Thursday, October 10, 2013

From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949-
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero


Markin comment (repost from 2012):

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 974
18 February 2011
Black History Month
 
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero
 
One of the many contributions of our comrade Martha Phillips was her research and presentation on Harriet Tubman, a hero in the fight to smash slavery (“Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom,” Women and Revolution No. 32, Winter 1986-87, reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 5, February 1988). Martha was tragically murdered in Moscow in February 1992 under suspicious circumstances, as she led our struggle to bring the authentic communism of Lenin and Trotsky to Soviet workers facing the ravages of capitalist counterrevolution. In honor of Martha Phillips, and to commemorate Black History Month, we print below selections from her salute to Harriet Tubman, which provides a succinct analysis of the intersection of race, sex and class in America.
“General Tubman,” as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. A fugitive slave, Tubman played a crucial role in the Underground Railroad and became known as the Moses of her people. In the Civil War, she was a scout and spy for the Union Army and led 300 black soldiers in a military action on South Carolina’s Combahee River in June 1863. Tubman saw early on that the war for the union must become a war to free the slaves. But the promise of black freedom offered by the Union Army’s victory over the South was subsequently betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, marked by the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. This betrayal was cruelly experienced by the impoverished Tubman, who suffered physical attack and brutal segregation and was compelled to wage a decades-long battle for the pension that her Civil War service entitled her to. As Tubman acidly stated: “You wouldn’t think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds.”
To learn more about Martha Phillips, see Prometheus Research Series No. 6, “Selected Speeches and Writings in Honor of Three Women Leaders of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist): Martha Phillips, Susan Adams, Elizabeth King Robertson.” To order, send check for $7.00 to Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116.
* * *
The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom…she lived in poverty all her life....
Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution—the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the economic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression….
Marx said, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the “American dream” is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx’s words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is the race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves.
Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, “Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!” to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolutionary party.
WV 974
18 February 2011
·
·
·
Black History Month
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
Workers Vanguard No. 974
18 February 2011
Black History Month
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero
One of the many contributions of our comrade Martha Phillips was her research and presentation on Harriet Tubman, a hero in the fight to smash slavery (“Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom,” Women and Revolution No. 32, Winter 1986-87, reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 5, February 1988). Martha was tragically murdered in Moscow in February 1992 under suspicious circumstances, as she led our struggle to bring the authentic communism of Lenin and Trotsky to Soviet workers facing the ravages of capitalist counterrevolution. In honor of Martha Phillips, and to commemorate Black History Month, we print below selections from her salute to Harriet Tubman, which provides a succinct analysis of the intersection of race, sex and class in America.
“General Tubman,” as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. A fugitive slave, Tubman played a crucial role in the Underground Railroad and became known as the Moses of her people. In the Civil War, she was a scout and spy for the Union Army and led 300 black soldiers in a military action on South Carolina’s Combahee River in June 1863. Tubman saw early on that the war for the union must become a war to free the slaves. But the promise of black freedom offered by the Union Army’s victory over the South was subsequently betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, marked by the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. This betrayal was cruelly experienced by the impoverished Tubman, who suffered physical attack and brutal segregation and was compelled to wage a decades-long battle for the pension that her Civil War service entitled her to. As Tubman acidly stated: “You wouldn’t think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds.”
To learn more about Martha Phillips, see Prometheus Research Series No. 6, “Selected Speeches and Writings in Honor of Three Women Leaders of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist): Martha Phillips, Susan Adams, Elizabeth King Robertson.” To order, send check for $7.00 to Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116.
* * *
The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom…she lived in poverty all her life....
Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution—the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the economic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression….
Marx said, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the “American dream” is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx’s words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is the race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves.
Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, “Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!” to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolutionary party.
Workers Vanguard No. 974
WV 974
18 February 2011
·
·
·
Black History Month
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
Workers Vanguard No. 974
18 February 2011
Black History Month
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero
One of the many contributions of our comrade Martha Phillips was her research and presentation on Harriet Tubman, a hero in the fight to smash slavery (“Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom,” Women and Revolution No. 32, Winter 1986-87, reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 5, February 1988). Martha was tragically murdered in Moscow in February 1992 under suspicious circumstances, as she led our struggle to bring the authentic communism of Lenin and Trotsky to Soviet workers facing the ravages of capitalist counterrevolution. In honor of Martha Phillips, and to commemorate Black History Month, we print below selections from her salute to Harriet Tubman, which provides a succinct analysis of the intersection of race, sex and class in America.
“General Tubman,” as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. A fugitive slave, Tubman played a crucial role in the Underground Railroad and became known as the Moses of her people. In the Civil War, she was a scout and spy for the Union Army and led 300 black soldiers in a military action on South Carolina’s Combahee River in June 1863. Tubman saw early on that the war for the union must become a war to free the slaves. But the promise of black freedom offered by the Union Army’s victory over the South was subsequently betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, marked by the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. This betrayal was cruelly experienced by the impoverished Tubman, who suffered physical attack and brutal segregation and was compelled to wage a decades-long battle for the pension that her Civil War service entitled her to. As Tubman acidly stated: “You wouldn’t think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds.”
To learn more about Martha Phillips, see Prometheus Research Series No. 6, “Selected Speeches and Writings in Honor of Three Women Leaders of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist): Martha Phillips, Susan Adams, Elizabeth King Robertson.” To order, send check for $7.00 to Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116.
* * *
The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom…she lived in poverty all her life....
Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution—the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the economic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression….
Marx said, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the “American dream” is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx’s words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is the race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves.
Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, “Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!” to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolutionary party.
Workers Vanguard No. 974
WV 974
18 February 2011
·
·
·
Black History Month
Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero
·
·
·
·
·
·
·

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