From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949-
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero
Markin comment (repost from 2012):
On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.
This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.
What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.
That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
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Black History Month
“General Tubman,” as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the
revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle
against the Southern slavocracy. A fugitive slave, Tubman played a crucial role
in the Underground Railroad and became known as the Moses of her people. In the
Civil War, she was a scout and spy for the Union Army and led 300 black soldiers
in a military action on South Carolina’s Combahee River in June 1863. Tubman saw
early on that the war for the union must become a war to free the slaves. But
the promise of black freedom offered by the Union Army’s victory over the South
was subsequently betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, marked by the defeat of
Radical Reconstruction. This betrayal was cruelly experienced by the
impoverished Tubman, who suffered physical attack and brutal segregation and was
compelled to wage a decades-long battle for the pension that her Civil War
service entitled her to. As Tubman acidly stated: “You wouldn’t think that after
I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds.”
To learn more about Martha Phillips, see Prometheus Research
Series No. 6, “Selected Speeches and Writings in Honor of Three Women
Leaders of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist): Martha
Phillips, Susan Adams, Elizabeth King Robertson.” To order, send check for $7.00
to Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116.
* * *
The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than
any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children
was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of
their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly
acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the
elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom…she
lived in poverty all her life....
Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great
bourgeois revolution—the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks.
Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber
barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private
property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights,
the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white.
The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on
private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the economic
source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove
the social roots of racial and sexual oppression….
Marx said, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where
in the black it is branded.” The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of
the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour
day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the
years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South,
has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer
into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at
the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation
compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the “American dream” is a
nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the
unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the
boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx’s words are all
too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation
of all working people. It is the race question—the poison of racism—that keeps
the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take
up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any
emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and
arming of the slaves.
Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of
socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the
slogans, “Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!” to
express the historic tasks which fall to the revolutionary party.
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