimed to stand for their rights and interests.
The Revolutionary Tendency and the Civil Rights Movement
James P. Cannon, in an essay on the black question and the early Communist Party written in the late 1950s, emphasized:
“After November, 1917 this new doctrine—with special emphasis on the Negroes —began to be transmitted to the American communist movement with the authority of the Russian Revolution behind it. The Russians in the Comintern started on the American communists with the harsh, insistent demand that they shake off their own unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community….
“The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, 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 be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement.”
—“The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)
Not coincidentally, when Cannon wrote this essay the Southern civil rights movement, struggling against legalized segregation and for democratic rights, was agitating and polarizing American society and dominating the country’s political life. As it developed, this movement offered a short-lived opportunity for even a small revolutionary party to make a historic breakthrough. By the early 1960s, a large and growing current of young black militants was breaking to the left of the liberal reformism and pacifism of Martin Luther King but had not yet latched on to separatist ideology. These young militants were experienced in struggle and were leading and organizing a mass movement that included large numbers of black workers. And many of them could have been won to a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party on the programmatic basis of revolutionary integrationism.
That was the perspective that the Revolutionary Tendency (RT, the forerunner of the SL) fought for at the time within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the historic party of American Trotskyism. However, by then the SWP had moved sharply to the right. Its leadership willfully abstained from the civil rights movement while cheerleading from afar for both the liberal reformism of King and the reactionary separatism of the Nation of Islam. Against this, a 1963 RT document stated:
“The rising upsurge and militancy of the black revolt and the contradictory and confused, groping nature of what is now the left wing in the movement provide the revolutionary vanguard with fertile soil and many opportunities to plant the seeds of revolutionary socialism. Our task is to create a Trotskyist tendency in the broad left wing of the movement, while building that left wing…. We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.”
—“The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership,” reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised)
Over the next year or so the leaders and members of the RT were expelled from the SWP. The early Spartacist tendency then actively intervened in the civil rights struggles in the South as well as the North, raising demands such as for a Freedom Labor Party, for a Southern unionization drive backed by organized labor nationwide, and for armed self-defense against the Klan and other racist terrorists. This important chapter in our history is well documented in the early issues of Spartacist. Our forces, however, were very small and predominantly white. And the main body of young black activists was rapidly moving toward separatism.
To understand why that happened it’s necessary to consider the civil rights movement when it came North in the mid 1960s and how it differed from the Southern movement. The core demands of the Southern movement were for an end to legalized segregation and for democratic rights, centrally the right to vote. By the early 1960s, the dominant sections of the American ruling class were moving to bring the legal and political structure of the South into line with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. An important underlying factor was the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union. Legally enforced white supremacy and racial segregation in the South had become an increasing embarrassment for American imperialism internationally, especially in the countries of Asia and Africa, most of them former European colonies.
The Civil Rights Movement in the North
As it happened, in 1956 at the age of 12 I spent three or four months in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I attended a legally segregated, white junior high school. At the time federal courts had ordered school integration in Arkansas and other Southern states. And many of my classmates, knowing I was from New York, asked me what it was like to go to school with blacks. I said I didn’t know because there were no blacks in the school I went to in Queens.
The North was just as segregated as the South, at a personal level maybe more so. But the main basis of that segregation was the atomized workings of the capitalist economy. Blacks were, proverbially, the last hired and the first fired. Reinforcing these basic economic factors were certain laws, which, though they did not explicitly refer to race, in fact enforced segregation. Most blacks who lived in the ghettos did so out of economic necessity. However, their children then went to segregated public schools because the law mandated that students attend schools in their neighborhoods. In addition, there was white racial prejudice that could and did express itself in mass violence. For example, when in 1966 Martin Luther King led a march for “open housing” into the white Chicago suburb of Cicero, it was met and driven back by a racist mob.
A major demand of the civil rights movement in the North was for “open housing.” But even if realtors could have been compelled by law to sell homes in better-off white suburbs to black families from Harlem or Chicago’s South Side, how many black families could have afforded such homes? The everyday conditions of life facing the mass of blacks—widespread and chronic unemployment, rat-infested slums, rampant police brutality—could not be eradicated by Congress passing another Civil Rights Act. What working-class and poor blacks hoped to achieve through the civil rights movement in the North would have required a radical restructuring of the American economy and a massive redistribution of wealth. And that the American ruling class was not going to do.
Consequently, civil rights agitation generated a rapidly rising level of frustrated expectations, especially among lumpenized black youth, which exploded in what came to be called the ghetto rebellions in the mid-late 1960s in major Northern cities. Black youth took to the streets, battled the cops, looted and trashed stores. We wrote at time:
“As the struggle against the police expands, the black street-fighters turn on the merchants and shopkeepers, the visible representatives of the oppressive class society, and smash whatever cannot be carried off. Yet despite the vast energies expended and the casualties suffered, these outbreaks have changed nothing. This is a reflection of the urgent need for organizations of real struggle, which can organize and direct these energies toward conscious political objectives. It is the duty of a revolutionary organization to intervene where possible to give these outbursts political direction.”
—“Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom”
In line with this policy, at the time of the 1967 ghetto rebellion in Newark, New Jersey, we put out a very short agitational leaflet written by Jim Robertson, titled “Organize Black Power!” Incidentally, during the first years of our existence our name, Spartacist League, was obscure to most people, especially black ghetto youth. However, in 1967 Hollywood re-issued the film Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, about the great slave rebellion in the ancient Roman Empire. So when we distributed the leaflet, blacks would say, “You’re the Kirk Douglas group, you guys kicked the butts of the Romans.” And we’d reply, “Yeah, that’s our historical tradition.”
While the ghetto revolts were suppressed with murderous savagery by the police and National Guard, the ruling class also sought to dampen black unrest by offering certain reforms. Democratic president Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” that is, federally funded programs that were supposed to alleviate the horrific conditions of ghetto life. Busing black children into white neighborhoods was supposed to increase the level of school integration. Affirmative action for blacks in college admissions was supposed to increase racial integration in higher education.
Not only were these policies totally inadequate to improve the conditions of the black masses, but almost all were subsequently reversed by racist reaction. Busing, for example, was effectively killed in Boston in 1974 when white racist mobs attacked black school children. We actively intervened in the Boston busing crisis, agitating for mass, integrated labor-black defense guards to protect the black children in South Boston. We also called for low-rent, racially integrated public housing, for quality, integrated education for all, and for the implementation of busing and its extension to the suburbs as a minimal step toward black equality. However, the local Boston labor bureaucracy passively tolerated racist mob violence against black school children. (See “As Racist Mobs Rampaged, Liberals and Reformists Knifed Busing,” WV No. 921, 26 September 2008.)
The Bankruptcy of Black Nationalism
But let’s shift back in time to the mid-late 1960s and talk about what was called black nationalism. I say what was called black nationalism because it really wasn’t. The central demand of Basque nationalists in Spain is for an independent Basque state. Likewise for Québécois nationalists in Canada. While some of the self-styled black nationalist groups included in their formal programs the call for an independent black state, that was not what they were really about. No one took that seriously. I and other comrades had many arguments with black nationalists at the time and they never focused on carving out an independent state from the existing U.S. These groups are more accurately described as pseudo-nationalists or separatists. What differentiated them from liberal black groups and from racially integrated leftist groups was that they were exclusively black and advocated exclusively black institutions—schools, government agencies, cops—within the framework of the existing American capitalist state.
Despite their radical and often white-baiting rhetoric, most of these black nationalists quickly re-entered the fold of mainstream bourgeois politics. They offered themselves to the white ruling class as overseers of the ghetto masses. They became administrators of the various poverty programs and members of the entourage of local black Democratic politicos. For example, well-known black nationalist and white-baiting poet Amiri Baraka became an aide to the black Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. In that role he tried to break a strike by the racially integrated teachers union that, moreover, had a black leadership. The Black Panthers described such political operators as “pork-chop nationalists” and dashiki Democrats (dashikis being a garment worn by men in Africa).
So what about the Black Panther Party, which described itself as “revolutionary nationalist” and “Marxist-Leninist”? Formed in 1966, the Panthers consisted mainly of lumpenized ghetto youth led by a small number of young black leftist intellectuals. In fact, they had a doctrine of lumpen vanguardism. Initially the Panthers attempted to build a black paramilitary organization in the ghettos that would coexist with and restrain the police—sort of an armed version of “community control of the police.” And for a short time they actually got away with it, especially here in Oakland, their original and strongest base.
But by 1968 the FBI and local police had launched an all-out campaign to destroy the Panthers. Thirty-eight Panther militants were killed outright and top leaders were imprisoned on capital charges. A few managed to flee the country and gain refuge, for example, in Algeria. The Panther leadership responded to the murderous repression by turning sharply to the right in an effort to gain liberal support for their legal defense. In 1970-71, the organization was effectively destroyed by a violent factional struggle.
As we later wrote about black nationalism in general, in all its diverse political expressions: “At bottom black nationalism is an expression of hopelessness stemming from defeat, reflecting despair over prospects for integrated class struggle and labor taking up the fight for black rights. The chief responsibility for this lies on the shoulders of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which has time and again refused to mobilize the social power of the multiracial working class in struggle against racist discrimination and terror” (Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League/U.S., November 2000).
At the same time, the failure of the labor bureaucracy to improve the condition of the working class in general and to expand the scope of union power in the labor force as a whole conditioned what was called the “white backlash” in the mid-late 1960s. This was a widespread racist reaction against the black movement and minimal reforms like busing and affirmative action. Right-wing demagogues appealed with some success to the economic discontents and insecurities of white working-class as well as petty-bourgeois families. They said that the gains made by blacks, which they enormously exaggerated, had come at the expense of white working people, that their tax money was going to support black welfare mothers and “poverty hustlers,” that their children did not gain admission to the better colleges because colleges were giving preference to blacks.
The “white backlash” deepened the racial divisions and antagonisms within the working class, including in its unionized sector. And this helped set the stage for the effective union-busting offensive launched by the ruling class beginning in the late 1970s. The basic point is that labor and blacks go forward together or they will be driven back separately.
So what about today? First, it’s important to recognize that as a result of large-scale immigration from Latin America in recent decades the ethnic composition of the U.S. working class has significantly changed since the 1960s and ’70s. We are a small revolutionary Marxist propaganda group. As such we don’t have the capacity to lead the kind of labor, anti-racist and immigrant rights struggles that will raise the political consciousness of large numbers of workers whether white, black, Latino, native-born or immigrant. What we can and must do is develop a multiracial and multiethnic cadre that can lead such struggles in the future. And here I want to emphasize the importance of a multiethnic cadre. Racial and ethnic divisions cannot be fully and permanently overcome among the broad mass of workers under capitalism. At times of direct struggle, such as during strikes against the employers and government, these divisions are in one sense overcome. But then they subsequently reappear and are exploited and aggravated by bourgeois politicians. Look at the recent Democratic primaries where the overwhelming majority of blacks voted for Obama and most Latinos for Hillary Clinton.
Black communists will generally speak with greater political authority to black workers, and Latino communists to Latino workers. We need all kinds in the party. The unity of the working class in an all-sided and durable sense can exist only at the highest level of political consciousness organizationally embodied in a revolutionary vanguard party. And that’s what we seek to create.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Letter
March 3, 2009
Dear Young Spartacus,
I noticed an error in Seymour’s talk on the black question (WV930) [“Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom” (13 February)], when he says that “King led a march for ‘open housing’ into the white Chicago suburb of Cicero.” In fact King cancelled the march to appease [Chicago mayor] Daley; it was others like SNCC and CORE who went ahead with it.
Is a correction already in the works? A useful book on this question is Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago by Anderson and Pickering.
What Seymour said is actually a widely held myth, and correcting it would be an opportunity to illustrate how the Democratic Party smothers the fight for black freedom.
Keith
(From WV No. 945, 23 October 2009.)
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.
Workers Vanguard No. 930
13 February 2009
Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom
(Young Spartacus pages)
(Black History and the Class Struggle)
Correction Appended
To celebrate Black History Month, we print below an edited version of a public class given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour on 16 August 2008 for the Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club.
The subject of this educational, the black question and revolutionary integrationism, has a special significance for me personally. The program and especially the strategy of revolutionary integrationism was the single most important reason why I joined the Spartacist tendency (it was not yet a league) in 1965 at the age of 21. Like most young leftist radicals at the time, I started out as a liberal idealist. I was impelled ever further to the left by the contradiction between my liberal democratic ideals and the actual policies and practices of the U.S. government both at home and abroad, under both the Republicans and Democrats.
When I graduated high school in 1961, the American South was still a white racist police state in which blacks were deprived of all basic democratic rights and freedoms. In the North, blacks were concentrated in the impoverished inner-city ghettos. Internationally, the U.S. government was supporting right-wing dictatorships, for example, in Latin America; reactionary feudalist regimes like the Saudi Arabian monarchy; and European colonial rule, for example, the French in Algeria.
I was a member of the political generation called the New Left. Unlike the “Old Left,” the New Left viewed the basic conflict in the world, including in the U.S., not as one between the working class and the capitalist class but rather between the oppressed non-white masses—peasants, workers, the urban poor—and the white American ruling class. This worldview was conditioned by the major events and struggles in the world at the time, including in the U.S. American society was being disrupted and polarized by the civil rights movement, first in the South and then extending into the North. The Cuban Revolution had occurred a few years earlier. Algeria had just won its independence from the French after a prolonged and especially bloody national liberation struggle. And in South Vietnam, a Communist-led, peasant-based insurgency was threatening to overthrow the U.S. puppet regime.
During the early-mid 1960s, there was a widespread leftist radicalization among black youth, not only college students but also young black workers and lumpenized ghetto youth. In 1963 I was, for a few months, a member of the youth group of the Progressive Labor Movement, a recently formed Maoist-Stalinist organization. On one occasion I was selling its journal, the Marxist-Leninist Quarterly, and I approached a couple of young black guys. They waved me off, saying: “Man, we know all that. When the shooting starts, call us, we’ll be there.” In one sense they were just being smart alecks. But they were also in their own way expressing hostility to the racist capitalist-imperialist system as they understood it. At the time most blacks, especially young blacks, opposed the war in Vietnam while most whites, including white workers, supported it out of anti-Communism. The prevailing attitude toward the war among black youth was expressed a few years later by the boxing champion Muhammad Ali when he refused to be inducted into the armed forces. He said: “No Viet Cong”—that’s what the South Vietnamese Communists were usually called—“ever called me n----r.”
Insofar as New Left radicals had a strategy for establishing socialism on a world scale, it was by increasingly weakening and isolating American imperialism through mainly peasant-based revolutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This idea was expressed a few years later by Che Guevara in the slogan, “Two, three, many Vietnams.” Unlike most New Leftists, I didn’t see how it was possible to build socialist societies in Latin America, India and East Asia as long as the U.S. remained a capitalist-imperialist state. If the American ruling class felt its existence was seriously threatened by Communist-led revolutions and states in those regions, it could resort to nuclear weapons. At the same time, I couldn’t see how a socialist revolution was possible in the U.S. in a historically meaningful time period. The large majority of the working class was white. And most white workers had racial prejudices to some extent; they supported U.S. imperialist militarism out of anti-Communist sentiment and, in some cases, out of racist disdain for the peoples of what was later called the Third World.
I wrestled with this problem for a year or so. And the concept of revolutionary integrationism as put forward by the Spartacist tendency provided a solution, a key to unlocking the potential for a proletarian socialist revolution in the bastion of world imperialism. Black workers, with their generally higher level of political consciousness and greater opposition to U.S. imperialist militarism, could act as a lever to move the mass of more backward white workers toward a class-struggle program and outlook.
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
As Richard S. Fraser stated in his 1955 document, “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question”:
“One of the main factors which prevents the development of class consciousness in the American working class is race prejudice. Specifically: white chauvinism….
“Segregation is the foundation of prejudice. The Negroes, in their struggle against segregation are constantly clearing the ground for the emergence of class consciousness in the working class as a whole.
“It is the historical role of the Negro struggle to break down race prejudice in the working class and thereby to lead white workers toward class consciousness.
“If the Negro struggle should change its course and strike out for racial independence, it would deprive the working class of its most class conscious, and advanced segments.”
—reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” (September 1978)
This was restated by the early Spartacist League in our basic document on the black question, “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom”: “Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section [of the American working class], revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution” (Spartacist supplement, May-June 1967). Concretely, we put forward as a transitional demand directed at civil rights activists the formation of a South-wide Freedom Labor Party. Such a party would combine the struggle for black democratic rights and social equality with the struggle of labor against capital, for example, by promoting the unionization of the multiracial working class in the South.
Unlike in the 1960s, today there does not exist a mass black movement and there is relatively little working-class struggle of any kind. Nonetheless, black workers are generally politically to the left of the mass of white workers, for example, in their attitude toward U.S. military adventures abroad. Consider the current issue of Workers Vanguard with the headline “U.S. Imperialists Out of Afghanistan, Iraq!” (No. 918, 1 August 2008). In selling this to a group of mainly black workers, you would get a more positive or, at least, less negative response than in selling it to a group of predominantly white workers.
We describe blacks in the U.S. as an oppressed race-color caste integrated into the American capitalist economy while segregated at the bottom of American society. However, the idea that blacks are an embryonic nation was long discussed and debated within the American Trotskyist movement. Trotsky himself tentatively advanced this position in the 1930s. What is a nation and how is it different from a caste? What programmatic conclusions follow from recognizing that an oppressed people are a nation? These are the central themes addressed in Fraser’s 1955 document. Although he does not describe American blacks as a caste, that is the substance of his analysis.
A nation is a group of people who usually share a distinct language, culture and also territory. But the most basic character of a nation is the capacity to form a separate political economy, an independent system for the production and circulation of commodities. A nation can, under certain historical circumstances, become an independent bourgeois state with its own propertied and exploited classes. Our basic program with respect to an oppressed nation is the right of self-determination, that is, the right to secede from the state of the oppressor nation and form its own nation-state.
A caste is a group of people—who may be demarcated by race, ethnicity or some other factor—who occupy a certain position within the hierarchical structure of a given social and economic order. The concept of caste derives from Hindu society in India. All Hindus are born into castes that determine their future place in the social hierarchy. At the bottom of Hindu society are the so-called “untouchables.”
How many of you know who C. Vann Woodward is? He was a well-known white left-liberal historian of the American South. In his memoirs, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986), he recounted:
“A new and extraordinary foreign perspective came my way during the Second World War while I was on duty as a naval officer in India. With a letter of introduction in hand, I sought out Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, acclaimed leader of India’s millions of untouchables and later a figure of first importance in Indian constitutional history. He received me cordially at his home in New Delhi and plied me with questions about the black ‘untouchables’ of America and how their plight compared with that of his own people.”
As Fraser emphasized, blacks have always played an integral and important role in the American capitalist economy since its beginning as a British colony in the 17th century. Racial oppression has always been directly bound up with class exploitation—first for slaves, then for tenant farmers and then for a component of the industrial working class. Historically, the basic thrust of mass black struggle has been to remove the obstacles separating black people from the rest of American society in order to achieve social and economic as well as political equality with the white majority. But that equality can be achieved only through the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a planned socialist economy under a multiracial workers government. This is the crux of revolutionary integrationism.
Black Oppression: Bedrock of American Capitalism
Blacks were originally brought to this country from Africa as slaves to work the agricultural plantations of the Southern colonies of British North America. They became the main labor force producing the country’s major agricultural exports—tobacco, sugar and later cotton—during the colonial era and under the American bourgeois state until the Civil War in the 1860s. Thus black chattel slavery in the South was a central factor in the development of mercantile, financial and later industrial capitalism in the North.
However, eventually the conflicts of interest between the Northern capitalists and Southern plantation owners, mainly over control of the national government, led to the Civil War, which, when the North won, resulted in the abolition of slavery. Here I want to emphasize that blacks played an important role in their own emancipation. During the war, hundreds of thousands of blacks fled from the plantations and took refuge behind the lines of the Union Army. At first they served the Union forces mainly as laborers. But by the war’s end, nearly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors served in the Union Army and Navy.
In the decade following the war, the Northern ruling class carried out a policy called Radical Reconstruction in the South under the occupation of the Union Army. Black men (all women were disenfranchised at the time) were given the right to vote and played an active role in political life. There were black judges, state legislators, even U.S. Congressmen. However the Northern capitalists, given their basic economic interests, did not expropriate the land of the former slave plantations and distribute it to the black freedmen. Most blacks therefore became tenant farmers on land owned by whites and were exploited through sharecropping arrangements, debt peonage and other mechanisms. This formed the economic basis for the restoration of white-supremacist political rule in the South when the Union Army was withdrawn in 1877 to cement the renewed alliance between the Northern and Southern propertied classes. Blacks were subjected to legally enforced racial segregation and stripped of all democratic rights. They were held down by savage state repression reinforced by the racist terror of the Ku Klux Klan.
Prior to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the large majority of blacks lived in the rural South. During the war there was a substantial migration of blacks to the Northern cities where many found employment in major industries like steel and meatpacking. Racial prejudice among white workers therefore became a major obstacle to working-class organization and struggle even at the most basic trade-union level.
At the same time, the black question was posed for the early American Communist Party. The impetus for this came from Communist leaders in Russia like Lenin and Trotsky. The founding leaders of the American Communist Party like James P. Cannon had come out of the left wing of the Socialist Party and/or the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World. The position of these tendencies on the black question can be characterized as color-blind workerism. This was clearly expressed by prominent Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.”
The position of the Bolsheviks toward the many oppressed nationalities in tsarist Russia was very different. In order to combat and partly overcome the national divisions within the working class in the Russian empire, the Bolsheviks actively championed the rights and interests of the oppressed non-Russian peoples. And Communist leaders like Lenin and Trotsky applied similar principles to blacks in the U.S. They recognized and insisted that American Communists must actively fight against the oppression of black people in all its aspects. Not to do so would passively reinforce racial prejudices among white workers. And if the Communists did not fight against racial oppression, the mass of blacks would support liberal bourgeois parties that claimed to stand for their rights and interests.
The Revolutionary Tendency and the Civil Rights Movement
James P. Cannon, in an essay on the black question and the early Communist Party written in the late 1950s, emphasized:
“After November, 1917 this new doctrine—with special emphasis on the Negroes —began to be transmitted to the American communist movement with the authority of the Russian Revolution behind it. The Russians in the Comintern started on the American communists with the harsh, insistent demand that they shake off their own unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community….
“The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, 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 be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement.”
—“The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)
Not coincidentally, when Cannon wrote this essay the Southern civil rights movement, struggling against legalized segregation and for democratic rights, was agitating and polarizing American society and dominating the country’s political life. As it developed, this movement offered a short-lived opportunity for even a small revolutionary party to make a historic breakthrough. By the early 1960s, a large and growing current of young black militants was breaking to the left of the liberal reformism and pacifism of Martin Luther King but had not yet latched on to separatist ideology. These young militants were experienced in struggle and were leading and organizing a mass movement that included large numbers of black workers. And many of them could have been won to a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party on the programmatic basis of revolutionary integrationism.
That was the perspective that the Revolutionary Tendency (RT, the forerunner of the SL) fought for at the time within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the historic party of American Trotskyism. However, by then the SWP had moved sharply to the right. Its leadership willfully abstained from the civil rights movement while cheerleading from afar for both the liberal reformism of King and the reactionary separatism of the Nation of Islam. Against this, a 1963 RT document stated:
“The rising upsurge and militancy of the black revolt and the contradictory and confused, groping nature of what is now the left wing in the movement provide the revolutionary vanguard with fertile soil and many opportunities to plant the seeds of revolutionary socialism. Our task is to create a Trotskyist tendency in the broad left wing of the movement, while building that left wing…. We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.”
—“The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership,” reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised)
Over the next year or so the leaders and members of the RT were expelled from the SWP. The early Spartacist tendency then actively intervened in the civil rights struggles in the South as well as the North, raising demands such as for a Freedom Labor Party, for a Southern unionization drive backed by organized labor nationwide, and for armed self-defense against the Klan and other racist terrorists. This important chapter in our history is well documented in the early issues of Spartacist. Our forces, however, were very small and predominantly white. And the main body of young black activists was rapidly moving toward separatism.
To understand why that happened it’s necessary to consider the civil rights movement when it came North in the mid 1960s and how it differed from the Southern movement. The core demands of the Southern movement were for an end to legalized segregation and for democratic rights, centrally the right to vote. By the early 1960s, the dominant sections of the American ruling class were moving to bring the legal and political structure of the South into line with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. An important underlying factor was the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union. Legally enforced white supremacy and racial segregation in the South had become an increasing embarrassment for American imperialism internationally, especially in the countries of Asia and Africa, most of them former European colonies.
The Civil Rights Movement in the North
As it happened, in 1956 at the age of 12 I spent three or four months in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I attended a legally segregated, white junior high school. At the time federal courts had ordered school integration in Arkansas and other Southern states. And many of my classmates, knowing I was from New York, asked me what it was like to go to school with blacks. I said I didn’t know because there were no blacks in the school I went to in Queens.
The North was just as segregated as the South, at a personal level maybe more so. But the main basis of that segregation was the atomized workings of the capitalist economy. Blacks were, proverbially, the last hired and the first fired. Reinforcing these basic economic factors were certain laws, which, though they did not explicitly refer to race, in fact enforced segregation. Most blacks who lived in the ghettos did so out of economic necessity. However, their children then went to segregated public schools because the law mandated that students attend schools in their neighborhoods. In addition, there was white racial prejudice that could and did express itself in mass violence. For example, when in 1966 Martin Luther King led a march for “open housing” into the white Chicago suburb of Cicero, it was met and driven back by a racist mob.
A major demand of the civil rights movement in the North was for “open housing.” But even if realtors could have been compelled by law to sell homes in better-off white suburbs to black families from Harlem or Chicago’s South Side, how many black families could have afforded such homes? The everyday conditions of life facing the mass of blacks—widespread and chronic unemployment, rat-infested slums, rampant police brutality—could not be eradicated by Congress passing another Civil Rights Act. What working-class and poor blacks hoped to achieve through the civil rights movement in the North would have required a radical restructuring of the American economy and a massive redistribution of wealth. And that the American ruling class was not going to do.
Consequently, civil rights agitation generated a rapidly rising level of frustrated expectations, especially among lumpenized black youth, which exploded in what came to be called the ghetto rebellions in the mid-late 1960s in major Northern cities. Black youth took to the streets, battled the cops, looted and trashed stores. We wrote at time:
“As the struggle against the police expands, the black street-fighters turn on the merchants and shopkeepers, the visible representatives of the oppressive class society, and smash whatever cannot be carried off. Yet despite the vast energies expended and the casualties suffered, these outbreaks have changed nothing. This is a reflection of the urgent need for organizations of real struggle, which can organize and direct these energies toward conscious political objectives. It is the duty of a revolutionary organization to intervene where possible to give these outbursts political direction.”
—“Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom”
In line with this policy, at the time of the 1967 ghetto rebellion in Newark, New Jersey, we put out a very short agitational leaflet written by Jim Robertson, titled “Organize Black Power!” Incidentally, during the first years of our existence our name, Spartacist League, was obscure to most people, especially black ghetto youth. However, in 1967 Hollywood re-issued the film Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, about the great slave rebellion in the ancient Roman Empire. So when we distributed the leaflet, blacks would say, “You’re the Kirk Douglas group, you guys kicked the butts of the Romans.” And we’d reply, “Yeah, that’s our historical tradition.”
While the ghetto revolts were suppressed with murderous savagery by the police and National Guard, the ruling class also sought to dampen black unrest by offering certain reforms. Democratic president Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” that is, federally funded programs that were supposed to alleviate the horrific conditions of ghetto life. Busing black children into white neighborhoods was supposed to increase the level of school integration. Affirmative action for blacks in college admissions was supposed to increase racial integration in higher education.
Not only were these policies totally inadequate to improve the conditions of the black masses, but almost all were subsequently reversed by racist reaction. Busing, for example, was effectively killed in Boston in 1974 when white racist mobs attacked black school children. We actively intervened in the Boston busing crisis, agitating for mass, integrated labor-black defense guards to protect the black children in South Boston. We also called for low-rent, racially integrated public housing, for quality, integrated education for all, and for the implementation of busing and its extension to the suburbs as a minimal step toward black equality. However, the local Boston labor bureaucracy passively tolerated racist mob violence against black school children. (See “As Racist Mobs Rampaged, Liberals and Reformists Knifed Busing,” WV No. 921, 26 September 2008.)
The Bankruptcy of Black Nationalism
But let’s shift back in time to the mid-late 1960s and talk about what was called black nationalism. I say what was called black nationalism because it really wasn’t. The central demand of Basque nationalists in Spain is for an independent Basque state. Likewise for Québécois nationalists in Canada. While some of the self-styled black nationalist groups included in their formal programs the call for an independent black state, that was not what they were really about. No one took that seriously. I and other comrades had many arguments with black nationalists at the time and they never focused on carving out an independent state from the existing U.S. These groups are more accurately described as pseudo-nationalists or separatists. What differentiated them from liberal black groups and from racially integrated leftist groups was that they were exclusively black and advocated exclusively black institutions—schools, government agencies, cops—within the framework of the existing American capitalist state.
Despite their radical and often white-baiting rhetoric, most of these black nationalists quickly re-entered the fold of mainstream bourgeois politics. They offered themselves to the white ruling class as overseers of the ghetto masses. They became administrators of the various poverty programs and members of the entourage of local black Democratic politicos. For example, well-known black nationalist and white-baiting poet Amiri Baraka became an aide to the black Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. In that role he tried to break a strike by the racially integrated teachers union that, moreover, had a black leadership. The Black Panthers described such political operators as “pork-chop nationalists” and dashiki Democrats (dashikis being a garment worn by men in Africa).
So what about the Black Panther Party, which described itself as “revolutionary nationalist” and “Marxist-Leninist”? Formed in 1966, the Panthers consisted mainly of lumpenized ghetto youth led by a small number of young black leftist intellectuals. In fact, they had a doctrine of lumpen vanguardism. Initially the Panthers attempted to build a black paramilitary organization in the ghettos that would coexist with and restrain the police—sort of an armed version of “community control of the police.” And for a short time they actually got away with it, especially here in Oakland, their original and strongest base.
But by 1968 the FBI and local police had launched an all-out campaign to destroy the Panthers. Thirty-eight Panther militants were killed outright and top leaders were imprisoned on capital charges. A few managed to flee the country and gain refuge, for example, in Algeria. The Panther leadership responded to the murderous repression by turning sharply to the right in an effort to gain liberal support for their legal defense. In 1970-71, the organization was effectively destroyed by a violent factional struggle.
As we later wrote about black nationalism in general, in all its diverse political expressions: “At bottom black nationalism is an expression of hopelessness stemming from defeat, reflecting despair over prospects for integrated class struggle and labor taking up the fight for black rights. The chief responsibility for this lies on the shoulders of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which has time and again refused to mobilize the social power of the multiracial working class in struggle against racist discrimination and terror” (Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League/U.S., November 2000).
At the same time, the failure of the labor bureaucracy to improve the condition of the working class in general and to expand the scope of union power in the labor force as a whole conditioned what was called the “white backlash” in the mid-late 1960s. This was a widespread racist reaction against the black movement and minimal reforms like busing and affirmative action. Right-wing demagogues appealed with some success to the economic discontents and insecurities of white working-class as well as petty-bourgeois families. They said that the gains made by blacks, which they enormously exaggerated, had come at the expense of white working people, that their tax money was going to support black welfare mothers and “poverty hustlers,” that their children did not gain admission to the better colleges because colleges were giving preference to blacks.
The “white backlash” deepened the racial divisions and antagonisms within the working class, including in its unionized sector. And this helped set the stage for the effective union-busting offensive launched by the ruling class beginning in the late 1970s. The basic point is that labor and blacks go forward together or they will be driven back separately.
So what about today? First, it’s important to recognize that as a result of large-scale immigration from Latin America in recent decades the ethnic composition of the U.S. working class has significantly changed since the 1960s and ’70s. We are a small revolutionary Marxist propaganda group. As such we don’t have the capacity to lead the kind of labor, anti-racist and immigrant rights struggles that will raise the political consciousness of large numbers of workers whether white, black, Latino, native-born or immigrant. What we can and must do is develop a multiracial and multiethnic cadre that can lead such struggles in the future. And here I want to emphasize the importance of a multiethnic cadre. Racial and ethnic divisions cannot be fully and permanently overcome among the broad mass of workers under capitalism. At times of direct struggle, such as during strikes against the employers and government, these divisions are in one sense overcome. But then they subsequently reappear and are exploited and aggravated by bourgeois politicians. Look at the recent Democratic primaries where the overwhelming majority of blacks voted for Obama and most Latinos for Hillary Clinton.
Black communists will generally speak with greater political authority to black workers, and Latino communists to Latino workers. We need all kinds in the party. The unity of the working class in an all-sided and durable sense can exist only at the highest level of political consciousness organizationally embodied in a revolutionary vanguard party. And that’s what we seek to create.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Letter
March 3, 2009
Dear Young Spartacus,
I noticed an error in Seymour’s talk on the black question (WV930) [“Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom” (13 February)], when he says that “King led a march for ‘open housing’ into the white Chicago suburb of Cicero.” In fact King cancelled the march to appease [Chicago mayor] Daley; it was others like SNCC and CORE who went ahead with it.
Is a correction already in the works? A useful book on this question is Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago by Anderson and Pickering.
What Seymour said is actually a widely held myth, and correcting it would be an opportunity to illustrate how the Democratic Party smothers the fight for black freedom.
Keith
(From WV No. 945, 23 October 2009.)
Vote NO (With Both Hands) On The Obama Afghan War Budget
Commentary
Today the gloves can come off. This is the first ‘wake-up’ call in the fight against President Obama’s slippery road to escalation in Afghanistan. Get ready. I also note that some leftist intellectuals share my concern. They have already taken out a half page ad in the “New York Review of Books” entitled “Not This Time” (dated February 26, 2009, page 35) calling for, among other things, withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. While I might disagree with the thrust of the letter to the President as a tactic I stand in solidarity with their call for withdrawal. Below is a proposal for a more concrete form of opposition.
Down With The Afghan War- Down With The Afghan War Budget- For Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan (and Central Asia)! Hands Off Pakistan!
Praise be. Finally we can get down to brass tacks on this Obamian imperial presidency. As regular readers of this space will know last fall in the American presidential elections, as befits an anti-capitalist labor militant, I called for a NO vote on Obama, McCain, Nader (“Independent”?) and McKinney (Green) as an expression of opposition to the pro-capitalist parties, large and small. I at the same time, nevertheless, recognized that the immense popularity of the Obama victory would give him, if not from me, then from the masses of youth, blacks, Hispanics and old time ‘soft’ lefties from my “Generation of ‘68”, a protracted “honeymoon”. That possibility seemed all the more likely as the wreckage of the truly obscene and incompetent Bush administration, an administration that even by loose bourgeois political standards was a disaster, came to light after he left office. But now, as if to mock the wisdom of the political gods, even that supposedly protracted “honeymoon” is to go by the boards, at least for thoughtful political types.
Why is that honeymoon over? Well the money season, especially the military money season, is upon us as the political calendar churns on. That means, in practical terms, also money for Obama’s Afghan war funding. Politics is about careful selection of issues and timing. That little nugget of political wisdom is true whether you, like Obama, have been empowered by a 600 million dollar plus electoral campaign or, like me, are out in the “wilderness” as a left-wing political propagandist with a budget of six dollars. Obviously, thoughtful militants, and I like to include myself in that category, have been frustrated over the past few weeks looking for a cutting edge issue in order to gain some political leverage.
After the aura of the Inauguration festivities dissipated what did we have for an edge? The muffed Obama Cabinet selections? That was a yawner, except for ‘insiders’ and truly desperate political junkies. The fight around the bailout of capitalism by the ‘second-handout’ governmental actions generically called the “stimulus package”? Frankly, there is no leverage in those issues for leftists today. Sure we can furtively rail about the “bum of the month” club now known as Wall Street but that is tempered as an issue by some of the ‘goodies’ in the package that might actually help working people. Times are desperate enough that we cannot get a reasonable hearing on that one, at present. But now, with military appropriations coming up over the next few weeks, we have a banner to fight under.
And, moreover, we apparently are not alone here, at least among those few left-wing parliamentary Democrats that fought a losing battle against the various Bush Administration Iraq/Afghan war appropriations. Very early on in the fight against the Iraq war build-up I noted that, on the parliamentary playing field, the only serious question is YES or NO on war appropriations in the fight against any particular imperialist war move. That is as true today as it was then. I do not know where ex-Democratic presidential contender Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, one of the few consistent “anti-war horses” (excuse the turn of phrase) on Iraq/Afghan war appropriations stands on opposition to Afghan war appropriations now but fellow “anti-war horse” Massachusetts Congressman James McGovern has, according to a recent article from the Associated Press (“Antiwar lawmakers wary of adding troops in Afghanistan” by Anna Flaherty, dated February 9, 2009), some ‘jitters’ about where things are heading there.
Well, Congressman McGovern here is the ‘skinny’. President Obama has already authorized an ‘intermediate’ troop escalation with more planned. He, moreover, has very publicly declared that Afghanistan, come hell or high water, is his signature war and has made Afghan policy a high priority. I have argued previously my belief that Obama intends to stake his administration, if not his place in history, on Afghanistan. In short, although he has proven he can raise fantastic sums of money for himself, since he is not going to pay for it personally he is coming to you looking for the loot. As the beginning of anti-war political wisdom therefore-“just say NO”. No money. Nada. I would urge every anti-war militant to sent e-mails, letters (does anyone do that anymore?) or call your representative and tell them the same thing. But here is the real anti-war ‘skinny’. Let’s get ready to, once again, go back into the streets and shout (and shout at least as loudly as we did at the unlamented Bush), Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan!
Note: In my introduction to this entry I noted that some leftist intellectuals shared my concern about Obama’s slippery slope in Afghanistan. I also noted that they have already taken out a half page ad in the “New York Review of Books” entitled “Not This Time” (dated February 26, 2009, page 35) calling for, among other things, withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. I placed myself in solidarity with that call, if not the tactic of the letter to the President. What I noticed in reading the list of signatories is that outside a few old hardened “soft lefties”, like the very fine ‘magical realism’ writer Russell Banks and academic radical gadfly Howard Zinn, there were not the usual heavyweight academic lefties that usually sign these things. While a fair number of such types, like Norman Mailer, have passed away recently and some of the names that I did not recognize are just beginning their letter signing careers I have a funny feeling that in the academy Obama is being given that protracted “honeymoon” I mentioned above. This is not a good sign.
Today the gloves can come off. This is the first ‘wake-up’ call in the fight against President Obama’s slippery road to escalation in Afghanistan. Get ready. I also note that some leftist intellectuals share my concern. They have already taken out a half page ad in the “New York Review of Books” entitled “Not This Time” (dated February 26, 2009, page 35) calling for, among other things, withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. While I might disagree with the thrust of the letter to the President as a tactic I stand in solidarity with their call for withdrawal. Below is a proposal for a more concrete form of opposition.
Down With The Afghan War- Down With The Afghan War Budget- For Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan (and Central Asia)! Hands Off Pakistan!
Praise be. Finally we can get down to brass tacks on this Obamian imperial presidency. As regular readers of this space will know last fall in the American presidential elections, as befits an anti-capitalist labor militant, I called for a NO vote on Obama, McCain, Nader (“Independent”?) and McKinney (Green) as an expression of opposition to the pro-capitalist parties, large and small. I at the same time, nevertheless, recognized that the immense popularity of the Obama victory would give him, if not from me, then from the masses of youth, blacks, Hispanics and old time ‘soft’ lefties from my “Generation of ‘68”, a protracted “honeymoon”. That possibility seemed all the more likely as the wreckage of the truly obscene and incompetent Bush administration, an administration that even by loose bourgeois political standards was a disaster, came to light after he left office. But now, as if to mock the wisdom of the political gods, even that supposedly protracted “honeymoon” is to go by the boards, at least for thoughtful political types.
Why is that honeymoon over? Well the money season, especially the military money season, is upon us as the political calendar churns on. That means, in practical terms, also money for Obama’s Afghan war funding. Politics is about careful selection of issues and timing. That little nugget of political wisdom is true whether you, like Obama, have been empowered by a 600 million dollar plus electoral campaign or, like me, are out in the “wilderness” as a left-wing political propagandist with a budget of six dollars. Obviously, thoughtful militants, and I like to include myself in that category, have been frustrated over the past few weeks looking for a cutting edge issue in order to gain some political leverage.
After the aura of the Inauguration festivities dissipated what did we have for an edge? The muffed Obama Cabinet selections? That was a yawner, except for ‘insiders’ and truly desperate political junkies. The fight around the bailout of capitalism by the ‘second-handout’ governmental actions generically called the “stimulus package”? Frankly, there is no leverage in those issues for leftists today. Sure we can furtively rail about the “bum of the month” club now known as Wall Street but that is tempered as an issue by some of the ‘goodies’ in the package that might actually help working people. Times are desperate enough that we cannot get a reasonable hearing on that one, at present. But now, with military appropriations coming up over the next few weeks, we have a banner to fight under.
And, moreover, we apparently are not alone here, at least among those few left-wing parliamentary Democrats that fought a losing battle against the various Bush Administration Iraq/Afghan war appropriations. Very early on in the fight against the Iraq war build-up I noted that, on the parliamentary playing field, the only serious question is YES or NO on war appropriations in the fight against any particular imperialist war move. That is as true today as it was then. I do not know where ex-Democratic presidential contender Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, one of the few consistent “anti-war horses” (excuse the turn of phrase) on Iraq/Afghan war appropriations stands on opposition to Afghan war appropriations now but fellow “anti-war horse” Massachusetts Congressman James McGovern has, according to a recent article from the Associated Press (“Antiwar lawmakers wary of adding troops in Afghanistan” by Anna Flaherty, dated February 9, 2009), some ‘jitters’ about where things are heading there.
Well, Congressman McGovern here is the ‘skinny’. President Obama has already authorized an ‘intermediate’ troop escalation with more planned. He, moreover, has very publicly declared that Afghanistan, come hell or high water, is his signature war and has made Afghan policy a high priority. I have argued previously my belief that Obama intends to stake his administration, if not his place in history, on Afghanistan. In short, although he has proven he can raise fantastic sums of money for himself, since he is not going to pay for it personally he is coming to you looking for the loot. As the beginning of anti-war political wisdom therefore-“just say NO”. No money. Nada. I would urge every anti-war militant to sent e-mails, letters (does anyone do that anymore?) or call your representative and tell them the same thing. But here is the real anti-war ‘skinny’. Let’s get ready to, once again, go back into the streets and shout (and shout at least as loudly as we did at the unlamented Bush), Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan!
Note: In my introduction to this entry I noted that some leftist intellectuals shared my concern about Obama’s slippery slope in Afghanistan. I also noted that they have already taken out a half page ad in the “New York Review of Books” entitled “Not This Time” (dated February 26, 2009, page 35) calling for, among other things, withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. I placed myself in solidarity with that call, if not the tactic of the letter to the President. What I noticed in reading the list of signatories is that outside a few old hardened “soft lefties”, like the very fine ‘magical realism’ writer Russell Banks and academic radical gadfly Howard Zinn, there were not the usual heavyweight academic lefties that usually sign these things. While a fair number of such types, like Norman Mailer, have passed away recently and some of the names that I did not recognize are just beginning their letter signing careers I have a funny feeling that in the academy Obama is being given that protracted “honeymoon” I mentioned above. This is not a good sign.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Afghanistan Redux -In Honor Of The Fallen Soviet Soldiers In Afghanistan, 1979-1989
Commentary
This year marks the 20th Anniversary of the historically decisive (for the fate of the Soviet Union itself as it turned out) and catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union is no more, to the great detriment of the international working class in its efforts to fight for socialism. Nevertheless this is an appropriate time and an appropriate space to honor the Soviet soldiers who fell doing their internationalist duty in Afghanistan. All Honor To The Fallen Soviet Soldiers In Afghanistan, 1979-89!
I once again pose the question here (as I do directly below in the reposted commentary from May 14, 2007 because the points made there seem appropriate today)- Does any socialist, self-styled or otherwise, in the West want to reconsider their anti-Soviet support for Western imperialist objectives and material aid to the Islamic fundamentalists in respond to the Soviet assistance of the secular/nationalist government in Afghanistan in 1979? You should, although I would have to stretch my imagination to believe that you would do so.
Dated May 14, 2007
COMMENTARY
IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF U.S/ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN!
"With the recent flurry of activity by Congress in Washington over the Iraq and Afghanistan war budgets and the ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq Afghanistan has fallen below the newspaper fold. That is a mistake. In one of the ironies of history Afghanistan was the pivotal start of the whole ‘war of civilizations’ going back to the fight by the Soviet Union in the 1980’s that was fought, at least partially, to bring Afghanistan into the 20th century (or maybe even the 19th). If the Soviet Union had waged more than a half-hearted fight then world history might have looked significantly difference today. The Islamic fundamentalist forces, notably those committed to Bin Laden and an Al Qaeda strategy, got their first taste of blood there. And they liked it.
The current political situation in that benighted country is that the Karzai government’s writ does not extend outside of Kabul and that the U.S./NATO presence there is the only thing propping up that government. And this is the rub. There has been a recent spate of articles on the fighting in Afghanistan centered on the allied forces indiscriminate bombing of various outlining villages and the killing of innocent civilians. While not now a matter of widespread public knowledge the American strategy in Afghanistan is essentially the same as in Iraq. In order to defeat the Taliban (and other) insurgencies those allied forces have relied on the old tried and true imperialist method of bringing overwhelming military force and then letting “God” separate out the innocent from the guilty. Of course, this nice little strategy has its blow back effect as previously disinterested Afghans have now begun, on their own, to fight against the imperialist presence. One village that was bombed by the United States during the past week did just that. One can expect more to come.
American imperialism, for public consumption, will bring out the candy bars and soap to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local populace but when the deal goes down the bomb is the persuader of choice. So much for all those vaunted pacification programs. In justification for the aerial bombing policy one of the Allied ground commanders stated that without the use of such power hundreds of thousands of additional ground troops would be necessary. Nobody in the political and military establishment in Washington, or anywhere else, wants to, at this point, get into that hornet’s nest. The long and the short of it is that while we keep the fight against the war in Iraq on the front burner we had better bring the demand for immediate withdrawal in Afghanistan up to the front as well. In fact, United States Hands Off The World!"
February 18, 2009
I have argued since the Americans presidential elections of November 2008 were decided with the election of Barack Obama that virtually every move that he had made up that time was predicated on making Afghanistan the center of his Middle Eastern foreign policy initiatives. That included his own predilection to gain a ‘win’ in that region of the world for American imperialism by shucking (that is the correct word for this) Iraq for the ‘greener pastures' fields of Afghanistan. His later national security and appropriate cabinet level appointments concerned with Afghanistan only confirm this. At that time, since then and today I will stand by the point I made there that Obama has staked his place in history on this decision. And working people, one way or another, in lives and treasure will the price of that decision.
That said, after reading a review in “The New York Review Of Books” (February 12, 2009) by William Dalrymple of a book “Descent Into Chaos: The United States And The Failure Of Nation Building In Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia” by noted scholar Ahmed Rashid the probabilities submerged in that last sentence may prove even more ominous that I suspected. I would note that I have only started reading this work myself because I had some difficulty getting a copy but one should recall that this book is by the same author of the book “Taliban” that everyone started to climb the shelves for after 9/11. The man knows this area of world.
I am not sure whether President Obama, as intellectually-inclined as he appears to, is a devotee of “The New York Review”. However, he should read this article. And take these words as I intend them as I sure as hell have no ambition, like some others on the left, to be a foreign policy advisor to him or his administration. If one want to get an approximate understanding of the huge pitfalls that await this rookie president then read the review, or better, get a copy of the book. In short, the fates of the British and the Russians mentioned above are calling. Hey, I’ll stick with another point that I made last November (and repeated on Inauguration Day)- Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia!
This year marks the 20th Anniversary of the historically decisive (for the fate of the Soviet Union itself as it turned out) and catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union is no more, to the great detriment of the international working class in its efforts to fight for socialism. Nevertheless this is an appropriate time and an appropriate space to honor the Soviet soldiers who fell doing their internationalist duty in Afghanistan. All Honor To The Fallen Soviet Soldiers In Afghanistan, 1979-89!
I once again pose the question here (as I do directly below in the reposted commentary from May 14, 2007 because the points made there seem appropriate today)- Does any socialist, self-styled or otherwise, in the West want to reconsider their anti-Soviet support for Western imperialist objectives and material aid to the Islamic fundamentalists in respond to the Soviet assistance of the secular/nationalist government in Afghanistan in 1979? You should, although I would have to stretch my imagination to believe that you would do so.
Dated May 14, 2007
COMMENTARY
IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF U.S/ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN!
"With the recent flurry of activity by Congress in Washington over the Iraq and Afghanistan war budgets and the ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq Afghanistan has fallen below the newspaper fold. That is a mistake. In one of the ironies of history Afghanistan was the pivotal start of the whole ‘war of civilizations’ going back to the fight by the Soviet Union in the 1980’s that was fought, at least partially, to bring Afghanistan into the 20th century (or maybe even the 19th). If the Soviet Union had waged more than a half-hearted fight then world history might have looked significantly difference today. The Islamic fundamentalist forces, notably those committed to Bin Laden and an Al Qaeda strategy, got their first taste of blood there. And they liked it.
The current political situation in that benighted country is that the Karzai government’s writ does not extend outside of Kabul and that the U.S./NATO presence there is the only thing propping up that government. And this is the rub. There has been a recent spate of articles on the fighting in Afghanistan centered on the allied forces indiscriminate bombing of various outlining villages and the killing of innocent civilians. While not now a matter of widespread public knowledge the American strategy in Afghanistan is essentially the same as in Iraq. In order to defeat the Taliban (and other) insurgencies those allied forces have relied on the old tried and true imperialist method of bringing overwhelming military force and then letting “God” separate out the innocent from the guilty. Of course, this nice little strategy has its blow back effect as previously disinterested Afghans have now begun, on their own, to fight against the imperialist presence. One village that was bombed by the United States during the past week did just that. One can expect more to come.
American imperialism, for public consumption, will bring out the candy bars and soap to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local populace but when the deal goes down the bomb is the persuader of choice. So much for all those vaunted pacification programs. In justification for the aerial bombing policy one of the Allied ground commanders stated that without the use of such power hundreds of thousands of additional ground troops would be necessary. Nobody in the political and military establishment in Washington, or anywhere else, wants to, at this point, get into that hornet’s nest. The long and the short of it is that while we keep the fight against the war in Iraq on the front burner we had better bring the demand for immediate withdrawal in Afghanistan up to the front as well. In fact, United States Hands Off The World!"
February 18, 2009
I have argued since the Americans presidential elections of November 2008 were decided with the election of Barack Obama that virtually every move that he had made up that time was predicated on making Afghanistan the center of his Middle Eastern foreign policy initiatives. That included his own predilection to gain a ‘win’ in that region of the world for American imperialism by shucking (that is the correct word for this) Iraq for the ‘greener pastures' fields of Afghanistan. His later national security and appropriate cabinet level appointments concerned with Afghanistan only confirm this. At that time, since then and today I will stand by the point I made there that Obama has staked his place in history on this decision. And working people, one way or another, in lives and treasure will the price of that decision.
That said, after reading a review in “The New York Review Of Books” (February 12, 2009) by William Dalrymple of a book “Descent Into Chaos: The United States And The Failure Of Nation Building In Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia” by noted scholar Ahmed Rashid the probabilities submerged in that last sentence may prove even more ominous that I suspected. I would note that I have only started reading this work myself because I had some difficulty getting a copy but one should recall that this book is by the same author of the book “Taliban” that everyone started to climb the shelves for after 9/11. The man knows this area of world.
I am not sure whether President Obama, as intellectually-inclined as he appears to, is a devotee of “The New York Review”. However, he should read this article. And take these words as I intend them as I sure as hell have no ambition, like some others on the left, to be a foreign policy advisor to him or his administration. If one want to get an approximate understanding of the huge pitfalls that await this rookie president then read the review, or better, get a copy of the book. In short, the fates of the British and the Russians mentioned above are calling. Hey, I’ll stick with another point that I made last November (and repeated on Inauguration Day)- Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia!
Monday, February 09, 2009
Post-Civil War Reconstructon-Professor John Hope Franklin's View
Book Review
February is Black History Month
Reconstruction After The Civil War, John Hope Franklin, The University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1961
The Reconstruction period directly after the American Civil War ended in 1865 was cast as the time of the ‘scalawags’, ‘carpetbaggers’, Black Codes and ultimately after a determined and ugly political and military fight by the ‘right’ people, the so-called natural rulers in the South, ‘redemption’. In short, a least for any radical, a time of shame in the American experience and, at least implicitly, a racist slap at blacks and their supporters for attempting to upset the traditional social order.
There certainly was plenty that went wrong during Radical Reconstruction (there were, as Professor Franklin points out several phases of Reconstruction, not all of them radical) in the South but the conventional high school history textbooks never got into the whole story. Nor did they want to. The whole story is that until fairly recently this Radical Reconstruction period was the most democratic period in the South in American history, for white and black alike. The book under review that reflects the earlier 'revisionist' efforts as well as the likes of Professor Kenneth Stamp (whose book of essays on Reconstruction I have previously reviewed in this space) goes a long way toward a better understanding of the period than those old high school textbooks.
Professor Franklin, as he must, starts off his narrative history by describing the political problems associated with most of the earlier studies of Reconstruction done by those influenced by Professor Dunning and his school in the early 20th century (Franklin provides a very useful “Suggested Reading” section at the end the book which details his sources for those who want to look at the state of scholarship on the subject in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s). That picture presented, as I described above, the familiar corrupt and scandalous activities associated with this period. Needless to say this position dovetailed very nicely with the rationale for Jim Crow in the pre-1960’s South. Moreover, in the hands of its northern liberal devotees it nicely covered up the burgeoning corruption of the northern- based ‘robber barons’. There is an old adage that history is written by the victors. Whatever the truth to that assertion might be early Reconstruction history was written by the losers, or rather their apologists once removed.
The Reconstruction era was dominated by three basic plans that Professor Franklin describes in some detail; the aborted Lincoln ‘soft’ union indivisible efforts; the Johnson ‘soft’ redemption plans; and, the radical Republican ‘scorched earth’ policy. In the end none of these plans was pursued strongly enough to insure that enhanced black rights gained through legislation would lead to enlightened citizenship. Franklin, following Stampp, presents detailed critiques of all these plans and some insights about the social and cultural mores of the country at the time that do not make for pretty reading.
The professor then goes on to try to demystify what the radical reconstruction governments did and did not do. That there were scandalous activities and more than enough corrupt politicians to go around goes without saying. However like most myths there is a snowball effect about how bad things really were that obliterates the very real advances for black (and some poor whites) like public education, improved roads and increased state facilities that were anathema to the planting class that formerly ruled the South.
The last part of the book deals with the conservative counter-revolution to overthrow the radical governments culminating in the well-known Compromise of 1877. The actions of that rabble, rich and poor whites alike formed in militias and other para-military operations like the Klan, is certainly not pretty reading. Moreover it took about a century and a ‘cold’ civil war during the 1960’s (a battle that continues today) to even minimally right that situation. For those that need an in- depth, definitive study of this subject you must turn to the master, Eric Foner, and his monumental “Reconstruction, 1863-1877”. However, if you want an earlier, shorter but nevertheless informative overview of Reconstruction this is one of your first stops.
February is Black History Month
Reconstruction After The Civil War, John Hope Franklin, The University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1961
The Reconstruction period directly after the American Civil War ended in 1865 was cast as the time of the ‘scalawags’, ‘carpetbaggers’, Black Codes and ultimately after a determined and ugly political and military fight by the ‘right’ people, the so-called natural rulers in the South, ‘redemption’. In short, a least for any radical, a time of shame in the American experience and, at least implicitly, a racist slap at blacks and their supporters for attempting to upset the traditional social order.
There certainly was plenty that went wrong during Radical Reconstruction (there were, as Professor Franklin points out several phases of Reconstruction, not all of them radical) in the South but the conventional high school history textbooks never got into the whole story. Nor did they want to. The whole story is that until fairly recently this Radical Reconstruction period was the most democratic period in the South in American history, for white and black alike. The book under review that reflects the earlier 'revisionist' efforts as well as the likes of Professor Kenneth Stamp (whose book of essays on Reconstruction I have previously reviewed in this space) goes a long way toward a better understanding of the period than those old high school textbooks.
Professor Franklin, as he must, starts off his narrative history by describing the political problems associated with most of the earlier studies of Reconstruction done by those influenced by Professor Dunning and his school in the early 20th century (Franklin provides a very useful “Suggested Reading” section at the end the book which details his sources for those who want to look at the state of scholarship on the subject in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s). That picture presented, as I described above, the familiar corrupt and scandalous activities associated with this period. Needless to say this position dovetailed very nicely with the rationale for Jim Crow in the pre-1960’s South. Moreover, in the hands of its northern liberal devotees it nicely covered up the burgeoning corruption of the northern- based ‘robber barons’. There is an old adage that history is written by the victors. Whatever the truth to that assertion might be early Reconstruction history was written by the losers, or rather their apologists once removed.
The Reconstruction era was dominated by three basic plans that Professor Franklin describes in some detail; the aborted Lincoln ‘soft’ union indivisible efforts; the Johnson ‘soft’ redemption plans; and, the radical Republican ‘scorched earth’ policy. In the end none of these plans was pursued strongly enough to insure that enhanced black rights gained through legislation would lead to enlightened citizenship. Franklin, following Stampp, presents detailed critiques of all these plans and some insights about the social and cultural mores of the country at the time that do not make for pretty reading.
The professor then goes on to try to demystify what the radical reconstruction governments did and did not do. That there were scandalous activities and more than enough corrupt politicians to go around goes without saying. However like most myths there is a snowball effect about how bad things really were that obliterates the very real advances for black (and some poor whites) like public education, improved roads and increased state facilities that were anathema to the planting class that formerly ruled the South.
The last part of the book deals with the conservative counter-revolution to overthrow the radical governments culminating in the well-known Compromise of 1877. The actions of that rabble, rich and poor whites alike formed in militias and other para-military operations like the Klan, is certainly not pretty reading. Moreover it took about a century and a ‘cold’ civil war during the 1960’s (a battle that continues today) to even minimally right that situation. For those that need an in- depth, definitive study of this subject you must turn to the master, Eric Foner, and his monumental “Reconstruction, 1863-1877”. However, if you want an earlier, shorter but nevertheless informative overview of Reconstruction this is one of your first stops.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
The Fire Next Time- Keb' Mo'
CD REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
Keb’ Mo’, Keb’ Mo’, Okeh Records, 1994
This reviewer has spent much ink in this space over the past year or so touting various old time country blues singers like Bukka White, Skip James and, of course, Son House. I have noted that their music reflected the rural southern, mainly Mississippi Delta. plantation life of hard toil (picking that damn cotton), hard living and hard loving from an earlier part of the last century. That age effectively ended on an economic level with the vast increases in the mechanization of agriculture and the migration of blacks north (mainly to Chicago and other Midwest industrial stops) in the period leading up to World War II. Musically it ended with the electrification of the blues guitar as the music headed north. That, however, begs an important question. Who would, if anyone, continue that old blues tradition?
Well we know part of the answer. The various white (mainly) urban folk revivalists of the 1960’s, including the likes of Dave Van Ronk and Eric Von Schmidt and British rock aficionados like Eric Clapton of that same period held the tradition together by physically “discovering” the remnants of the old time singers like the above-mentioned artists. And by creating their own blues tradition. But what of now. That is where the artist under review, Keb’ Mo’, comes into the picture. He has gone back to the roots with some sassy, saucy, sexy songs (mainly of his own creation) that would do his predecessors proud. In the age of the ‘hip-hop nation’ the sheer number of those who are committed to the maintenance of this music is surely much too small but the quality, as represented by Keb’, makes up the difference.
So what is good here? “Anybody Seen My Girl” deserves a listen as does “Dirty Low Down and Bad” but if you have only time to listen to one give a listen to the old Robert Johnson tune “ Kindhearted Woman” then you will know why the old blues tradition is still in capable hands. Kudos Keb’.
Note: I first heard of Keb’ through part one of Martin Scorsese’s six part 2003 PBS series on the history of the blues. I recommend that series for those who want a primer on the history of this music-then push on from there.
February Is Black History Month
Keb’ Mo’, Keb’ Mo’, Okeh Records, 1994
This reviewer has spent much ink in this space over the past year or so touting various old time country blues singers like Bukka White, Skip James and, of course, Son House. I have noted that their music reflected the rural southern, mainly Mississippi Delta. plantation life of hard toil (picking that damn cotton), hard living and hard loving from an earlier part of the last century. That age effectively ended on an economic level with the vast increases in the mechanization of agriculture and the migration of blacks north (mainly to Chicago and other Midwest industrial stops) in the period leading up to World War II. Musically it ended with the electrification of the blues guitar as the music headed north. That, however, begs an important question. Who would, if anyone, continue that old blues tradition?
Well we know part of the answer. The various white (mainly) urban folk revivalists of the 1960’s, including the likes of Dave Van Ronk and Eric Von Schmidt and British rock aficionados like Eric Clapton of that same period held the tradition together by physically “discovering” the remnants of the old time singers like the above-mentioned artists. And by creating their own blues tradition. But what of now. That is where the artist under review, Keb’ Mo’, comes into the picture. He has gone back to the roots with some sassy, saucy, sexy songs (mainly of his own creation) that would do his predecessors proud. In the age of the ‘hip-hop nation’ the sheer number of those who are committed to the maintenance of this music is surely much too small but the quality, as represented by Keb’, makes up the difference.
So what is good here? “Anybody Seen My Girl” deserves a listen as does “Dirty Low Down and Bad” but if you have only time to listen to one give a listen to the old Robert Johnson tune “ Kindhearted Woman” then you will know why the old blues tradition is still in capable hands. Kudos Keb’.
Note: I first heard of Keb’ through part one of Martin Scorsese’s six part 2003 PBS series on the history of the blues. I recommend that series for those who want a primer on the history of this music-then push on from there.
*The Confessions Of Nat Turner- Novelist William Styron's View
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for American author, William Styron.
BOOK REVIEW/COMMENTARY
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Directly below is a review (January 29,2007)of William Styron's book (originally written in 1967) "The Confessions Of Nat Turner", an imaginative literary treatment (for the most part) of the justly famous 1831 slave rebellion led by the heroic Turner and his band of fellow slaves. The fall-out from that event (Turner's revolt) had not been the subject (to my knowledge) of such a literary treatment previously and the fall out from that latter event(the subsequent all-around open season furor over Styron's take on the matter from black nationalist, pro-segregationist and other sources)was not, I believe, anticipated by him at the time. I am reposting the original review because in essentials I continue to stand by the main political (and literary) points made there. I have added a few other points below that repost as I have thought about this book recently.
From The Archives: January 29, 2007
"THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, WILLIAM STYRON,VINTAGE PRESS, NEW YORK, 2004
I came of political age during the civil rights struggle here in America in the early 1960's. Part and parcel with that awakening struggle came an increased interest in the roots of the black struggle, especially in slavery times. Such intellectuals as Herbert Apteker, the Genoveses, the Foners, Harold Cruise, James Baldwin, John Hope Franklin and others, black and white, were very interested in exploring or discovering a black resistance to the conditions of slavery not apparent on any then general reading of the black experience in America. This is the place where the recently deceased William Styron and his novelistic interpretation of one aspect of that struggle- Nat Turner's Virginia slave rebellion enters the fray.
No Styron is not politically correct in his appreciation of Turner or his followers. Nor are latter day Southern whites and their sympathizers who have recoiled in horror at what expansion of Turner's rebellion might have meant for the `peculiar institution'. But being politically correct, etc. now or historically is beside the point. Slavery was brutal. Slavery brutalized whole generations of black people for a very long time. If one expected nature's noblemen and women to come out of such a process, one would certainly be very sadly mistaken. That the white beneficiaries of this system were brutalized is a given. Human progress has come about through fits and starts, not a seamless curve onward and upward. Nevertheless all our sympathies are with Nat and his fellow rebels.
Moreover, here are some things to think about if you are not worried about your political correctness status. Outside of John Brown at Harper's Ferry Turner's rebellion represented the highest achievement of resistance to the white slaveholders in the early 19th century. Although the fight was not pretty on either side every progressive today should stand in historical solidarity with that fight. Then one will understand not only that oppression oppresses but also that the military conditions for a successful rebellion for isolated blacks in pre- Civil War American were slim. The later incorporation of 200,000 black soldiers and sailors among the Northern forces in the Civil War are a very, very profound argument that once off the plantation blacks were as capable of bravery, courage and honor as any other American. As difficult as it is, if you do not have access to the original chronicles of the Turner uprising, read this book to get a flavor of how hard the struggle for the abolition of slavery in this country was going to be."
February 4, 2009
In rereading the above review I feel that although I made the right political points that one can take from this essentially literary treatment of the person of the black preacher/ craftsman and intellectual Nat Turner by a seemingly sympathetic white writer writing over a century later in the heat of the turmoil over what direction the previously integrationist civil rights movement of the early 1960’s was headed I think I failed to give enough weight to the particulars of Turner’s leadership qualities. Although most of Stryon’s dialogue and descriptive narrative is, as he stated in his introduction, purely literary conjecture the portrait that emerges of a revolutionary black leader does not seem to be that far from some “truth”. As the careers of the later black liberation fighters John Brown and Frederick Douglass (and I might add what we know about the earlier slave general, Spartacus) also demonstrated, in the matter of revolutionary leadership the ‘norms’ of political acumen are of a different magnitude. That is a point I wish to expand on here.
Styron has done credible job of setting the framework for Nat Turner’s emergence as a leader of a slave rebellion. Precocious as a child, Turner strived to learn to read and write, by hook or by crook, in a culture that enacted laws (the infamous Black Codes) to prevent such an occurrence. In fact, even among sympathetic whites there was a feeling that Turner was unusual and that his ability to read and write was an exceptional experience. In short, as W.E.B. Dubois later put it in another context, Turner was one of the “talented tenth”. Moreover, Turner’s personal existence as a trained craftsman, self-taught preacher and one with time and opportunity to become a budding slave general would seem to conform to a historical pattern about the way plebeian leaderships are formed. Contrary to intuitive reasoning the most oppressed are not necessarily the most revolutionary (proven here by the betrayal by fellow slaves and by history a million times in a million ways). Some can be lead to see their plight. But they, initially at least must be led by the Nat Turners of the world. That, my friends, is where the ‘lessons’ of Styron’s book apply today. We better get busy.
BOOK REVIEW/COMMENTARY
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Directly below is a review (January 29,2007)of William Styron's book (originally written in 1967) "The Confessions Of Nat Turner", an imaginative literary treatment (for the most part) of the justly famous 1831 slave rebellion led by the heroic Turner and his band of fellow slaves. The fall-out from that event (Turner's revolt) had not been the subject (to my knowledge) of such a literary treatment previously and the fall out from that latter event(the subsequent all-around open season furor over Styron's take on the matter from black nationalist, pro-segregationist and other sources)was not, I believe, anticipated by him at the time. I am reposting the original review because in essentials I continue to stand by the main political (and literary) points made there. I have added a few other points below that repost as I have thought about this book recently.
From The Archives: January 29, 2007
"THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, WILLIAM STYRON,VINTAGE PRESS, NEW YORK, 2004
I came of political age during the civil rights struggle here in America in the early 1960's. Part and parcel with that awakening struggle came an increased interest in the roots of the black struggle, especially in slavery times. Such intellectuals as Herbert Apteker, the Genoveses, the Foners, Harold Cruise, James Baldwin, John Hope Franklin and others, black and white, were very interested in exploring or discovering a black resistance to the conditions of slavery not apparent on any then general reading of the black experience in America. This is the place where the recently deceased William Styron and his novelistic interpretation of one aspect of that struggle- Nat Turner's Virginia slave rebellion enters the fray.
No Styron is not politically correct in his appreciation of Turner or his followers. Nor are latter day Southern whites and their sympathizers who have recoiled in horror at what expansion of Turner's rebellion might have meant for the `peculiar institution'. But being politically correct, etc. now or historically is beside the point. Slavery was brutal. Slavery brutalized whole generations of black people for a very long time. If one expected nature's noblemen and women to come out of such a process, one would certainly be very sadly mistaken. That the white beneficiaries of this system were brutalized is a given. Human progress has come about through fits and starts, not a seamless curve onward and upward. Nevertheless all our sympathies are with Nat and his fellow rebels.
Moreover, here are some things to think about if you are not worried about your political correctness status. Outside of John Brown at Harper's Ferry Turner's rebellion represented the highest achievement of resistance to the white slaveholders in the early 19th century. Although the fight was not pretty on either side every progressive today should stand in historical solidarity with that fight. Then one will understand not only that oppression oppresses but also that the military conditions for a successful rebellion for isolated blacks in pre- Civil War American were slim. The later incorporation of 200,000 black soldiers and sailors among the Northern forces in the Civil War are a very, very profound argument that once off the plantation blacks were as capable of bravery, courage and honor as any other American. As difficult as it is, if you do not have access to the original chronicles of the Turner uprising, read this book to get a flavor of how hard the struggle for the abolition of slavery in this country was going to be."
February 4, 2009
In rereading the above review I feel that although I made the right political points that one can take from this essentially literary treatment of the person of the black preacher/ craftsman and intellectual Nat Turner by a seemingly sympathetic white writer writing over a century later in the heat of the turmoil over what direction the previously integrationist civil rights movement of the early 1960’s was headed I think I failed to give enough weight to the particulars of Turner’s leadership qualities. Although most of Stryon’s dialogue and descriptive narrative is, as he stated in his introduction, purely literary conjecture the portrait that emerges of a revolutionary black leader does not seem to be that far from some “truth”. As the careers of the later black liberation fighters John Brown and Frederick Douglass (and I might add what we know about the earlier slave general, Spartacus) also demonstrated, in the matter of revolutionary leadership the ‘norms’ of political acumen are of a different magnitude. That is a point I wish to expand on here.
Styron has done credible job of setting the framework for Nat Turner’s emergence as a leader of a slave rebellion. Precocious as a child, Turner strived to learn to read and write, by hook or by crook, in a culture that enacted laws (the infamous Black Codes) to prevent such an occurrence. In fact, even among sympathetic whites there was a feeling that Turner was unusual and that his ability to read and write was an exceptional experience. In short, as W.E.B. Dubois later put it in another context, Turner was one of the “talented tenth”. Moreover, Turner’s personal existence as a trained craftsman, self-taught preacher and one with time and opportunity to become a budding slave general would seem to conform to a historical pattern about the way plebeian leaderships are formed. Contrary to intuitive reasoning the most oppressed are not necessarily the most revolutionary (proven here by the betrayal by fellow slaves and by history a million times in a million ways). Some can be lead to see their plight. But they, initially at least must be led by the Nat Turners of the world. That, my friends, is where the ‘lessons’ of Styron’s book apply today. We better get busy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)