Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the "Underground Railroad".
DVD/CD REVIEW
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Underground Railroad, hosted by Alfie Woodward, History Channel, 1999
One of the most general perceptions that I received from my high school history days in the 1960’s concerning the fate of black slaves in America was that they essentially passively waited for the Union armies to free them during the process of the Civil War in the 1860’s. In short, blacks had no pre-history as a people who struggled for freedom in their own right but were merely the victims of history. Of course, since those days I have made it my business to find out the real story of slave resistance and although there are many parts that are lost to history we now know that as least some slaves in some situations found ways to break their bondage. Aided during the past few decades by serious scholarly research into the subject we have a more rounded view of the dynamics of slavery in ante bellum American society. This well done History Channel docu-drama, hosted by actress Alfie Woodward, presents one part of that struggle- the work of the Underground Railroad- the fight of courageous individual blacks, aided sometimes by their Northern supporters, to "follow the drinking gourd" North to freedom.
This presentation, complete with the ‘talking head’ commentators that inevitably accompany such efforts, goes back to the early days of slavery and demonstrates that there was always an element of the struggle for freedom by black slaves from the earliest days of European settlement in North America. Moreover, a cadre of freed blacks who were the catalyst for the freedom struggle developed from early on as well. However, the black anti-slavery movement (and for that matter the white part of the anti-slavery movement) did not get energized until the early 19th century in response to the increasing use of slaves to cultivate the expanding cotton crop on Southern plantations. From then on the propaganda fight for emancipation took many forms but basically continued unabated until the Civil War militarily resolved the issue against slavery.
One of the benefits of this production is a well though out exposition of the role that blacks played in this anti-slavery process. Not just the now well-known names like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman but the little known Henry Garnet, John Stills and John Parker. Moreover, whatever social distinctions could be drawn, even by those within the anti-slavery movement, between blacks and whites it represented the first serious integrated social movement in this country. Needless to say such efforts have been far and few in the history of this country. It is clear that there would be no Underground Railroad stretching, at it needed to at times, all the way to Canada without such integrated efforts. Aiding that clarity is mention of the Midwest, especially the Ohio River towns, as routes to freedom as well as the more well known eastern coastal routes.
A major highlight here was a serious exposition of the role of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in curtaining the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad, causing the first seeds of irreconcilable conflict between North and South and contributing to the overweening and disproportionate role that the South played in national politics. Some worthwhile time is spent here detailing the effects that such legislation had on ordinary citizens who wished not to be complicit with the slaveholders. The various efforts by Northerners, and not just hard core abolitionists, to resist the slave catchers as they headed north is dramatically presented. The well-known Boston case of Anthony Brooks is the focal point for this section.
If there is one criticism that I have of this presentation though it goes back to that first sentence of this entry. If we now know that blacks themselves, as ultimately demonstrated by the enlistment of 200,000 black Union soldiers in the Civil War, were not mere passive victims of slavery there was a tendency of this presentation to overplay the quest for freedom by blacks. One of the hard facts of human history is that oppression oppresses. That little truism conceals this truth- not everyone, and maybe not even many of those oppressed, in the great scheme of things, can break out of the struggle to merely exist to rise out and rebel. Or even flee. This black cadre was the vanguard, a precious vanguard, but a vanguard nevertheless. That vanguard expressed that suppressed urge for freedom that we assume beats in every human heart. That is the value of this docu-drama. Watch it and learn a few things about our common history.
Follow The Drinking Gourd, Please
Steal Away: Songs Of The Underground Railroad, Kim and Reggie Harris, Appleseed Records, 1998
My purposes in this space have been primarily to review political books that reflect on various aspects of history and politics. Along the edges of this work I have filled in the borders with commentary on musical and cultural phenomena that reflect those concerns. Thus, one is as likely to find a review of some old forgotten folkie or blues singer as a more well-known historical figure like Leon Trotsky or John Brown. However, sometimes music is not just an adjunct to historical narrative but forms a central cog in understanding the phenomena. That is just the situation here with Kim and Reggie Harris’ contribution to an understanding of slavery, freedom from slavery and how to get out from under slavery that was the primary fight for blacks, especially in the lead up to the America Civil War in the mid-19th century.
From a perusal of the liner notes this “concept” album is a labor of love by this singing/songwriting couple. The project developed in the 1980’s out a need to present the fight against slavery as epitomized by the organization of the Underground Railroad to the next generations so that it is firmly etched in their minds. Their musical abilities, especially when they harmonize (listen to “Oh, Freedom” and “Wade In The Water”), make this a very fruitful enterprise. As always with Appleseed recordings the liner notes give a detailed story of how this effort was produced and what each song represents in the anthology.
I will not repeat that information here. I will, however, mention that various figures highlighted here like “General” Harriet Tubman get their full due, as does Sojourner Truth on the nicely done “Aren’t I A Woman”. The various coded hymns and other songs that were used on the Underground Railroad to either symbolize the freedom struggle or for security like “Follow The Drinking Gourd” are also explained. “Heaven Is Less Than Fair”, a Harris tribute product, does a nice job on explaining the uses and need for the codes. Needless to say there are religiously-tinged songs like “Go Down Moses” that reflect that deep feeling that helped blacks get through the hard days of slavery in one piece. Listen to the music and learn history at the same time. That’s a great combination, right?
Friday, February 06, 2009
Thursday, February 05, 2009
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Black Freedom, Women's Rights and the Civil War
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for black abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War
This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).
The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.
Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.
The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction
The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.
In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.
Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.
Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.
During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).
But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.
When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.
But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.
It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the 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."
—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.
In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.
The Industrial Revolution
It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).
The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.
Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.
The Fight for Women's Legal Rights
Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.
Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.
Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.
The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights
But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.
In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.
As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.
The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.
The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina
Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.
Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.
Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"
Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.
Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.
Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement
Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.
The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
The Fight Over the 14th Amendment
Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.
The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.
This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.
But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."
The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.
But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:
"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."
—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).
From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.
The Birth of American Feminism
Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.
Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:
"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."
Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.
So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.
Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:
"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 to 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 an urgency to obtain the ballot."
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.
They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.
After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.
Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War
This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).
The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.
Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.
The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction
The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.
In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.
Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.
Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.
During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).
But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.
When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.
But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.
It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the 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."
—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.
In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.
The Industrial Revolution
It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).
The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.
Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.
The Fight for Women's Legal Rights
Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.
Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.
Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.
The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights
But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.
In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.
As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.
The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.
The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina
Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.
Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.
Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"
Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.
Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.
Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement
Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.
The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
The Fight Over the 14th Amendment
Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.
The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.
This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.
But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."
The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.
But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:
"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."
—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).
From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.
The Birth of American Feminism
Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.
Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:
"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."
Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.
So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.
Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:
"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 to 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 an urgency to obtain the ballot."
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.
They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.
After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.
Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
The Civil War Massachusetts 54th Regiment Reactivated
Commentary
February is Black History Month.
This is a news items from the AP released on November 19, 2008 that I have held up until now. The Massachusetts 54th and Black History Month are a natural pairing. For those not familiar with the heroic exploits of this regiment in the American Civil War before Fort Wagner down in South Carolina the film "Glory" starring Denzel Washington is very definitely recommended. As is a documentary "Glory, Too" directed by Anthony Cromwell Hill.
Famed 54th Massachusetts reactivated
November 21, 2008
BOSTON—An all-black Civil War infantry unit depicted in the Academy Award-winning moving "Glory," starring Denzel Washington, is making a real-life comeback.
The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was reactivated Friday at a Statehouse ceremony and redesignated as the Massachusetts National Guard's ceremonial unit, which renders military honors at funerals and state functions.
The revival pays homage to the group of black soldiers who fought on behalf of the state in the Civil War.
The unit won praise for its doomed charge on Battery Wagner in South Carolina in 1863and produced the nation's first black Medal of Honor winner, Sgt. William Carney.
It was deactivated after the Civil War and its colors were retired.
The 1989 movie "Glory," based on the letters of the unit's commander Colonel Robert G. Shaw, depicted the prejudice the unit and Shaw faced. The film was honored with three Academy Awards, including best supporting actor for Washington's portrayal of a private in the unit.
February is Black History Month.
This is a news items from the AP released on November 19, 2008 that I have held up until now. The Massachusetts 54th and Black History Month are a natural pairing. For those not familiar with the heroic exploits of this regiment in the American Civil War before Fort Wagner down in South Carolina the film "Glory" starring Denzel Washington is very definitely recommended. As is a documentary "Glory, Too" directed by Anthony Cromwell Hill.
Famed 54th Massachusetts reactivated
November 21, 2008
BOSTON—An all-black Civil War infantry unit depicted in the Academy Award-winning moving "Glory," starring Denzel Washington, is making a real-life comeback.
The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was reactivated Friday at a Statehouse ceremony and redesignated as the Massachusetts National Guard's ceremonial unit, which renders military honors at funerals and state functions.
The revival pays homage to the group of black soldiers who fought on behalf of the state in the Civil War.
The unit won praise for its doomed charge on Battery Wagner in South Carolina in 1863and produced the nation's first black Medal of Honor winner, Sgt. William Carney.
It was deactivated after the Civil War and its colors were retired.
The 1989 movie "Glory," based on the letters of the unit's commander Colonel Robert G. Shaw, depicted the prejudice the unit and Shaw faced. The film was honored with three Academy Awards, including best supporting actor for Washington's portrayal of a private in the unit.
Monday, February 02, 2009
*Free And Equal Blues- The Work Of Josh White
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Josh White performing "Nobody Knows You When You Are Down And Out". Ain't that the truth.
CD Review
February Is Black History Month
Josh White: Free and Equal Blues, Josh White, Vestapol Productions, 2001
I have spent no little ink over the past year or so reviving memories of various folk and blues artists whose music helped me pass away my youth, a youth that otherwise would have been cluttered solely with little things like the fight for a more just society, attempts to understand history and, maybe as importantly, the individual’s role in it-mine. As a part of that past I had spent more than a few Sunday evenings listening to a folk program on a local radio station. As a result I became very familiar with the name Josh White as an exemplar of soulful folk and blues tunes. And the first song that I recall hearing from this iconic figure?- “You, Can’t Get No Bread With One Meatball”. Go figure, right?
That oddly funny selection (not played here, although it would have been nice to hear it again), fortunately, does not reflect the very serious nature of Josh White’s work, his personality and his struggle as a fighter for black liberation. We are treated to all aspects of that work in this one hour film of rare clips; mostly it appears to be material from 1950’s television performances. We are favored with the smooth voice, the strong guitar work (when required to give urgency to songs like the anti-Jim Crow ones presented here early on) and the sense of showmanship and professionalism that I remember the folk historian Dave Van Ronk mentioning concerning Josh’s approach to performing. But what stand out here are the songs- from the intense “Strange Fruit” (an anti-Jim Crow song also covered in a different way by Billie Holiday) to a crowd-pleasing “Danny Boy”. If this is your first exposure to this legendary figure in the folk and blues world then I would only state you have found a good place to start.
Freedom Road
written by: Langston Hughes, sung by:Josh White
Hand me my gun, let the bugle blow loud
I’m on my way with my head up proud
One objective I’ve got in view
Is to keep ahold of freedom for me and you
That’s why I’m marching, yes, I’m marching
Marching down Freedom’s Road
Ain’t nobody gonna stop me, nobody gonna keep me
From marching down Freedom’s Road
It ought to be plain as the nose on your face
There’s room in this land for every race
Some folks think that freedom just ain’t right
Those are the very people I want to fight . . .
United we stand, divided we fall
Let’s make this land safe for one and all
I’ve got a message and you know it’s right
Black and white together, unite and fight!
The Free and Equal Blues
variation written by: Josh White (a slightly different version was written originally by Yip Harburg)
I went down to that St. James Infirmary, and I saw some plasma there,
I ups and asks the doctor man, "Say was the donor dark or fair?"
The doctor laughed a great big laugh, and he puffed it right in my face,
He said, "A molecule is a molecule, son, and the damn thing has no race."
And that was news, yes that was news,
That was very, very, very special news.
'Cause ever since that day we’ve had those free and equal blues.
"You mean you heard that doc declare
That the plasma in that test tube there could be
White man, black man, yellow man, red?"
"That’s just what that doctor said."
The doc put down his doctor book and gave me a very scientific look
And he spoke out plain and clear and rational,
He said, "Metabolism is international."
Chorus
Then the doc rigged up his microscope with some Berlin blue blood,
And, by gosh, it was the same as Chun King, Quebechef, Chattanooga, Timbuktoo blood
Why, those men who think they’re noble
Don’t even know that the corpuscle is global
Trying to disunite us with their racial supremacy,
And flying in the face of old man chemistry,
Taking all the facts and trying to twist ëem,
But you can’t overthrow the circulatory system.
Chorus
So I stayed at that St. James Infirmary.
(I couldn’t leave that place, it was too interesting)
But I said to the doctor, "Give me some more of that scientific talk talk," and he did:
He said, "Melt yourself down into a crucible
Pour yourself out into a test tube and what have you got?
Thirty-five hundred cubic feet of gas,
The same for the upper and lower class."
Well, I let that pass . . .
"Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces"
"You mean that goes for princes, dukeses and countses?"
"Whatever you are, that’s what the amounts is:
Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces; iron, 57 grains."
Not enough to keep a man in chains.
"50 ounces of phosophorus, that’s whether you’re poor or prosperous."
"Say buddy, can you spare a match?"
"Sugar, 60 ordinary lumps, free and equal rations for all nations.
Then you take 20 teaspoons of sodium chloride (that’s salt), and you add 38
quarts of H2O (that’s water), mix two ounces of lime, a pinch of chloride of
potash, a drop of magnesium, a bit of sulfur, and a soupÁon of hydrochloric
acid, and you stir it all up, and what are you?"
"You’re a walking drugstore."
"It’s an international, metabolistic cartel."
And that was news, yes that was news,
So listen, you African and Indian and Mexican, Mongolian, Tyrolean and Tartar,
The doctor’s right behind the Atlantic Charter.
The doc’s behind the new brotherhood of man,
As prescribed at San Francisco and Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, and at Potsdam:
Every man, everywhere is the same, when he’s got his skin off.
And that’s news, yes that’s news,
That’s the free and equal blues!
CD Review
February Is Black History Month
Josh White: Free and Equal Blues, Josh White, Vestapol Productions, 2001
I have spent no little ink over the past year or so reviving memories of various folk and blues artists whose music helped me pass away my youth, a youth that otherwise would have been cluttered solely with little things like the fight for a more just society, attempts to understand history and, maybe as importantly, the individual’s role in it-mine. As a part of that past I had spent more than a few Sunday evenings listening to a folk program on a local radio station. As a result I became very familiar with the name Josh White as an exemplar of soulful folk and blues tunes. And the first song that I recall hearing from this iconic figure?- “You, Can’t Get No Bread With One Meatball”. Go figure, right?
That oddly funny selection (not played here, although it would have been nice to hear it again), fortunately, does not reflect the very serious nature of Josh White’s work, his personality and his struggle as a fighter for black liberation. We are treated to all aspects of that work in this one hour film of rare clips; mostly it appears to be material from 1950’s television performances. We are favored with the smooth voice, the strong guitar work (when required to give urgency to songs like the anti-Jim Crow ones presented here early on) and the sense of showmanship and professionalism that I remember the folk historian Dave Van Ronk mentioning concerning Josh’s approach to performing. But what stand out here are the songs- from the intense “Strange Fruit” (an anti-Jim Crow song also covered in a different way by Billie Holiday) to a crowd-pleasing “Danny Boy”. If this is your first exposure to this legendary figure in the folk and blues world then I would only state you have found a good place to start.
Freedom Road
written by: Langston Hughes, sung by:Josh White
Hand me my gun, let the bugle blow loud
I’m on my way with my head up proud
One objective I’ve got in view
Is to keep ahold of freedom for me and you
That’s why I’m marching, yes, I’m marching
Marching down Freedom’s Road
Ain’t nobody gonna stop me, nobody gonna keep me
From marching down Freedom’s Road
It ought to be plain as the nose on your face
There’s room in this land for every race
Some folks think that freedom just ain’t right
Those are the very people I want to fight . . .
United we stand, divided we fall
Let’s make this land safe for one and all
I’ve got a message and you know it’s right
Black and white together, unite and fight!
The Free and Equal Blues
variation written by: Josh White (a slightly different version was written originally by Yip Harburg)
I went down to that St. James Infirmary, and I saw some plasma there,
I ups and asks the doctor man, "Say was the donor dark or fair?"
The doctor laughed a great big laugh, and he puffed it right in my face,
He said, "A molecule is a molecule, son, and the damn thing has no race."
And that was news, yes that was news,
That was very, very, very special news.
'Cause ever since that day we’ve had those free and equal blues.
"You mean you heard that doc declare
That the plasma in that test tube there could be
White man, black man, yellow man, red?"
"That’s just what that doctor said."
The doc put down his doctor book and gave me a very scientific look
And he spoke out plain and clear and rational,
He said, "Metabolism is international."
Chorus
Then the doc rigged up his microscope with some Berlin blue blood,
And, by gosh, it was the same as Chun King, Quebechef, Chattanooga, Timbuktoo blood
Why, those men who think they’re noble
Don’t even know that the corpuscle is global
Trying to disunite us with their racial supremacy,
And flying in the face of old man chemistry,
Taking all the facts and trying to twist ëem,
But you can’t overthrow the circulatory system.
Chorus
So I stayed at that St. James Infirmary.
(I couldn’t leave that place, it was too interesting)
But I said to the doctor, "Give me some more of that scientific talk talk," and he did:
He said, "Melt yourself down into a crucible
Pour yourself out into a test tube and what have you got?
Thirty-five hundred cubic feet of gas,
The same for the upper and lower class."
Well, I let that pass . . .
"Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces"
"You mean that goes for princes, dukeses and countses?"
"Whatever you are, that’s what the amounts is:
Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces; iron, 57 grains."
Not enough to keep a man in chains.
"50 ounces of phosophorus, that’s whether you’re poor or prosperous."
"Say buddy, can you spare a match?"
"Sugar, 60 ordinary lumps, free and equal rations for all nations.
Then you take 20 teaspoons of sodium chloride (that’s salt), and you add 38
quarts of H2O (that’s water), mix two ounces of lime, a pinch of chloride of
potash, a drop of magnesium, a bit of sulfur, and a soupÁon of hydrochloric
acid, and you stir it all up, and what are you?"
"You’re a walking drugstore."
"It’s an international, metabolistic cartel."
And that was news, yes that was news,
So listen, you African and Indian and Mexican, Mongolian, Tyrolean and Tartar,
The doctor’s right behind the Atlantic Charter.
The doc’s behind the new brotherhood of man,
As prescribed at San Francisco and Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, and at Potsdam:
Every man, everywhere is the same, when he’s got his skin off.
And that’s news, yes that’s news,
That’s the free and equal blues!
Sunday, February 01, 2009
*A Man Who Spoke The Bitter Truth- Honor Malcolm X
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Malcolm on Black Nationalism in 1964. This, my friends is not on the same page as Martin Luther King's dream. Malcolm had his political faults but King's 'turn the other cheek' toadyism was not one of them.
COMMENTARY/DVD REVIEW
MALCOLM POSED THE QUESTION-WHICH WAY FORWARD FOR THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE? OUR ANSWER- BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH.
Brother Minister: The Story Behind the Assassination of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and others, Koch Vision, 1994
Let us be clear about one thing from the start, whatever contradictions Malcolm X’s brand of black nationalism entailed, whatever shortcomings he had as an emerging political leader, whatever mistakes he made along the way as he groped for a solution to the seemingly intractable fight for black freedom he stood, and continues to stand, head and shoulders above any black leader thrown up in America in the 20th century. Only Frederick Douglass in the 19th century compares with him in stature.
No attempts by latter-day historians or politicians to assimilate Malcolm along with other leaders of the civil rights struggle in this country, notably Dr. Martin Luther King, as part of the same continuum of leadership are false and dishonest to all parties. That proposition is at least implied in this well-done documentary about the trials and tribulations of Malcolm X concerning a possible alliance with those reformist forces and mars what is otherwise a very good visual introduction to this charismatic man to new generations of those sympathetic to the real black liberation struggle.
Malcolm X, as a minister of the Black Muslims and after his break from that organization, stood in opposition to the official liberal non-violence strategy of that reformist leadership. His term “Uncle Toms” fully applies to their stance. And, in turn, that liberal black misleadership and its various hangers-on in the liberal establishment hated him when he spoke the truth about their role in white-controlled bourgeois Democratic Party politics. The “chickens were coming home to roost”, indeed!
The other axis of this film- who killed Malcolm, including the possibility that the infamous Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam was involved gets a full workout here. Although some of the ‘talking heads’ that populate such documentaries as this one have some very interesting things to say about the role of the FBI and its COINTELPRO programs against blacks and other radicals in the 1960’s (and now), Nation of Islam’s military arm- The Fruit of Islam and ‘turf’ wars none of this is central to the meaning of Malcolm’s life. Moreover, for this commentary I do not want to dwell on those aspects of this documentary
That said, who was Malcolm X? Or more properly what did he represent in his time. At one level, given the rudiments of his life story which are detailed in the Autobiography of Malcolm X and visually here, he represented that part of the black experience (an experience not only limited to blacks in immigrant America) which pulled itself by the bootstraps and turned away from the lumpen milieu of gangs, crimes and prisons into what I call ‘street’ intellectuals. That experience is far removed from the experience of what today passes for the black intelligentsia, who have run away from the turmoil of the streets. Barack Obama is only the most visible example of that flight. In liberation struggles both ‘street’ and academic intellectuals are necessary but the ‘street’ intellectual is perhaps more critical as the transmission belt to the masses. That is how liberation fighters get a hearing and no other way. In any case I have always been partial to the ‘streets’.
But what is the message for the way forward? For Malcolm, until shortly before his death, that message was black separatism-the idea that the only way blacks could get any retribution was to go off on their own (or be left alone), in practical terms to form their own nation. To state the question that way in modern America points to the obvious limitation of such a scheme, even if blacks formed such a nation and wanted to express the right to national self-determination that goes with it. Nevertheless whatever personal changes Malcolm made in his quest for political relevance and understanding whether he was a Black Muslim minister or after he broke for that group he still sought political direction through the fight of what is called today ‘people of color’ against the mainly white oppressor, at first in America and later after travels throughout the ‘third world’.
However sincere he was in that belief, and he was sincere, that strategy of black separatism or ‘third world’ vanguardism could never lead to the black freedom he so fervently desired. An underestimation of the power of an internally unchallenged world, and in the first instance American, imperialism to corrupt liberation struggles or defeat or destroy them militarily never seemed to enter into his calculations.
Malcolm’s whole life story of struggle against the bedrock of white racism in America, as the legitimate and at the time the ONLY voice speaking for the rage of the black ghettos, nevertheless never worked out fully any other strategy that could work in America, and by extension internationally. A close reading of his work demonstrates that as he got more politically aware he saw the then unfolding ‘third world’ liberation struggles as the key to black liberation in America. That, unfortunately for him, was exactly backwards. If the ‘third world’ struggles were ever ultimately to be successful and create more just societies then American imperialism-as the main enemy of the peoples of the world-then, as now had to be brought to bay. And that, my friends, whether you agree or not, requires class struggle here.
That is where the fight for black liberation intersects the fight for socialism. And I will state until my last breathe that the key to the fight for socialism in America will be the cohesion of a central black cadre leading a multi-ethnic organization that will bring that home. And it will not be from the lips of the Martin Luther Kings of today that the struggle will be successful but by new more enlightened Malcolms, learning the lessons of history, who will get what they need-'by any means necessary'.
COMMENTARY/DVD REVIEW
MALCOLM POSED THE QUESTION-WHICH WAY FORWARD FOR THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE? OUR ANSWER- BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH.
Brother Minister: The Story Behind the Assassination of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and others, Koch Vision, 1994
Let us be clear about one thing from the start, whatever contradictions Malcolm X’s brand of black nationalism entailed, whatever shortcomings he had as an emerging political leader, whatever mistakes he made along the way as he groped for a solution to the seemingly intractable fight for black freedom he stood, and continues to stand, head and shoulders above any black leader thrown up in America in the 20th century. Only Frederick Douglass in the 19th century compares with him in stature.
No attempts by latter-day historians or politicians to assimilate Malcolm along with other leaders of the civil rights struggle in this country, notably Dr. Martin Luther King, as part of the same continuum of leadership are false and dishonest to all parties. That proposition is at least implied in this well-done documentary about the trials and tribulations of Malcolm X concerning a possible alliance with those reformist forces and mars what is otherwise a very good visual introduction to this charismatic man to new generations of those sympathetic to the real black liberation struggle.
Malcolm X, as a minister of the Black Muslims and after his break from that organization, stood in opposition to the official liberal non-violence strategy of that reformist leadership. His term “Uncle Toms” fully applies to their stance. And, in turn, that liberal black misleadership and its various hangers-on in the liberal establishment hated him when he spoke the truth about their role in white-controlled bourgeois Democratic Party politics. The “chickens were coming home to roost”, indeed!
The other axis of this film- who killed Malcolm, including the possibility that the infamous Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam was involved gets a full workout here. Although some of the ‘talking heads’ that populate such documentaries as this one have some very interesting things to say about the role of the FBI and its COINTELPRO programs against blacks and other radicals in the 1960’s (and now), Nation of Islam’s military arm- The Fruit of Islam and ‘turf’ wars none of this is central to the meaning of Malcolm’s life. Moreover, for this commentary I do not want to dwell on those aspects of this documentary
That said, who was Malcolm X? Or more properly what did he represent in his time. At one level, given the rudiments of his life story which are detailed in the Autobiography of Malcolm X and visually here, he represented that part of the black experience (an experience not only limited to blacks in immigrant America) which pulled itself by the bootstraps and turned away from the lumpen milieu of gangs, crimes and prisons into what I call ‘street’ intellectuals. That experience is far removed from the experience of what today passes for the black intelligentsia, who have run away from the turmoil of the streets. Barack Obama is only the most visible example of that flight. In liberation struggles both ‘street’ and academic intellectuals are necessary but the ‘street’ intellectual is perhaps more critical as the transmission belt to the masses. That is how liberation fighters get a hearing and no other way. In any case I have always been partial to the ‘streets’.
But what is the message for the way forward? For Malcolm, until shortly before his death, that message was black separatism-the idea that the only way blacks could get any retribution was to go off on their own (or be left alone), in practical terms to form their own nation. To state the question that way in modern America points to the obvious limitation of such a scheme, even if blacks formed such a nation and wanted to express the right to national self-determination that goes with it. Nevertheless whatever personal changes Malcolm made in his quest for political relevance and understanding whether he was a Black Muslim minister or after he broke for that group he still sought political direction through the fight of what is called today ‘people of color’ against the mainly white oppressor, at first in America and later after travels throughout the ‘third world’.
However sincere he was in that belief, and he was sincere, that strategy of black separatism or ‘third world’ vanguardism could never lead to the black freedom he so fervently desired. An underestimation of the power of an internally unchallenged world, and in the first instance American, imperialism to corrupt liberation struggles or defeat or destroy them militarily never seemed to enter into his calculations.
Malcolm’s whole life story of struggle against the bedrock of white racism in America, as the legitimate and at the time the ONLY voice speaking for the rage of the black ghettos, nevertheless never worked out fully any other strategy that could work in America, and by extension internationally. A close reading of his work demonstrates that as he got more politically aware he saw the then unfolding ‘third world’ liberation struggles as the key to black liberation in America. That, unfortunately for him, was exactly backwards. If the ‘third world’ struggles were ever ultimately to be successful and create more just societies then American imperialism-as the main enemy of the peoples of the world-then, as now had to be brought to bay. And that, my friends, whether you agree or not, requires class struggle here.
That is where the fight for black liberation intersects the fight for socialism. And I will state until my last breathe that the key to the fight for socialism in America will be the cohesion of a central black cadre leading a multi-ethnic organization that will bring that home. And it will not be from the lips of the Martin Luther Kings of today that the struggle will be successful but by new more enlightened Malcolms, learning the lessons of history, who will get what they need-'by any means necessary'.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
*"Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?"- The Songwriting of "Yip" Harburg
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Clip Of Yip Harburg's "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" done by Tom Waits. Wow.
Commentary
Virtually every odd ball political call- in show that I have listened to lately and virtually every other audio/visual commentary source that I have paid attention to, as well, concerning the relationship between today’s economic downturn and the Great Depression of the 1930’s has felt obliged to flesh out its analysis with a rendition of “Yip” Harburg’s Depression classic “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”. And, seemingly, give the economic numbers they are not wrong to do so, except that instead of Yip’s dime today it should be a dollar, although that destroys the rhythm of the piece. It seems fitting today that this space should recognize the work of Brother Harburg.
Actually, not for the first time here, the recently departed Studs Terkel should be called to account for my interest in Yip. While reading Stud’s book "The Spectator” about various cultural trends and personalities that he witnessed in his long life I noticed that one of his interviews was with Yip concerning the genesis of “Brother”. Yip gives a pretty straight forward account of how he wrote it in 1931. The only comment that I would add is that the various versions that I have heard, Bing Crosby’s being the most outstanding, tend to do it in an upbeat 1930’s Broadway show tune cadence. There is, seemingly, none of the darkness that I think that Yip was trying to get at about the plight of working people that built all the wealth, fought all the wars and then were placed on the scrap heap. I believe that I heard Dave Van Ronk do a classic raspy Von Ronk-type rendition of “Brother” long ago that caught the pathos of ex-World War I soldiers down on their uppers. I have not been able to find a copy yet.
One final point. For those who may not think they are familiar with Yip Harburg you actually do know some of his other musical work. Like “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” in “The Wizard Of Oz”. More importantly, for consideration in this space, when the anti-Soviet “red scare” of the 1950’s put the hammer down on the entertainment industry Yip was ‘blacklisted’. Yes, indeed, I knew there was something wrong with that “Rainbow” song. It was way, way too hopeful about future prospects. I guess it was true what the old McCarthyite witch hunters of the 1950’s said- there ‘really’ were ‘reds’ under every bunk bed trying to corrupt the morals of America’s youth. I’m with Yip on this one though. I’d give you a dollar anytime.
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
The Free and Equal Blues
Written by Yip Harburg, sung by Josh White
I went down to that St. James Infirmary, and I saw some plasma there,
I ups and asks the doctor man, "Say was the donor dark or fair?"
The doctor laughed a great big laugh, and he puffed it right in my face,
He said, "A molecule is a molecule, son, and the damn thing has no race."
And that was news, yes that was news,
That was very, very, very special news.
'Cause ever since that day we’ve had those free and equal blues.
"You mean you heard that doc declare
That the plasma in that test tube there could be
White man, black man, yellow man, red?"
"That’s just what that doctor said."
The doc put down his doctor book and gave me a very scientific look
And he spoke out plain and clear and rational,
He said, "Metabolism is international."
Chorus
Then the doc rigged up his microscope with some Berlin blue blood,
And, by gosh, it was the same as Chun King, Quebechef, Chattanooga, Timbuktoo blood
Why, those men who think they’re noble
Don’t even know that the corpuscle is global
Trying to disunite us with their racial supremacy,
And flying in the face of old man chemistry,
Taking all the facts and trying to twist ëem,
But you can’t overthrow the circulatory system.
Chorus
So I stayed at that St. James Infirmary.
(I couldn’t leave that place, it was too interesting)
But I said to the doctor, "Give me some more of that scientific talk talk," and he did:
He said, "Melt yourself down into a crucible
Pour yourself out into a test tube and what have you got?
Thirty-five hundred cubic feet of gas,
The same for the upper and lower class."
Well, I let that pass . . .
"Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces"
"You mean that goes for princes, dukeses and countses?"
"Whatever you are, that’s what the amounts is:
Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces; iron, 57 grains."
Not enough to keep a man in chains.
"50 ounces of phosophorus, that’s whether you’re poor or prosperous."
"Say buddy, can you spare a match?"
"Sugar, 60 ordinary lumps, free and equal rations for all nations.
Then you take 20 teaspoons of sodium chloride (that’s salt), and you add 38
quarts of H2O (that’s water), mix two ounces of lime, a pinch of chloride of
potash, a drop of magnesium, a bit of sulfur, and a soupÁon of hydrochloric
acid, and you stir it all up, and what are you?"
"You’re a walking drugstore."
"It’s an international, metabolistic cartel."
And that was news, yes that was news,
So listen, you African and Indian and Mexican, Mongolian, Tyrolean and Tartar,
The doctor’s right behind the Atlantic Charter.
The doc’s behind the new brotherhood of man,
As prescribed at San Francisco and Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, and at Potsdam:
Every man, everywhere is the same, when he’s got his skin off.
And that’s news, yes that’s news,
That’s the free and equal blues!
Commentary
Virtually every odd ball political call- in show that I have listened to lately and virtually every other audio/visual commentary source that I have paid attention to, as well, concerning the relationship between today’s economic downturn and the Great Depression of the 1930’s has felt obliged to flesh out its analysis with a rendition of “Yip” Harburg’s Depression classic “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”. And, seemingly, give the economic numbers they are not wrong to do so, except that instead of Yip’s dime today it should be a dollar, although that destroys the rhythm of the piece. It seems fitting today that this space should recognize the work of Brother Harburg.
Actually, not for the first time here, the recently departed Studs Terkel should be called to account for my interest in Yip. While reading Stud’s book "The Spectator” about various cultural trends and personalities that he witnessed in his long life I noticed that one of his interviews was with Yip concerning the genesis of “Brother”. Yip gives a pretty straight forward account of how he wrote it in 1931. The only comment that I would add is that the various versions that I have heard, Bing Crosby’s being the most outstanding, tend to do it in an upbeat 1930’s Broadway show tune cadence. There is, seemingly, none of the darkness that I think that Yip was trying to get at about the plight of working people that built all the wealth, fought all the wars and then were placed on the scrap heap. I believe that I heard Dave Van Ronk do a classic raspy Von Ronk-type rendition of “Brother” long ago that caught the pathos of ex-World War I soldiers down on their uppers. I have not been able to find a copy yet.
One final point. For those who may not think they are familiar with Yip Harburg you actually do know some of his other musical work. Like “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” in “The Wizard Of Oz”. More importantly, for consideration in this space, when the anti-Soviet “red scare” of the 1950’s put the hammer down on the entertainment industry Yip was ‘blacklisted’. Yes, indeed, I knew there was something wrong with that “Rainbow” song. It was way, way too hopeful about future prospects. I guess it was true what the old McCarthyite witch hunters of the 1950’s said- there ‘really’ were ‘reds’ under every bunk bed trying to corrupt the morals of America’s youth. I’m with Yip on this one though. I’d give you a dollar anytime.
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
The Free and Equal Blues
Written by Yip Harburg, sung by Josh White
I went down to that St. James Infirmary, and I saw some plasma there,
I ups and asks the doctor man, "Say was the donor dark or fair?"
The doctor laughed a great big laugh, and he puffed it right in my face,
He said, "A molecule is a molecule, son, and the damn thing has no race."
And that was news, yes that was news,
That was very, very, very special news.
'Cause ever since that day we’ve had those free and equal blues.
"You mean you heard that doc declare
That the plasma in that test tube there could be
White man, black man, yellow man, red?"
"That’s just what that doctor said."
The doc put down his doctor book and gave me a very scientific look
And he spoke out plain and clear and rational,
He said, "Metabolism is international."
Chorus
Then the doc rigged up his microscope with some Berlin blue blood,
And, by gosh, it was the same as Chun King, Quebechef, Chattanooga, Timbuktoo blood
Why, those men who think they’re noble
Don’t even know that the corpuscle is global
Trying to disunite us with their racial supremacy,
And flying in the face of old man chemistry,
Taking all the facts and trying to twist ëem,
But you can’t overthrow the circulatory system.
Chorus
So I stayed at that St. James Infirmary.
(I couldn’t leave that place, it was too interesting)
But I said to the doctor, "Give me some more of that scientific talk talk," and he did:
He said, "Melt yourself down into a crucible
Pour yourself out into a test tube and what have you got?
Thirty-five hundred cubic feet of gas,
The same for the upper and lower class."
Well, I let that pass . . .
"Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces"
"You mean that goes for princes, dukeses and countses?"
"Whatever you are, that’s what the amounts is:
Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces; iron, 57 grains."
Not enough to keep a man in chains.
"50 ounces of phosophorus, that’s whether you’re poor or prosperous."
"Say buddy, can you spare a match?"
"Sugar, 60 ordinary lumps, free and equal rations for all nations.
Then you take 20 teaspoons of sodium chloride (that’s salt), and you add 38
quarts of H2O (that’s water), mix two ounces of lime, a pinch of chloride of
potash, a drop of magnesium, a bit of sulfur, and a soupÁon of hydrochloric
acid, and you stir it all up, and what are you?"
"You’re a walking drugstore."
"It’s an international, metabolistic cartel."
And that was news, yes that was news,
So listen, you African and Indian and Mexican, Mongolian, Tyrolean and Tartar,
The doctor’s right behind the Atlantic Charter.
The doc’s behind the new brotherhood of man,
As prescribed at San Francisco and Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, and at Potsdam:
Every man, everywhere is the same, when he’s got his skin off.
And that’s news, yes that’s news,
That’s the free and equal blues!
Thursday, January 29, 2009
*SDS 2009,This Is Not Your Parents' (Or, Ouch, Grandparents') SDS 1969
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Students For Democratic Society (SDS) of the 1960s (Old Believers).
Commentary
I have spilled plenty of ink over the past year or so discussing the ‘fresh’ breeze that has come through the political atmosphere as a result of the Obama whirlwind. I have, endlessly it seems, compared this phenomena to the one of my youth in the 1960s, the election and truncated presidency of John F. Kennedy. A large piece of that comparison has been the way that today’s youth, especially college students, have gravitated toward Obama in the hope of getting out of the abyss of the past eight years. Fair enough, for now. Although today I am older and wiser and therefore cannot join the young in their enthusiasms I will nevertheless stick to my position that I have held over this past period of seeing this political awakening as a first positive step toward an understanding for the need for socialist solutions after the Obama ship runs aground.
That said, one must recognize that today is not the 1960’s and that history does not (and as a rule should not) repeat itself. Nevertheless one organization that was pivotal in the student struggle s of the 1960’s, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has been resurrected over the past few years and therefore is subject to comment on as a link between the generations. Below is an article gleaned from the “Young Spartacus” pages of “Workers Vanguard”, Number 927, dated January 2, 2009 that polemicizes against today’s SDS and also provides some information about the history the 1960’s organization, its aims, achievements and failures. This article provides a good place to start a discussion about the way that socialists can tap into the political energy on today’s campuses.
As the article makes clear today’s SDS makes no pretense to be a socialist organization, has a merely marginal critique of contemporary American society and on the face of it does not rise to the level of politics that build the old SDS. Some of these shortcomings appears to be done willfully so. The earlier SDS faced that same problem, a problem that I argue today’s SDS will willy-nilly be forced to face. Either SDS will make serious anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critiques of American society and take actions based on those understandings or fold its tent. Look, generations of political activists, young and old, have broken their teeth trying to position themselves just slightly to the left of the Democratic Party or act as an ‘outside’ pressure on that organization. The hard reality, my young friends, is that if that is to be the fate of today’s SDS then the Young Democrats can do it better, have a history of doing this kind of donkey work (no pun intended, I do not think). And have jobs to offer.
However, that is music for the future. Right now serious, mainly liberal (hey we all started out from that position back in the days), students have to develop their critiques and march to a different drummer than that of the Young Democrats. I would argue that there is plenty of room for an all-inclusive socialist student organization where individual students and organizations (including the dreaded ‘vanguard’ organizations that everyone runs in fear of) can fight for their programs and unite on individual actions that are collectively agreed upon. One of the abiding sorrows of the old “New Left”, as the struggle in SDS intensified, is that an issue that never really got fought out was building this kind of organization. Not as a pro-socialist organization, any way. Read the article and think about this a bit.
SDS Old & New
From Tepid Liberalism to Radicalism and Back Again
(Young Spartacus pages)
A “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 2006, has mushroomed on campuses across the country. This heterogeneous lash-up pounded the pavement to bring out voters for the Democratic Party (see “UCLA SDS Hitches Skateboard to Obama Bandwagon,” p. 5), but it has also occupied military recruitment centers. Disdainful of “ideology” and dominated by hysterical liberal anti-Communists, the new SDS sticks together by shunning political debate in favor of “politically correct” platitudes about democracy. So, for example, SDS’s voluminous “Who We Are” statement does not take a position on a single concrete political issue (studentsforademocraticsociety.org, 2007). Veterans of the early SDS, including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and Mike Klonsky, have rallied around the new SDS, giving talks and raising money, as well as holding their own tepid liberal protests and nostalgic conferences under the auspices of a refounded Movement for a Democratic Society.
So, what’s in a name? SDS cofounder Pat Korte explained, “The reason we chose to keep the name SDS is because it accurately describes us (we are students for a democratic society)” (“The New SDS: Towards a Radical Youth Movement,” CounterPunch, 10 July 2006). What being “for a democratic society” means in racist, capitalist America becomes clear from a look at SDSers’ activities. Having gained some experience at the business end of a nightstick, the original SDS was known for its petty-bourgeois radical “off the pig” rhetoric—but the new SDS in Boston went on hunger strike in support of security guards at Harvard! Former SDS News Bulletin coeditor and UCLA SDS honcho Dave Shukla wants to braintrust the Feds, who witchhunted the first SDS, by “developing a model for mass participation and engagement with institutional design and policy formation for each agency and program in the federal government” (“Left Forum 2008 Speaker Bio,” leftforum.org, undated). At Rutgers, SDS has taken up local New Jersey gerrymandering so “each [ward] gets to elect it’s OWN Council person to represent their neighborhood” and “the student community will get the representation it deserves” (Tent State University/Students for a Democratic Society Facebook page, undated).
The institutions of bourgeois democracy are institutions of capitalist class rule with which the bourgeoisie dupes, defrauds and represses working people and the oppressed. SDS’s pushing of “democratic models” diverts young activists into the dead end of bourgeois electoral politics. What unites the liberals in the new SDS with reformists of all varieties is the view that the capitalist system can be made to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. As revolutionary Marxists, we seek to win youth to building a revolutionary workers party that can lead the working class in the struggle to overthrow the whole rotten capitalist system and lay the basis for an egalitarian, communist society.
Pushing the myth that communism destroyed the first SDS, the new SDS’s leadership raises the spectre of “sectarian takeovers” and “totalitarian principles” in the service of liberal anti-communism. Voicing her opposition to members of the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization being in SDS, New York SDS honcho Rachel Haut told Platypus magazine: “I think it is inappropriate to have conversations about ideological differences when we still have Maoists in the organization. Why should we be having these conversations with them, including them in the discussion, if their ideology is in direct opposition to building a democratic society?” (September 2008). Who needs the House Committee on Un-American Activities when you have the new SDS! The Workers World Party, Freedom Road Socialist Organization and other reformists work in SDS anyway, but this says less about SDS’s “non-sectarianism” than about the reformists’ toothless politics. They must feel right at home with the new SDS’s parochial campus activism and Democratic Party lesser-evilism.
Forty years ago, Students for a Democratic Society played a prominent role in protests at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. The dirty, losing Vietnam War, initiated and escalated under Democratic Party presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was a burning issue. Most of the protesters in Chicago in 1968 opposed the Democratic Party as a capitalist party presiding over social injustice. As Kirkpatrick Sale described in SDS, his well-known history of the organization, SDSers rejected “as usual the idea of mass marches but [were] doubly scornful of any project mired in electoral politics.” SDSers propagandized and organized actions against the Democratic Party and raised general hell in the city. For that, they were arrested, savagely beaten, and one young man was shot to death, all under the aegis of the Democratic Party city administration of the infamous Daley machine.
Last August, the new SDS mobilized for protests at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. They did so as part of the Alliance for Real Democracy, whose stated intention was “to convince and pressure Democrats to work for just and progressive policies at home and abroad” (realdemocracy2008.org, undated).
Ostensibly more radical chapters of SDS, including the one from Grand Rapids, Michigan, stated in their call to action, “If we, as a radical movement, are going to attempt to pressure the Democratic Party candidates, the time to do so is before they are elected” (“SDS Call to Action: Disrupt the DNC,” undated). The new SDS is a far cry from the iconic New Left organization of the 1960s, but the history of the old SDS sheds light on the new one.
Heirs of Stodgy Cold Warriors
While the first SDS emerged as part of a radicalization of U.S. society, the new SDS reflects a rightward social shift in a period of little struggle. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a grave defeat for working people and the oppressed worldwide. It ushered in a period of bourgeois triumphalism over the “death of communism,” in which social struggle has been limited and isolated. In their works Empire and Multitude, American academic Michael Hardt and his mentor, veteran Italian New Left intellectual Antonio Negri, developed on the bourgeois idea that communism has failed—an idea also embraced by the new SDS. As our article “Empire, Multitude and the ‘Death of Communism’: The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism,” noted:
“Claiming to update Marx, Hardt and Negri jettison the programmatic core of Marxism: proletarian revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. They dismiss the lessons distilled from the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian insurrection, and the subsequent history of the revolutionary workers movement. They deride class war and proletarian power as ‘old, tired and faded’ notions….
“In the late 1930s, following the victory of fascism in Germany and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky observed: ‘As always during epochs of reaction and decay, quacks and charlatans appear on all sides, desirous of revising the whole course of revolutionary thought’ (Transitional Program [1938]). The triumph of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe in the early 1990s has nurtured a new generation of ideological quacks and charlatans. Hardt and Negri peddle their ideological wares to young leftists who, having no sense of the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, accept the subjective outlook that a new world will be won not by uprooting the material reality of oppression but by changing the ideas in people’s heads.”
—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 59, Spring 2006
Dismissing communist revolution as a “failed experiment,” today’s SDSers are left with nothing more than the grubby politics of “lesser evil” capitalism. They are running the film of the first SDS’s radicalization in reverse.
The new SDS’s “democratic” and “anti-authoritarian” rhetoric recapitulates the Cold War anti-Communism that the first SDS broke from. SDS originated as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Moribund by 1960, the LID had served as a handmaiden of the U.S. government in the left and the labor movement, peddling the virtues of “democratic,” “anti-authoritarian” capitalism. Populated by “State Department socialists” such as Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, the LID also counted among its members the labor traitors Victor and Walter Reuther, who rode to power in the United Auto Workers by purging Communists from the union in the 1940s, and Sidney Hook, a former Communist turned “god that failed” supporter of the established order. Hook was a leading light in the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a CIA-funded operation devoted to counteracting the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union.
Despite posturing as champions of democracy in the Cold War, the U.S. imperialists supported right-wing military dictatorships, reactionary regimes and the remnants of European colonial rule around the world. On the home front, in the American South black people faced legal segregation and were deprived of basic rights—a fact publicized by the Soviet Union. The Southern Jim Crow system was based on police/Klan terror against atomized rural sharecroppers, and it had become increasingly anachronistic as industrialization in the American South during and following World War II drew blacks into the working class. By the mid 1950s, black anger at Jim Crow segregation had given birth to the civil rights movement, shattering the climate of Cold War McCarthyism and increasingly polarizing American society.
Seeking to refurbish its image and in response to early struggles, the U.S. capitalist class made some concessions, notably in the Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education that mandated the integration of public schools. But implementation of this ruling proceeded at a snail’s pace. Young liberal activists, black and white, came forward courageously in lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides. Students from the North, defiant in the face of the murder of young civil rights militants, poured into the South to register black voters. In this changed climate, in January 1960 SLID changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society; its membership began to grow.
Early SDS: Confronting Cold War Anti-Communism
The Cuban Revolution coincided with the civil rights movement, reinforcing the appeal of more radical ideas among young activists. In January 1959, Castro’s rebel army overthrew the brutal, corrupt, U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. A petty-bourgeois nationalist, Castro formed a coalition government with venal local bourgeois forces and pledged to protect their interests. However, Castro’s program of land redistribution and the measures taken against Batista’s police torturers alienated Castro’s Cuban bourgeois supporters and the U.S. imperialists, including Eisenhower’s CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, both major stockholders in the United Fruit Company. Eisenhower responded with brute economic pressure to bring Castro’s regime to heel. This pushed Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union. By early 1961, the holdings of the National City Bank, United Fruit, Standard Oil, the sugar barons and the Mafia—as well as the Cuban bourgeoisie—had been expropriated, and the Cuban capitalists were either in exile or in prison.
Facing the unrelenting pressure of U.S. imperialism, the Castro government sought the protection of the Soviet Union. It was compelled under these circumstances to liquidate the bourgeoisie as a class, carrying out a social revolution. Cuba became a bureaucratically deformed workers state in which capitalism had been overthrown but political power was held by a parasitic bureaucratic caste fundamentally sharing the nationalist political program of “socialism in one country” with the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. In 1961, newly elected president Kennedy launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, attempting to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and establish a puppet regime. Leftist youth were inspired by the Cubans’ defense of their revolution against U.S. imperialism. However, other guerrilla insurgencies aiming to overthrow right-wing capitalist regimes in Latin America were crushed with murderous repression.
In response to the Bay of Pigs invasion, SDSers posed the question “whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways” (The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, July 1962). Early SDSers were increasingly at odds with the Cold War-era anti-Communism of their parent organization, which they rightly saw as a loyalty oath to the powers that be. The Port Huron Statement, adopted at SDS’s June 1962 National Convention, sought “to oppose communism without contributing to the common fear of associations and public actions.” It criticized the Cold War as “not sufficient for the creation of appropriate policies with which to relate to and counter communist movements in the world” and argued that “the American military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism.” A delegate of the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing Committee was allowed to attend the convention as an observer.
Even these small steps away from McCarthyism were too much for the LID elders, who hauled the SDS leadership into a trial for not being anti-Communist enough, then cut all funds to SDS and changed the locks on the SDS office. After much organizational wrangling, SDS and the LID patched things up. Although moving away from the dried-up LID social democrats, SDS had not fundamentally broken from lesser-evil Democratic Party pressure politics, drawing disaffected youth back into the two-party shell game and perpetuating illusions in bourgeois democracy. In the 1964 elections, a wing of SDS campaigned to go “part of the way with LBJ,” maintaining that the Democratic Party platform was “superior to any passed by a major national party since the first New Deal” and that a victory by arch-conservative Barry Goldwater would spell disaster (Sale, SDS).
But the times, they were a-changin’. In 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) broke out against the Berkeley administration’s attempts to censor political life on campus by barring reds and other civil rights activists (“outside agitators”) and restricting the activities of student organizations. Facing reprisals from both the liberal campus administration and Democratic governor Pat Brown, FSM activists defended their right to “hear any person speak in any open area of the campus at any time on any subject” (see “The Student Revolt at Berkeley,” Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965). The FSM’s victory fueled further student radicalization across the country and undermined illusions in the good offices of campus administrations and the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, the escalation of the imperialist war in Vietnam meant more youth were being drafted, adding a direct material interest against American imperialist aims to the moral outrage felt by student activists. In 1965, SDS initiated the first nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. To many LID liberals, protesting a war against Communism was as bad as supporting the Communists outright. Furthermore, SDS’s call for the march included no anti-Communist exclusion clause. With a rush of new members and continued radicalization, SDS would abolish its anti-Communist exclusion clause at its 1965 summer convention, and soon afterward it split from the LID entirely.
Radicalization: the Civil Rights Movement
When the civil rights movement spread to the North, fighters for black freedom confronted not Southern legal segregation, but the vicious inequality and racial oppression embedded in the American capitalist system. The struggle for fundamental change in the conditions of black life—for real equality, for jobs, decent housing and adequate schools—collided head-on with the realities of American capitalism. The Northern ghettos were exploding in protest. At the 1964 Democratic Party convention, the Johnson/Humphrey machine crushed the attempt by delegates from the anti-racist Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the Jim Crow Mississippi delegation.
The civil rights movement was fracturing as young militants broke from the Democratic Party and the liberal pacifism exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., who said of the Watts ghetto upheaval, “It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them” (New York Times, 16 August 1965). As we wrote in “Black Power—Class Power”:
“In contrast to the reform program of the civil rights movement, the demands of the black masses are necessarily and inherently class demands, and demands which the ruling class cannot meet…. It is this transition which is represented by the black power slogan. Its popularization represents the repudiation of tokenism, liberal tutelage, reliance on the federal government, and the non-violent philosophy of moral suasion. In this sense, therefore, black power is class power, and should be supported by all socialist forces.”
—Spartacist West No. 8, 30 September 1966, reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), September 1978
At the same time, we warned of the “black power” slogan, in the absence of a broader class fight:
“It can be used by petty bourgeois black nationalist elements who want to slice the social cake along color rather than class lines and to promote reactionary color mysticism. More seriously, it can be degraded to mean mere support for black politicians operating within the system.”
This was a prescient warning. As struggle ebbed, such was exactly the bill of goods sold to the black masses.
Co-optation was one weapon of the racist rulers; extermination was another. The best elements of radicalized black youth drawn to the Black Panther Party faced a systematic government campaign of assassination, police provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment, including through the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program. The Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and rejection of the Marxist understanding of the role of the working class left them vulnerable to state repression. In the face of this repression, the Panthers turned to the right, into the orbit of the reformist Communist Party and its lawyers, as well as of the Democratic Party. (See “Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era,” Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], September 1978.)
The Vietnam War
Today, the SDS of the second mobilization displays chauvinist support for the forces of U.S. imperialism. In a grotesque testament to “support our troops” patriotism, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, chapter of SDS “collected and sent care packages to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is now going to be a monthly event…” (SDS News Bulletin No. 4, May/June 2008). The University of North Carolina-Asheville chapter set out white flags commemorating U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq together with shoes representing Iraqis killed under the American occupation (“UNCA SDS Iraq Body Count,” SDS News Bulletin No. 1, October 2007). SDS’s University of Chicago chapter has close relations with Platypus, an organization known for not opposing the occupation of Iraq (see “Platypus Group: Pseudo-Marxist, Pro-Imperialist, Academic Claptrap,” Workers Vanguard No. 908, 15 February 2008).
We stand for the military defense of the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan against the brutal U.S. imperialist occupiers. As revolutionary Marxists, we side with oppressed countries against the predatory imperialist powers. But unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was also another element at work during the Vietnam War: there was a socially progressive character to those who fought against the imperialist butchers. The heroic Vietnamese had carried out a social revolution, albeit bureaucratically deformed, overturning capitalism in the North, and they were fighting to extend this to the South. We demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces and called for the military defense of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces, raising revolutionary slogans, including “Victory for the Vietnamese Revolution…No negotiations!” and “All Indochina must go Communist!”
As U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, draft resistance spread among militant youth and SDS members. We oppose the draft, demanding “not one man, not one penny” for the imperialist military. But in the event of a draft, as we argued in “You Will Go!”, adapted from a position paper we put forward in SDS, we oppose the voluntary purging of radicals from the army, which would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. Instead, we said young militants should go with the working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation (see Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968).
As opposition to the war grew, more and more young activists stopped chanting for “peace” and began calling for “Victory to the NLF!” As we explained in the founding document of our youth organization, Youth, Class and Party (adopted in 1971; reprinted as a pamphlet in December 1974):
“When the liberal establishment backed the imperialist adventure in Vietnam, it drove the radical student movement to the left and opened the path to revolutionary politics.
“As the Vietnam war drove the New Left away from the liberals, the New Left began to re-examine the ‘Communist bloc’ and came to identify with Stalinism in its ‘militant Third World’ form. New Lefters did not consciously identify with the legacy of Stalinism as embodied in the Soviet Union. Instead they created a false dichotomy between the conservatism and opportunism of Soviet Stalinism and the apparent militancy of ‘Third World’ Stalinist governments and leaderships like those of China, Cuba and the NLF.”
Several variants of Maoism would attract a following in SDS. One was Progressive Labor Party (PL), a left split from the pro-Moscow Communist Party. PL put forward a crude working-class line against the blatant petty-bourgeois politics of Mike Klonsky’s wing of SDS, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which advanced a petty-bourgeois notion of sectoralist struggle, according to which the Vietnamese would fight for their liberation and independence, blacks in the U.S. for theirs, women for theirs, and so forth. By RYM’s lights, the role of revolutionary-minded students was to act as propaganda bureaus and support groups for these various “vanguards.” Ultimately, this sectoralism was just a “radical” version of standard ward-heeling-type Democratic Party constituency politics, with the working class relegated at best to another “oppressed” constituency rather than the agency for fundamental social change. Various Maoist outfits contended within and emerged from RYM, including what would become today’s Revolutionary Communist Party.
Maoism did not represent a break from Stalinist class collaboration, but rather “Khrushchevism under the gun” of U.S. imperialism. Seeking to win young radicals to a Trotskyist program, we exposed the Chinese Maoists’ repeated attempts to form a reactionary, anti-Soviet bloc with U.S. imperialism at the expense of social struggles around the world. This alliance was sealed by Mao’s 1972 meeting with U.S. war criminal Richard Nixon in Beijing as American warplanes rained death and destruction on Vietnam, and it eventually destroyed the Maoist movement for all intents and purposes within the “belly of the U.S. beast.”
As we stated in Youth, Class and Party: “Only by replacing the Stalinist parties with parties unalterably committed to internationalism can the power of the Sino-Soviet states be used to further the struggle for world socialism. Recognizing that collectivized property and economic planning constitute a major qualitative gain for the workers in the Sino-Soviet states, we unconditionally defend these property forms against imperialist attacks and capitalist encroachment.” Uniquely on the left, today we uphold the same Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense and proletarian political revolution for the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Student Radicals in Search of Revolutionary Program
By the end of the spring of 1968, universities had been shut down and reopened, administration buildings occupied and then abandoned. This did not stop the Vietnam War—the government escalated troop deployments to Vietnam. Radical youth within SDS were becoming increasingly restive with student-centered politics. Clearly, there was a limit to “student power.” The question was posed: if not students, then what force could bring social change? The French general strike of May 1968 gave an answer. This incipient workers revolution in France exposed the charlatanry of an earlier generation of “post-Marxist” ideologues such as Herbert Marcuse, who had written off the revolutionary potential of the working class. May ’68 forced the New Left to confront the key question of class, laying the basis for new layers of youth to be won to revolutionary Marxism.
SDS’s rejection of the “Old Left” was in large measure a response to the boring reformist politics of the Stalinist Communist Party, which had been deeply ensconced in Democratic Party politics for decades and whose idea of black struggle was to follow the lead of the “respectable,” religious black leaders. The most widely known self-styled Trotskyist organization at the time, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), was moving rapidly to the right when our founding cadres were expelled as a left-wing opposition in 1963-64. The SWP and its National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) gave Trotskyism a bad name as they promoted “peaceful, legal” single-issue antiwar peace crawls in order to make a reformist alliance with the defeatist wing of the U.S. bourgeoisie and social-democratic trade-union bureaucrats. The SWP’s alliance with liberal imperialists was sealed in blood when Spartacist supporters along with PLers and SDSers were beaten and expelled from a 1971 NPAC conference for protesting the presence of ruling-class politician Vance Hartke on the platform. (See “The Vietnam Antiwar Movement and the National Peace Action Coalition,” WV No. 920, 12 September 2008).
Our Trotskyist program won a hearing within SDS, and the forebear of today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs was founded as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) in SDS in early 1970. The RMC sought to win radical-minded students to a revolutionary, internationalist and proletarian communist program. This included fighting for an understanding of the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world’s first successful workers revolution, which pulled Russia out of the bloody slaughter of World War I, expropriated the capitalist class, and placed Russia’s economy under the control of democratic workers rule through soviets (workers councils). The RMC also sought to lay out Trotsky’s understanding of the material roots of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution (see our pamphlet, The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited).
In the summer of 1969 at the SDS National Convention in Chicago, facing the prospect of Progressive Labor’s positions gaining a majority, a clique within the SDS National Collective (NC), including Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky, engineered a split, lining up Black Panthers and others to race-bait PL supporters. When PL refused to take the bait, the NC splitters led their followers out of the conference. We remained with the PL-led Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) wing of SDS, based on its orientation, however crude, to the proletariat. But while PL correctly opposed the RYM splitters’ sectoralism, it also advanced (as it continues to do) a line of indifference toward special oppression, for example, racial and sexual oppression. We fought for a proletarian orientation on this question—we issued position papers within SDS, arguing for a Leninist vanguard party to bring the power of the working class to bear in the interests of all the oppressed (see “‘Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics’,” WV No. 897, 31 August 2007, and “‘The Fight for Women’s Liberation’,” WV No. 910, 14 March 2008).
PL was vulnerable to our Trotskyist criticism, but ultimately they clung to their reformist “minimum/maximum program,” combining “communist” rhetoric with reformist practice. We warned: “By attempting to build on social guilt, moralism, and empiricism, the three most obnoxious and defective characteristics of the American left, PL creates the conditions for its own defeat and the continuous splits to the right…. Without a clearly reasoned theoretical explanation for its break with Stalinist theory, without an institution of real inner party democracy, and without a transitional program which bridges the gap between ‘rubber mats’ [PL’s concrete demands for workers struggle on campus were usually grotesquely minimal] and the dictatorship of the proletariat, PL is bound to create within itself right wing splits and transmit the same process to SDS” (“Final SDS Convention?”, Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter No. 6, March 1971). Indeed, PL eventually “led” its WSA-SDS in retreat into outright liberal idealism, campus parochialism and ordinary reformism.
Terrorism and Communism
As we wrote in Youth, Class and Party:
“The break-up of the New Left, most evident in the 1969 SDS split, was caused by the inadequacy of New Left politics in the face of the general social crisis of the late ’60’s. With the collapse of the traditional New Left, there remained three general political tendencies on the left. One is an attempt to re-establish the ties between the left and the liberal political establishment, now possible because of the deep split in the ruling class over the Vietnam war. The second is a policy of confrontation with the armed forces of the state and terrorism practiced in the name of Third World nationalism. The third tendency is that of proletarian socialism of which the Revolutionary Communist Youth is an important element.”
Lacking a proletarian strategy, and desperate to do something, some in the RYM wing ended up in the Weather Underground. The Weathermen would conduct acts of individual terror that were self-defeating and, more times than not, far more dangerous to themselves than to the bourgeoisie. Such a program was no break from liberalism, but in fact a logical conclusion, in extremis, of the liberal program of bearing “moral witness” to the government’s crimes. The Weathermen’s strategy was futile; at the same time, their targets were representatives of imperialism and capitalist oppression. As comrade Trotsky wrote of a German youth who had assassinated a Nazi:
“We Marxists consider the tactic of individual terror inexpedient in the tasks of the liberating struggle of the proletariat as well as oppressed nationalities. A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing avengers even though they have been unable to discover the correct road.”
—“For Grynszpan: Against Fascist Pogrom Gangs and Stalinist Scoundrels,” February 1939
While politically in opposition to the Weathermen, we fought for their defense, insisting that they were “an integral part of the radical movement.” We wrote:
“The real crime vis-a-vis terror politics and heroic individualism is that it allows the revolutionary energies of some of the movement’s most talented, dedicated people to be channeled into futile and self-destructive actions. It is our job to seek to redirect these energies into genuinely revolutionary directions.”
—“Terrorism and Communism,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 17-18, August-September 1970
Other so-called “socialists” refused to defend the Weathermen and often even joined the witchhunting chorus against them. The Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party both denounced this small, isolated, and persecuted outfit of misguided radical youth. For its part, PL branded the Weathermen “police agents.”
Although the new SDS is divided over whether the Weathermen were heroic, criminal or simply irrelevant, the Weathermen’s politics have a pale echo in the new SDS’s “acts of resistance” which, even at their most militant, lack both the social power and political program required to challenge the class rule of the capitalists. Like much of the “anti-globalization” movement, these protests are based on “the dangerously false idea that the capitalist U.S. is or could be pressured into being a democracy ‘for the people’ if only the anti-globalization youth were determined or creative enough to make the rulers pay attention…. Lacking a perspective of mobilizing the working class against the rule of capital, such confrontations with the cops amount to the streetfighting face of reformism” (“What Strategy to Defeat Imperialism?” WV No. 817, 9 January 2004).
In the Pacific Northwest, SDSers and others have repeatedly blocked military convoys, delaying shipments of war materiel to Iraq. These courageous protesters have been arrested, beaten and pepper-sprayed, but they lack the social power and political program needed to stop the U.S. imperialists’ overwhelming military might. Despite our vast political differences, we revolutionary Marxist youth defend SDS when it runs afoul of the state (see “UCLA: 16 Arrested at SDS/SWF Protest—Drop the Charges! For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!” WV No. 918, 1 August 2008, and “Drop Charges Against Evergreen 6! Reinstate Olympia SDS!” WV No. 914, 9 May 2008).
SDS Today: Second Time Farce…
Once the U.S. had been defeated on the battlefield in Vietnam and mass protests had ended, many former SDSers reconciled themselves to the capitalist system. Tom Hayden, for example, went on to become a well-known California Democrat and state senator. Many other leading lights from the “generation of ’68” went to work for Democratic Party mayors who oversee the oppression of the working class and oppressed in major urban centers. Former radicals also people the union bureaucracies and liberal civil liberties outfits, as well as the Democratic Party itself. Most recently, Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson and others got involved in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Obama, having been vetted and approved by the ruling class, is about to assume the role of overseer of the whole plantation.
The Republicans had attempted to make electoral hay out of Obama’s acquaintance with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, a luminary for many new SDSers. Chicago machine Democrat and mayor Richard M. Daley (whose father unleashed the police on the ’68 protests) testified to Ayers’ “rehabilitation”: “This is 2008, people make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life” (New York Times, 4 October 2008). It is also the case that a section of the ruling class will never forgive the likes of Ayers and Dohrn, no matter how “rehabilitated” they are by other sections of the bourgeoisie with whom they have made their peace. Even more vicious has been the continuing racist persecution of former Panthers, not least Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost death row political prisoner (see “D.A. Petitions Supreme Court to Reinstate Death Penalty,” p. 2). The racist rulers have long memories. Believe it: they seek to stamp out even the hint of the militant challenge, however politically flawed, which faced them during the social explosions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Our model is not the confused, eclectic radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s but rather the Bolsheviks who led the 1917 Russian Revolution. Alienated radical students have no social power per se; they can, however, be won to the fight for a revolutionary workers party, one that struggles for the political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and for workers’ state power. Today the fight for revolutionary consciousness is surely an uphill battle, but a necessary one. There is a massive gulf between this understanding and that of the liberal politics, including their more “militant” face, of the present SDS.
Commentary
I have spilled plenty of ink over the past year or so discussing the ‘fresh’ breeze that has come through the political atmosphere as a result of the Obama whirlwind. I have, endlessly it seems, compared this phenomena to the one of my youth in the 1960s, the election and truncated presidency of John F. Kennedy. A large piece of that comparison has been the way that today’s youth, especially college students, have gravitated toward Obama in the hope of getting out of the abyss of the past eight years. Fair enough, for now. Although today I am older and wiser and therefore cannot join the young in their enthusiasms I will nevertheless stick to my position that I have held over this past period of seeing this political awakening as a first positive step toward an understanding for the need for socialist solutions after the Obama ship runs aground.
That said, one must recognize that today is not the 1960’s and that history does not (and as a rule should not) repeat itself. Nevertheless one organization that was pivotal in the student struggle s of the 1960’s, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has been resurrected over the past few years and therefore is subject to comment on as a link between the generations. Below is an article gleaned from the “Young Spartacus” pages of “Workers Vanguard”, Number 927, dated January 2, 2009 that polemicizes against today’s SDS and also provides some information about the history the 1960’s organization, its aims, achievements and failures. This article provides a good place to start a discussion about the way that socialists can tap into the political energy on today’s campuses.
As the article makes clear today’s SDS makes no pretense to be a socialist organization, has a merely marginal critique of contemporary American society and on the face of it does not rise to the level of politics that build the old SDS. Some of these shortcomings appears to be done willfully so. The earlier SDS faced that same problem, a problem that I argue today’s SDS will willy-nilly be forced to face. Either SDS will make serious anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critiques of American society and take actions based on those understandings or fold its tent. Look, generations of political activists, young and old, have broken their teeth trying to position themselves just slightly to the left of the Democratic Party or act as an ‘outside’ pressure on that organization. The hard reality, my young friends, is that if that is to be the fate of today’s SDS then the Young Democrats can do it better, have a history of doing this kind of donkey work (no pun intended, I do not think). And have jobs to offer.
However, that is music for the future. Right now serious, mainly liberal (hey we all started out from that position back in the days), students have to develop their critiques and march to a different drummer than that of the Young Democrats. I would argue that there is plenty of room for an all-inclusive socialist student organization where individual students and organizations (including the dreaded ‘vanguard’ organizations that everyone runs in fear of) can fight for their programs and unite on individual actions that are collectively agreed upon. One of the abiding sorrows of the old “New Left”, as the struggle in SDS intensified, is that an issue that never really got fought out was building this kind of organization. Not as a pro-socialist organization, any way. Read the article and think about this a bit.
SDS Old & New
From Tepid Liberalism to Radicalism and Back Again
(Young Spartacus pages)
A “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 2006, has mushroomed on campuses across the country. This heterogeneous lash-up pounded the pavement to bring out voters for the Democratic Party (see “UCLA SDS Hitches Skateboard to Obama Bandwagon,” p. 5), but it has also occupied military recruitment centers. Disdainful of “ideology” and dominated by hysterical liberal anti-Communists, the new SDS sticks together by shunning political debate in favor of “politically correct” platitudes about democracy. So, for example, SDS’s voluminous “Who We Are” statement does not take a position on a single concrete political issue (studentsforademocraticsociety.org, 2007). Veterans of the early SDS, including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and Mike Klonsky, have rallied around the new SDS, giving talks and raising money, as well as holding their own tepid liberal protests and nostalgic conferences under the auspices of a refounded Movement for a Democratic Society.
So, what’s in a name? SDS cofounder Pat Korte explained, “The reason we chose to keep the name SDS is because it accurately describes us (we are students for a democratic society)” (“The New SDS: Towards a Radical Youth Movement,” CounterPunch, 10 July 2006). What being “for a democratic society” means in racist, capitalist America becomes clear from a look at SDSers’ activities. Having gained some experience at the business end of a nightstick, the original SDS was known for its petty-bourgeois radical “off the pig” rhetoric—but the new SDS in Boston went on hunger strike in support of security guards at Harvard! Former SDS News Bulletin coeditor and UCLA SDS honcho Dave Shukla wants to braintrust the Feds, who witchhunted the first SDS, by “developing a model for mass participation and engagement with institutional design and policy formation for each agency and program in the federal government” (“Left Forum 2008 Speaker Bio,” leftforum.org, undated). At Rutgers, SDS has taken up local New Jersey gerrymandering so “each [ward] gets to elect it’s OWN Council person to represent their neighborhood” and “the student community will get the representation it deserves” (Tent State University/Students for a Democratic Society Facebook page, undated).
The institutions of bourgeois democracy are institutions of capitalist class rule with which the bourgeoisie dupes, defrauds and represses working people and the oppressed. SDS’s pushing of “democratic models” diverts young activists into the dead end of bourgeois electoral politics. What unites the liberals in the new SDS with reformists of all varieties is the view that the capitalist system can be made to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. As revolutionary Marxists, we seek to win youth to building a revolutionary workers party that can lead the working class in the struggle to overthrow the whole rotten capitalist system and lay the basis for an egalitarian, communist society.
Pushing the myth that communism destroyed the first SDS, the new SDS’s leadership raises the spectre of “sectarian takeovers” and “totalitarian principles” in the service of liberal anti-communism. Voicing her opposition to members of the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization being in SDS, New York SDS honcho Rachel Haut told Platypus magazine: “I think it is inappropriate to have conversations about ideological differences when we still have Maoists in the organization. Why should we be having these conversations with them, including them in the discussion, if their ideology is in direct opposition to building a democratic society?” (September 2008). Who needs the House Committee on Un-American Activities when you have the new SDS! The Workers World Party, Freedom Road Socialist Organization and other reformists work in SDS anyway, but this says less about SDS’s “non-sectarianism” than about the reformists’ toothless politics. They must feel right at home with the new SDS’s parochial campus activism and Democratic Party lesser-evilism.
Forty years ago, Students for a Democratic Society played a prominent role in protests at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. The dirty, losing Vietnam War, initiated and escalated under Democratic Party presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was a burning issue. Most of the protesters in Chicago in 1968 opposed the Democratic Party as a capitalist party presiding over social injustice. As Kirkpatrick Sale described in SDS, his well-known history of the organization, SDSers rejected “as usual the idea of mass marches but [were] doubly scornful of any project mired in electoral politics.” SDSers propagandized and organized actions against the Democratic Party and raised general hell in the city. For that, they were arrested, savagely beaten, and one young man was shot to death, all under the aegis of the Democratic Party city administration of the infamous Daley machine.
Last August, the new SDS mobilized for protests at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. They did so as part of the Alliance for Real Democracy, whose stated intention was “to convince and pressure Democrats to work for just and progressive policies at home and abroad” (realdemocracy2008.org, undated).
Ostensibly more radical chapters of SDS, including the one from Grand Rapids, Michigan, stated in their call to action, “If we, as a radical movement, are going to attempt to pressure the Democratic Party candidates, the time to do so is before they are elected” (“SDS Call to Action: Disrupt the DNC,” undated). The new SDS is a far cry from the iconic New Left organization of the 1960s, but the history of the old SDS sheds light on the new one.
Heirs of Stodgy Cold Warriors
While the first SDS emerged as part of a radicalization of U.S. society, the new SDS reflects a rightward social shift in a period of little struggle. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a grave defeat for working people and the oppressed worldwide. It ushered in a period of bourgeois triumphalism over the “death of communism,” in which social struggle has been limited and isolated. In their works Empire and Multitude, American academic Michael Hardt and his mentor, veteran Italian New Left intellectual Antonio Negri, developed on the bourgeois idea that communism has failed—an idea also embraced by the new SDS. As our article “Empire, Multitude and the ‘Death of Communism’: The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism,” noted:
“Claiming to update Marx, Hardt and Negri jettison the programmatic core of Marxism: proletarian revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. They dismiss the lessons distilled from the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian insurrection, and the subsequent history of the revolutionary workers movement. They deride class war and proletarian power as ‘old, tired and faded’ notions….
“In the late 1930s, following the victory of fascism in Germany and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky observed: ‘As always during epochs of reaction and decay, quacks and charlatans appear on all sides, desirous of revising the whole course of revolutionary thought’ (Transitional Program [1938]). The triumph of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe in the early 1990s has nurtured a new generation of ideological quacks and charlatans. Hardt and Negri peddle their ideological wares to young leftists who, having no sense of the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, accept the subjective outlook that a new world will be won not by uprooting the material reality of oppression but by changing the ideas in people’s heads.”
—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 59, Spring 2006
Dismissing communist revolution as a “failed experiment,” today’s SDSers are left with nothing more than the grubby politics of “lesser evil” capitalism. They are running the film of the first SDS’s radicalization in reverse.
The new SDS’s “democratic” and “anti-authoritarian” rhetoric recapitulates the Cold War anti-Communism that the first SDS broke from. SDS originated as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Moribund by 1960, the LID had served as a handmaiden of the U.S. government in the left and the labor movement, peddling the virtues of “democratic,” “anti-authoritarian” capitalism. Populated by “State Department socialists” such as Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, the LID also counted among its members the labor traitors Victor and Walter Reuther, who rode to power in the United Auto Workers by purging Communists from the union in the 1940s, and Sidney Hook, a former Communist turned “god that failed” supporter of the established order. Hook was a leading light in the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a CIA-funded operation devoted to counteracting the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union.
Despite posturing as champions of democracy in the Cold War, the U.S. imperialists supported right-wing military dictatorships, reactionary regimes and the remnants of European colonial rule around the world. On the home front, in the American South black people faced legal segregation and were deprived of basic rights—a fact publicized by the Soviet Union. The Southern Jim Crow system was based on police/Klan terror against atomized rural sharecroppers, and it had become increasingly anachronistic as industrialization in the American South during and following World War II drew blacks into the working class. By the mid 1950s, black anger at Jim Crow segregation had given birth to the civil rights movement, shattering the climate of Cold War McCarthyism and increasingly polarizing American society.
Seeking to refurbish its image and in response to early struggles, the U.S. capitalist class made some concessions, notably in the Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education that mandated the integration of public schools. But implementation of this ruling proceeded at a snail’s pace. Young liberal activists, black and white, came forward courageously in lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides. Students from the North, defiant in the face of the murder of young civil rights militants, poured into the South to register black voters. In this changed climate, in January 1960 SLID changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society; its membership began to grow.
Early SDS: Confronting Cold War Anti-Communism
The Cuban Revolution coincided with the civil rights movement, reinforcing the appeal of more radical ideas among young activists. In January 1959, Castro’s rebel army overthrew the brutal, corrupt, U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. A petty-bourgeois nationalist, Castro formed a coalition government with venal local bourgeois forces and pledged to protect their interests. However, Castro’s program of land redistribution and the measures taken against Batista’s police torturers alienated Castro’s Cuban bourgeois supporters and the U.S. imperialists, including Eisenhower’s CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, both major stockholders in the United Fruit Company. Eisenhower responded with brute economic pressure to bring Castro’s regime to heel. This pushed Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union. By early 1961, the holdings of the National City Bank, United Fruit, Standard Oil, the sugar barons and the Mafia—as well as the Cuban bourgeoisie—had been expropriated, and the Cuban capitalists were either in exile or in prison.
Facing the unrelenting pressure of U.S. imperialism, the Castro government sought the protection of the Soviet Union. It was compelled under these circumstances to liquidate the bourgeoisie as a class, carrying out a social revolution. Cuba became a bureaucratically deformed workers state in which capitalism had been overthrown but political power was held by a parasitic bureaucratic caste fundamentally sharing the nationalist political program of “socialism in one country” with the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. In 1961, newly elected president Kennedy launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, attempting to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and establish a puppet regime. Leftist youth were inspired by the Cubans’ defense of their revolution against U.S. imperialism. However, other guerrilla insurgencies aiming to overthrow right-wing capitalist regimes in Latin America were crushed with murderous repression.
In response to the Bay of Pigs invasion, SDSers posed the question “whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways” (The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, July 1962). Early SDSers were increasingly at odds with the Cold War-era anti-Communism of their parent organization, which they rightly saw as a loyalty oath to the powers that be. The Port Huron Statement, adopted at SDS’s June 1962 National Convention, sought “to oppose communism without contributing to the common fear of associations and public actions.” It criticized the Cold War as “not sufficient for the creation of appropriate policies with which to relate to and counter communist movements in the world” and argued that “the American military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism.” A delegate of the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing Committee was allowed to attend the convention as an observer.
Even these small steps away from McCarthyism were too much for the LID elders, who hauled the SDS leadership into a trial for not being anti-Communist enough, then cut all funds to SDS and changed the locks on the SDS office. After much organizational wrangling, SDS and the LID patched things up. Although moving away from the dried-up LID social democrats, SDS had not fundamentally broken from lesser-evil Democratic Party pressure politics, drawing disaffected youth back into the two-party shell game and perpetuating illusions in bourgeois democracy. In the 1964 elections, a wing of SDS campaigned to go “part of the way with LBJ,” maintaining that the Democratic Party platform was “superior to any passed by a major national party since the first New Deal” and that a victory by arch-conservative Barry Goldwater would spell disaster (Sale, SDS).
But the times, they were a-changin’. In 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) broke out against the Berkeley administration’s attempts to censor political life on campus by barring reds and other civil rights activists (“outside agitators”) and restricting the activities of student organizations. Facing reprisals from both the liberal campus administration and Democratic governor Pat Brown, FSM activists defended their right to “hear any person speak in any open area of the campus at any time on any subject” (see “The Student Revolt at Berkeley,” Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965). The FSM’s victory fueled further student radicalization across the country and undermined illusions in the good offices of campus administrations and the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, the escalation of the imperialist war in Vietnam meant more youth were being drafted, adding a direct material interest against American imperialist aims to the moral outrage felt by student activists. In 1965, SDS initiated the first nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. To many LID liberals, protesting a war against Communism was as bad as supporting the Communists outright. Furthermore, SDS’s call for the march included no anti-Communist exclusion clause. With a rush of new members and continued radicalization, SDS would abolish its anti-Communist exclusion clause at its 1965 summer convention, and soon afterward it split from the LID entirely.
Radicalization: the Civil Rights Movement
When the civil rights movement spread to the North, fighters for black freedom confronted not Southern legal segregation, but the vicious inequality and racial oppression embedded in the American capitalist system. The struggle for fundamental change in the conditions of black life—for real equality, for jobs, decent housing and adequate schools—collided head-on with the realities of American capitalism. The Northern ghettos were exploding in protest. At the 1964 Democratic Party convention, the Johnson/Humphrey machine crushed the attempt by delegates from the anti-racist Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the Jim Crow Mississippi delegation.
The civil rights movement was fracturing as young militants broke from the Democratic Party and the liberal pacifism exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., who said of the Watts ghetto upheaval, “It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them” (New York Times, 16 August 1965). As we wrote in “Black Power—Class Power”:
“In contrast to the reform program of the civil rights movement, the demands of the black masses are necessarily and inherently class demands, and demands which the ruling class cannot meet…. It is this transition which is represented by the black power slogan. Its popularization represents the repudiation of tokenism, liberal tutelage, reliance on the federal government, and the non-violent philosophy of moral suasion. In this sense, therefore, black power is class power, and should be supported by all socialist forces.”
—Spartacist West No. 8, 30 September 1966, reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), September 1978
At the same time, we warned of the “black power” slogan, in the absence of a broader class fight:
“It can be used by petty bourgeois black nationalist elements who want to slice the social cake along color rather than class lines and to promote reactionary color mysticism. More seriously, it can be degraded to mean mere support for black politicians operating within the system.”
This was a prescient warning. As struggle ebbed, such was exactly the bill of goods sold to the black masses.
Co-optation was one weapon of the racist rulers; extermination was another. The best elements of radicalized black youth drawn to the Black Panther Party faced a systematic government campaign of assassination, police provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment, including through the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program. The Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and rejection of the Marxist understanding of the role of the working class left them vulnerable to state repression. In the face of this repression, the Panthers turned to the right, into the orbit of the reformist Communist Party and its lawyers, as well as of the Democratic Party. (See “Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era,” Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], September 1978.)
The Vietnam War
Today, the SDS of the second mobilization displays chauvinist support for the forces of U.S. imperialism. In a grotesque testament to “support our troops” patriotism, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, chapter of SDS “collected and sent care packages to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is now going to be a monthly event…” (SDS News Bulletin No. 4, May/June 2008). The University of North Carolina-Asheville chapter set out white flags commemorating U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq together with shoes representing Iraqis killed under the American occupation (“UNCA SDS Iraq Body Count,” SDS News Bulletin No. 1, October 2007). SDS’s University of Chicago chapter has close relations with Platypus, an organization known for not opposing the occupation of Iraq (see “Platypus Group: Pseudo-Marxist, Pro-Imperialist, Academic Claptrap,” Workers Vanguard No. 908, 15 February 2008).
We stand for the military defense of the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan against the brutal U.S. imperialist occupiers. As revolutionary Marxists, we side with oppressed countries against the predatory imperialist powers. But unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was also another element at work during the Vietnam War: there was a socially progressive character to those who fought against the imperialist butchers. The heroic Vietnamese had carried out a social revolution, albeit bureaucratically deformed, overturning capitalism in the North, and they were fighting to extend this to the South. We demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces and called for the military defense of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces, raising revolutionary slogans, including “Victory for the Vietnamese Revolution…No negotiations!” and “All Indochina must go Communist!”
As U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, draft resistance spread among militant youth and SDS members. We oppose the draft, demanding “not one man, not one penny” for the imperialist military. But in the event of a draft, as we argued in “You Will Go!”, adapted from a position paper we put forward in SDS, we oppose the voluntary purging of radicals from the army, which would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. Instead, we said young militants should go with the working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation (see Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968).
As opposition to the war grew, more and more young activists stopped chanting for “peace” and began calling for “Victory to the NLF!” As we explained in the founding document of our youth organization, Youth, Class and Party (adopted in 1971; reprinted as a pamphlet in December 1974):
“When the liberal establishment backed the imperialist adventure in Vietnam, it drove the radical student movement to the left and opened the path to revolutionary politics.
“As the Vietnam war drove the New Left away from the liberals, the New Left began to re-examine the ‘Communist bloc’ and came to identify with Stalinism in its ‘militant Third World’ form. New Lefters did not consciously identify with the legacy of Stalinism as embodied in the Soviet Union. Instead they created a false dichotomy between the conservatism and opportunism of Soviet Stalinism and the apparent militancy of ‘Third World’ Stalinist governments and leaderships like those of China, Cuba and the NLF.”
Several variants of Maoism would attract a following in SDS. One was Progressive Labor Party (PL), a left split from the pro-Moscow Communist Party. PL put forward a crude working-class line against the blatant petty-bourgeois politics of Mike Klonsky’s wing of SDS, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which advanced a petty-bourgeois notion of sectoralist struggle, according to which the Vietnamese would fight for their liberation and independence, blacks in the U.S. for theirs, women for theirs, and so forth. By RYM’s lights, the role of revolutionary-minded students was to act as propaganda bureaus and support groups for these various “vanguards.” Ultimately, this sectoralism was just a “radical” version of standard ward-heeling-type Democratic Party constituency politics, with the working class relegated at best to another “oppressed” constituency rather than the agency for fundamental social change. Various Maoist outfits contended within and emerged from RYM, including what would become today’s Revolutionary Communist Party.
Maoism did not represent a break from Stalinist class collaboration, but rather “Khrushchevism under the gun” of U.S. imperialism. Seeking to win young radicals to a Trotskyist program, we exposed the Chinese Maoists’ repeated attempts to form a reactionary, anti-Soviet bloc with U.S. imperialism at the expense of social struggles around the world. This alliance was sealed by Mao’s 1972 meeting with U.S. war criminal Richard Nixon in Beijing as American warplanes rained death and destruction on Vietnam, and it eventually destroyed the Maoist movement for all intents and purposes within the “belly of the U.S. beast.”
As we stated in Youth, Class and Party: “Only by replacing the Stalinist parties with parties unalterably committed to internationalism can the power of the Sino-Soviet states be used to further the struggle for world socialism. Recognizing that collectivized property and economic planning constitute a major qualitative gain for the workers in the Sino-Soviet states, we unconditionally defend these property forms against imperialist attacks and capitalist encroachment.” Uniquely on the left, today we uphold the same Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense and proletarian political revolution for the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Student Radicals in Search of Revolutionary Program
By the end of the spring of 1968, universities had been shut down and reopened, administration buildings occupied and then abandoned. This did not stop the Vietnam War—the government escalated troop deployments to Vietnam. Radical youth within SDS were becoming increasingly restive with student-centered politics. Clearly, there was a limit to “student power.” The question was posed: if not students, then what force could bring social change? The French general strike of May 1968 gave an answer. This incipient workers revolution in France exposed the charlatanry of an earlier generation of “post-Marxist” ideologues such as Herbert Marcuse, who had written off the revolutionary potential of the working class. May ’68 forced the New Left to confront the key question of class, laying the basis for new layers of youth to be won to revolutionary Marxism.
SDS’s rejection of the “Old Left” was in large measure a response to the boring reformist politics of the Stalinist Communist Party, which had been deeply ensconced in Democratic Party politics for decades and whose idea of black struggle was to follow the lead of the “respectable,” religious black leaders. The most widely known self-styled Trotskyist organization at the time, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), was moving rapidly to the right when our founding cadres were expelled as a left-wing opposition in 1963-64. The SWP and its National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) gave Trotskyism a bad name as they promoted “peaceful, legal” single-issue antiwar peace crawls in order to make a reformist alliance with the defeatist wing of the U.S. bourgeoisie and social-democratic trade-union bureaucrats. The SWP’s alliance with liberal imperialists was sealed in blood when Spartacist supporters along with PLers and SDSers were beaten and expelled from a 1971 NPAC conference for protesting the presence of ruling-class politician Vance Hartke on the platform. (See “The Vietnam Antiwar Movement and the National Peace Action Coalition,” WV No. 920, 12 September 2008).
Our Trotskyist program won a hearing within SDS, and the forebear of today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs was founded as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) in SDS in early 1970. The RMC sought to win radical-minded students to a revolutionary, internationalist and proletarian communist program. This included fighting for an understanding of the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world’s first successful workers revolution, which pulled Russia out of the bloody slaughter of World War I, expropriated the capitalist class, and placed Russia’s economy under the control of democratic workers rule through soviets (workers councils). The RMC also sought to lay out Trotsky’s understanding of the material roots of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution (see our pamphlet, The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited).
In the summer of 1969 at the SDS National Convention in Chicago, facing the prospect of Progressive Labor’s positions gaining a majority, a clique within the SDS National Collective (NC), including Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky, engineered a split, lining up Black Panthers and others to race-bait PL supporters. When PL refused to take the bait, the NC splitters led their followers out of the conference. We remained with the PL-led Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) wing of SDS, based on its orientation, however crude, to the proletariat. But while PL correctly opposed the RYM splitters’ sectoralism, it also advanced (as it continues to do) a line of indifference toward special oppression, for example, racial and sexual oppression. We fought for a proletarian orientation on this question—we issued position papers within SDS, arguing for a Leninist vanguard party to bring the power of the working class to bear in the interests of all the oppressed (see “‘Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics’,” WV No. 897, 31 August 2007, and “‘The Fight for Women’s Liberation’,” WV No. 910, 14 March 2008).
PL was vulnerable to our Trotskyist criticism, but ultimately they clung to their reformist “minimum/maximum program,” combining “communist” rhetoric with reformist practice. We warned: “By attempting to build on social guilt, moralism, and empiricism, the three most obnoxious and defective characteristics of the American left, PL creates the conditions for its own defeat and the continuous splits to the right…. Without a clearly reasoned theoretical explanation for its break with Stalinist theory, without an institution of real inner party democracy, and without a transitional program which bridges the gap between ‘rubber mats’ [PL’s concrete demands for workers struggle on campus were usually grotesquely minimal] and the dictatorship of the proletariat, PL is bound to create within itself right wing splits and transmit the same process to SDS” (“Final SDS Convention?”, Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter No. 6, March 1971). Indeed, PL eventually “led” its WSA-SDS in retreat into outright liberal idealism, campus parochialism and ordinary reformism.
Terrorism and Communism
As we wrote in Youth, Class and Party:
“The break-up of the New Left, most evident in the 1969 SDS split, was caused by the inadequacy of New Left politics in the face of the general social crisis of the late ’60’s. With the collapse of the traditional New Left, there remained three general political tendencies on the left. One is an attempt to re-establish the ties between the left and the liberal political establishment, now possible because of the deep split in the ruling class over the Vietnam war. The second is a policy of confrontation with the armed forces of the state and terrorism practiced in the name of Third World nationalism. The third tendency is that of proletarian socialism of which the Revolutionary Communist Youth is an important element.”
Lacking a proletarian strategy, and desperate to do something, some in the RYM wing ended up in the Weather Underground. The Weathermen would conduct acts of individual terror that were self-defeating and, more times than not, far more dangerous to themselves than to the bourgeoisie. Such a program was no break from liberalism, but in fact a logical conclusion, in extremis, of the liberal program of bearing “moral witness” to the government’s crimes. The Weathermen’s strategy was futile; at the same time, their targets were representatives of imperialism and capitalist oppression. As comrade Trotsky wrote of a German youth who had assassinated a Nazi:
“We Marxists consider the tactic of individual terror inexpedient in the tasks of the liberating struggle of the proletariat as well as oppressed nationalities. A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing avengers even though they have been unable to discover the correct road.”
—“For Grynszpan: Against Fascist Pogrom Gangs and Stalinist Scoundrels,” February 1939
While politically in opposition to the Weathermen, we fought for their defense, insisting that they were “an integral part of the radical movement.” We wrote:
“The real crime vis-a-vis terror politics and heroic individualism is that it allows the revolutionary energies of some of the movement’s most talented, dedicated people to be channeled into futile and self-destructive actions. It is our job to seek to redirect these energies into genuinely revolutionary directions.”
—“Terrorism and Communism,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 17-18, August-September 1970
Other so-called “socialists” refused to defend the Weathermen and often even joined the witchhunting chorus against them. The Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party both denounced this small, isolated, and persecuted outfit of misguided radical youth. For its part, PL branded the Weathermen “police agents.”
Although the new SDS is divided over whether the Weathermen were heroic, criminal or simply irrelevant, the Weathermen’s politics have a pale echo in the new SDS’s “acts of resistance” which, even at their most militant, lack both the social power and political program required to challenge the class rule of the capitalists. Like much of the “anti-globalization” movement, these protests are based on “the dangerously false idea that the capitalist U.S. is or could be pressured into being a democracy ‘for the people’ if only the anti-globalization youth were determined or creative enough to make the rulers pay attention…. Lacking a perspective of mobilizing the working class against the rule of capital, such confrontations with the cops amount to the streetfighting face of reformism” (“What Strategy to Defeat Imperialism?” WV No. 817, 9 January 2004).
In the Pacific Northwest, SDSers and others have repeatedly blocked military convoys, delaying shipments of war materiel to Iraq. These courageous protesters have been arrested, beaten and pepper-sprayed, but they lack the social power and political program needed to stop the U.S. imperialists’ overwhelming military might. Despite our vast political differences, we revolutionary Marxist youth defend SDS when it runs afoul of the state (see “UCLA: 16 Arrested at SDS/SWF Protest—Drop the Charges! For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!” WV No. 918, 1 August 2008, and “Drop Charges Against Evergreen 6! Reinstate Olympia SDS!” WV No. 914, 9 May 2008).
SDS Today: Second Time Farce…
Once the U.S. had been defeated on the battlefield in Vietnam and mass protests had ended, many former SDSers reconciled themselves to the capitalist system. Tom Hayden, for example, went on to become a well-known California Democrat and state senator. Many other leading lights from the “generation of ’68” went to work for Democratic Party mayors who oversee the oppression of the working class and oppressed in major urban centers. Former radicals also people the union bureaucracies and liberal civil liberties outfits, as well as the Democratic Party itself. Most recently, Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson and others got involved in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Obama, having been vetted and approved by the ruling class, is about to assume the role of overseer of the whole plantation.
The Republicans had attempted to make electoral hay out of Obama’s acquaintance with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, a luminary for many new SDSers. Chicago machine Democrat and mayor Richard M. Daley (whose father unleashed the police on the ’68 protests) testified to Ayers’ “rehabilitation”: “This is 2008, people make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life” (New York Times, 4 October 2008). It is also the case that a section of the ruling class will never forgive the likes of Ayers and Dohrn, no matter how “rehabilitated” they are by other sections of the bourgeoisie with whom they have made their peace. Even more vicious has been the continuing racist persecution of former Panthers, not least Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost death row political prisoner (see “D.A. Petitions Supreme Court to Reinstate Death Penalty,” p. 2). The racist rulers have long memories. Believe it: they seek to stamp out even the hint of the militant challenge, however politically flawed, which faced them during the social explosions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Our model is not the confused, eclectic radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s but rather the Bolsheviks who led the 1917 Russian Revolution. Alienated radical students have no social power per se; they can, however, be won to the fight for a revolutionary workers party, one that struggles for the political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and for workers’ state power. Today the fight for revolutionary consciousness is surely an uphill battle, but a necessary one. There is a massive gulf between this understanding and that of the liberal politics, including their more “militant” face, of the present SDS.
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