Showing posts with label civil rights movement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civil rights movement. Show all posts

Friday, February 10, 2017

*The Black Liberation Struggle- Up Close And Personal- A "Workers Vanguard" Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)for background information for this article.


February Is Black History Month

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

How the Liberals and Reformists Derailed the Struggle for Integration

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard Nos. 830 and 831, 6 August and 3 September 2004.


We print below a forum, slightly edited for publication, given by comrade Don Alexander of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee at a regional educational in New York City on April 3.

I had to take a little time off in preparing this talk to keep from getting too involved in it, and comrade Karen and I went to hear a Southern liberal academic, who had written a book on the history of intermarriage in the U.S., particularly the striking down of the laws on the books that culminated in the 1967 Loving case. It was a quite interesting talk, a lot of anecdotes. In listening to his presentation, I noticed that the words "slavery," "segregation," "racism" weren't mentioned once. That's a pretty tall task in America, especially when you're talking about black-white intermarriage, because it's really the question of the persistence of caste. They can't deal with it. It really goes to the heart of this racist capitalist system. He was a rather charming gentleman, as they say.

There is a lot of talk today about multiculturalism, diversity, whiteness and "racialized subjects" and other liberal jargon that essentially attempts to erase the centrality of anti-black racism and black oppression in racist capitalist America. Recently, in preparing this talk, I read something professor Barbara Fields of Columbia University wrote. She was one of the few professors who endorsed our rally at Columbia against the Conservative Club's anti-affirmative action "bake sale." She made the point that all of these academic types are talking about "whiteness" and all this stuff—how the Irish became white—but they never talk about how "African and African-Caribbean immigrants became black." I thought that was a very interesting comment.

The Spartacist League has consistently, over the years, fought for a class-struggle program for black liberation as an inseparable part of the fight for the emancipation of labor from capitalist exploitation. Our program flows from a Marxist understanding of the nature of class society, of the role of class struggle as a motor force of history and the necessity of working-class rule. Capitalists like to dress up their rule in terms of general abstract slogans, pretending that they represent the "general will," the "people" and the like. But in fact, they have an executive committee that runs their affairs to perpetuate their brutal class rule, and that's called the state. This hideously oppressive and unequal society has perfected the machinery of deception and repression. There's a huge mountain of lies claiming that the U.S. is an "open society," a shining beacon of democracy where there are no classes and everybody is either in the middle class or becoming middle class, and where racism has largely been eliminated through civil rights laws, which have leveled the playing field. I know that if I keep on going in this vein you'll run me out of here, because it does make your blood boil.

If you read our publications, Workers Vanguard, Black History, Women and Revolution (which continues to be incorporated in Workers Vanguard and Spartacist), you'll see that we apply a revolutionary program to fight against national, sexual, racial and all oppression because that is part of our fight for world socialist revolution. In particular, when we raise the slogan for black liberation through socialist revolution, it sums up our strategic tasks. It encapsulates our fight for a third American revolution, a workers revolution that will put an end to this very brutal, decadent and violent ruling class. The realization of the age-long dream of black freedom, that is, the complete smashing of the color bar, can only occur through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. This means confronting the unfinished business of the Civil War—finishing the Civil War, which was a social revolution that destroyed slavery; but the social relations of anti-black racism were incorporated into the capitalist mode of production.

I want to cite part of what the veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser wrote, in particular in his lectures of November 1953, "The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution." We had a comment about comrade Fraser when we put out the bulletin, "In Memoriam Richard S. Fraser" (Prometheus Research Series No. 3 [1990]). We wrote that

"Although he was hampered by little formal scholarly training, his Marxist understanding and his broad experience in militant struggles with black workers sharpened his insight into the lessons of history. His dedicated study sprang from his conviction that in order to forge a program for black liberation, it is necessary to study the social forces that created the American institution of racial oppression.... To Fraser, understanding the roots of black oppression in the United States was no armchair activity; he carried his theory of Revolutionary Integration into struggle."

And that's really a very appropriate introduction to what I have to say.

We often quote Karl Marx's statement that "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." Fraser argued against the prevailing liberal ideology of his day that "prejudice" is the root of black oppression. He said:

"The racial division of society was born with capitalism and will die only with the death of this last system of exploitation. Before capitalism there was no race concept. There was no skin color exploitation, there was no race prejudice, there was no idea of superiority and inferiority based upon physical characteristics.

"It was the advent of Negro chattel slavery in the western hemisphere which first divided society into races. In a measure the whole supremacy of western capitalism is founded upon this modern chattel slavery. The primary accumulation of capital which was the foundation of the industrial revolution was accrued largely from the slave trade."

This was written in 1953 and is a powerful scientific, materialist analysis that has stood the test of time. It is particularly important because we hear this newfangled stuff about how race is somehow a "socially constructed category." Fraser also talked about how race was "socially constructed" and noted that as a biological category, race doesn't exist. But he emphasized the unique racial oppression of the American black population, the stigmatization of skin color, which was a product of the system of chattel slavery and was grafted onto the subsequent capitalist system.

Black Oppression and Capitalist Society

What are we fighting for? You have to look at the situation in this country where there is not a class-conscious proletariat today. The proletariat has yet to declare its political independence from the parties of the capitalist ruling class, thanks to the multiple betrayals of the reformists in this country, the petty-bourgeois liberal spokesmen for the black masses and, especially, the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which works overtime to derail any serious struggle.

It was over one hundred years after the Civil War that black people got the right to vote, and today black former prisoners have to fall on their knees before Florida governor Jeb Bush to beg for their rights back. This is a reflection of the fact that under capitalism, democratic rights are reversible and that every step of the way we have to fight.

The class divisions in this society are increasingly sharp and hard to paper over. Therefore, the lies become more brazen and the repression more severe. The U.S. imperialists say that those who are resisting the imperialist occupation of Iraq simply don't want to see that freedom has taken root. If you're standing in an employment line here with no prospects for a job in sight—which is the fate of millions—this will sound pretty hollow because these sweet-sounding words of "freedom," "equality" and "democracy" are coming out of mouths of the parasitic ruling class of the most brutal imperialist murderers in history. No, what they mean by "freedom" is the right to starve and to have their boots ground into your face. We hear a lot today about how opportunities are there if you just have the pluck and the patience to grasp them instead of whining for a handout. You hear a kinder, gentler version of this coming from black capitalist politicians and their mouthpieces, who complain that black people don't stick together like other races, they engage in "self-sabotage," and they hold each other back. You also hear the N-word, which lends legitimacy to this lie of black inferiority and is a reflection of its internalization. This scapegoating of the oppressed black masses in the name of "black power" or "black pride" is a reflection of petty-bourgeois contempt for the poor and oppressed. It is also an expression of the fact that today the black population, no less than the white population, is increasingly class-divided—in fact, even more so in terms of income and other inequalities within the black population.

Recently, I read a comment made by a Howard University black student who attended the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech—an event that Malcolm X correctly dubbed the "farce on Washington." What she had to say was, perhaps, typical of a certain train of thought: "We are tired of the struggle for equality and we are tired of the struggle for integration.... If the response is positive, we must organize. If the response is negative, we must organize."

This despairing tone is a product of the utter absence of any militant black leadership today and the failure of liberal integrationist programs. It is understandable, but it must be combatted. Consider who spoke at the rally, and you can understand this. Among others, there was the quintessential political hustler, black Democrat Al Sharpton. He railed against the Bush administration, saying that the checks sent to black America have bounced and are coming back marked "insufficient funds." You also had Martin Luther King III preaching a "revolution at the ballot box" in 2004—in other words, vote Democrat. These pro-capitalist hustlers have time and again led anti-racist struggles into the pigsty of bourgeois electoralism and lesser-evilism precisely at the moment when record numbers of black and Latino youth are in jail—when, as one writer describes it, the ghetto and the prisons are on a continuum. In sharp counterposition, we fight to mobilize the power of the multiracial working class—the only class in society which, because of its unique, strategic role in production, can smash this racist capitalist system and establish in its place a collectivized, planned socialist economy that produces for human need and not for profit. This will take a fight to forge a revolutionary leadership of the working class that stands at the head of the struggles of all the oppressed and exploited.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the post-Civil War post-Reconstruction period, you had a certain conservative black leader, Booker T. Washington, who came out openly for segregation, abandoning the fight for social equality. His rise to national prominence came in September 1895 when he delivered a speech at Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition. Basically, his speech told black people to stay "in their place." Here is what Washington asserted that black people are:

"The most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.... In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.... The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly...."

Now, the black nationalists today are cut out of the same cloth. Their bankrupt, petty-bourgeois program of "self-help" and black capitalism is pushed to line their own pockets and defend their own class interests against the ghetto poor. It tells the masses to accept the racist status quo, a product of centuries of racist oppression, and to stay in their so-called place. The Million Man March, organized in 1995 by the black-separatist, anti-woman, anti-Semitic bigot Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, stood in this retrograde tradition. No wonder that march met with favor from Bill Clinton's White House. It was an appeasement of the capitalist exploiters. Meanwhile, the jails are filled with American capitalism's victims, the so-called "surplus population" of black and Latino youth. In New York City alone, nearly one out of two black men is unemployed. In the entire country, 40 percent of black children live in poverty. Black women are the fastest-growing victims of the AIDS epidemic. This is a society characterized by unprecedented, truly monstrous class divisions. This is the reality of color-caste oppression. It is not negated by the partial reconfiguration of this caste with the growth of a black middle class, which finds out very quickly that there is an invisible, but very real, glass ceiling.

It is sickening to hear Colin Powell and other representatives of the U.S. imperialist military, which is soaked from head to foot in the blood of the oppressed around the world, talk about how integrated their killing machine is. This was one of the themes of General Wesley Clark on the campaign trail—especially in front of black audiences. Clark even had the nerve to say that the U.S. Army integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas high school in the bloody battle there in 1957. The truth is otherwise. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was president at the time, had opposed the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. His whole attitude toward the Brown decision was to never publicly support it. He made some really gross comments about overgrown black males sitting alongside white girls. He sent the troops into Little Rock to prevent the black masses from fighting back against the rampaging white racist mobs.

Right now, it is this same supposedly integrated imperialist army that has invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Its racist, colonial occupation has spilled the blood of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, along with increasing numbers of Haitians. We demand that the imperialist troops get out—and that the UN stay out. The working class and oppressed here have a very direct stake in opposing this colonialist occupation which can only further embolden world history's most monstrous imperialist power.

The Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom

Under capitalism—the system of private ownership of the means of production, in which the workers have only their labor power to sell as a commodity—a handful of capitalists are the dominant economic class. So it's futile to appeal to the nonexistent conscience and morality of the ruling class. It is not now and never has been in their interests to have a society based upon genuine peace, plenty and equality. Theirs is a system of production for profit and of anarchy resulting in inevitably recurring economic crises—a boom-bust cycle of overproduction of commodities giving rise to cyclical and structural unemployment and generalized impoverishment. Ending this requires a fight for the abolition of U.S. and world capitalism through international proletarian revolution.

Our interests lie in common, integrated class struggle against the racist capitalist rulers. The Spartacist League stands in the tradition of the early Communist International, the Comintern, under Lenin and Trotsky. Through insistent prodding, they reoriented the American Communist Party by uprooting the colorblindness characteristic of the early socialist movement. That movement had said that it had "nothing special" to offer to blacks and that their oppression was an economic problem. The Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky fought tooth and nail against this position, and actually laid the basis for the American Communist Party to lead an aggressive fight for black equality in the late 1920s and early 1930s. James P. Cannon—a founder of the Communist Party and early leader of American Trotskyism—wrote his seminal essay "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement" in 1959, five years after the Supreme Court Brown decision, as that movement was unfolding. He pointed out:

"It is customary to attribute the progress of the Negro movement, and the shift of public opinion in favor of its claims, to the changes brought about by the First World War. But the biggest thing that came out of the First World War, the event that changed everything, including the prospects of the American Negro, was the Russian Revolution. The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special problem of American society—a problem which cannot simply be subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-Communist radical movement."

— The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)

The Spartacist League's several decades of efforts and principled struggle to mobilize the working class in the fight for black freedom and in the liberation of the working class as a whole stands in this tradition and is unique.

As a consequence of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which was a gigantic defeat for workers and oppressed around the world, the capitalists have been emboldened to intensify their attacks against hard-won gains. It is no mere coincidence that, beginning in 1991, they have more energetically pushed for the resegregation of the school system—not that they began then, but they stepped on the pedal. There is no Soviet Union today to embarrass U.S. imperialism about the endemic racism which is inherent to this system.

Because of the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, consciousness has been thrown back. And this has been in the making for a while. In 1983, Jesse Jackson, a former leader in King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, helped knife protests in defense of busing in Norfolk, Virginia. Coleman Young denounced busing in Detroit when he was the black Democratic mayor there in 1974, agreeing with the Supreme Court decision that struck down cross-district busing of black schoolchildren from the inner city to the white suburbs. In 1997, the historically integrationist NAACP held a debate that called into question integration.

Furthermore, this retrogression in consciousness has also affected the so-called "progressive," radical black intellectuals such as Robin Kelley and bell hooks, along with outright pro-Democratic Party hip-hop capitalists such as Russell Simmons. Simmons, who slams integration and also pushes black capitalism, helped organize a massive rally at City Hall in June 2003 (some of us sold Workers Vanguard at it) which was joined by Democrat Andrew Cuomo to call for not ending, but reducing the sentences of the draconian Rockefeller-era anti-drug laws. This is the same Cuomo who in the Clinton administration, in the Department of Housing, actually used the money that was supposed to go to building new housing to build prisons in upstate New York. So they were down there at City Hall supposedly trying to reform these drug laws. We say: Down with the racist war on drugs! We are for the decriminalization of drugs. The so-called New Democrat Clinton escalated the bourgeoisie's attacks on the ghettos and barrios "to end welfare as we know it," expanding the racist death penalty, and putting about 100,000 more cops on the streets.

In a recent interview, Simmons spelled out his program. He said his program is 40 acres and a Bentley. His undisguised hostility to integration is quite understandable in that light. This is what he said:

"Economically, some families in our community had more financial stability during segregation. We had the black dentist, the black lawyer, the black teacher. We had jobs. We had things we had to do for our community and services to provide. Integration tore that down. It damaged our economic stability in our little communities.... They took all of our business."

— Henry Louis Gates, America Behind the Color Line (2004)

Well, first, what jobs? Ghettos are impoverished hell holes, and in periods of labor shortage, they used to be some kind of reserve army of the unemployed—and I stress used to be. These people are pushing black capitalism, which is really about feathering their own nests and flipping a bone to the rest of us.

The so-called "left" black feminist, bell hooks, harking back to a mythical golden era of cross-class black unity, argued:

"That sense of solidarity was altered by a class-based civil rights struggle whose ultimate goal was to acquire more freedom for those black folks who already had a degree of class privilege however relative. By the late 1960s class-based racial integration disrupted the racial solidarity that often held black folks together despite class difference. Pressured to assimilate into mainstream white culture to increase their class power and status, privileged black individuals began to leave the underprivileged behind, moving into predominantly white neighborhoods, taking their money and their industry out of the segregated black world."

— Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000)

Well, this is an utterly fantastic description of what actually happened. Some of what she points out, such as who benefited from the civil rights movement, is true. But the notion that there was ever in the past, or that there ever will be in the future, a significant black capitalist class along the lines of the Carnegies, the Mellons and the Rockefellers is utterly fantastic and utopian. Moreover, there is no such thing as "separate but equal." And that's the point: they have capitulated to that.

Now, there's the very voluble left-nationalist academic Robin Kelley. He rhetorically asks, "Integration: What's Left?" (Nation, 14 December 1998). He deliberately conflates the struggle for racial integration with liberal integrationism and submission to white liberal gradualism:

"Although black civil rights activists had always emphasized ‘desegregation'—the removal of all barriers that kept black people from enjoying full access to public facilities, decent housing, education and so on—in most white liberal circles racial integration came to mean solving the ‘Negro problem' by bringing black people into formerly all-white institutions.... The goal was to produce fully assimilated black people devoted to the American dream. Sharing power was rarely part of the equation."

And what is his program?

"Rather than a new integrationist movement under a left-wing banner, I would like to see a new, revitalized left launching a full-scale assault on white privilege—a new divestment campaign in which white people refuse the benefits of a racist society."

In particular, what Kelley is saying to the mass of white workers, which of course happens to be the most numerous class in this society, is: Prove your commitment for the poor and the oppressed by voluntarily impoverishing yourself. This can only reinforce the hold of the white ruling class upon white workers. Moreover, if he took that to any picket line they'd run him out on a rail.

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which was a radical-nationalist organization in Detroit in the '70s, had the opportunity to actually make common cause with white workers. They refused to pass out their leaflets to them. Their program was for more black foremen, for blacks on the board of General Motors and the like. Our program of revolutionary integration, of class struggle, cuts across these kinds of divisive schemes. Our program is to get rid of class exploitation and the brutal racial oppression that props it up, not to pit sections of the oppressed and exploited against each other so that both can be conquered. The depth of the political bankruptcy is astounding, but not surprising.

From our inception in the early 1960s inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as the Revolutionary Tendency, a left-wing opposition that fought against that party's abandonment of a revolutionary working-class program, we have emphasized common class struggle against a common class enemy. We say that there is an alternative to liberal integrationism—which favors the gradual absorption of "deserving blacks," one by one, into this system—and pro-Democratic Party capitalist politics. And that's the program of revolutionary integrationism, the struggle for black liberation through overturning this racist capitalist system by linking the struggles of the ghettos to the organized labor movement under a class-struggle leadership.

I need to point out that the ruling class today is forced to admit that increasingly U.S. society is being resegregated. In a special education supplement (New York Times, 18 January) on the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, a writer admits that "Millions of black students are celebrating Brown's anniversary in schools almost as segregated as when it was decided. It is now true, as the court held, that ‘separate but equal facilities are inherently unequal.' But 70 percent of black students attend schools in which racial minorities are a majority, and fully a third are in schools 90 to 100 percent minority." Professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, has done quite an extensive investigation of the growing resegregation in the U.S. He argues that, practically speaking, the U.S. today hasn't qualitatively progressed beyond the era of formalized segregation embodied in the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that sanctioned state-supported segregation in public accommodations.

When you look at what's going on as the schools become more segregated today, the fastest-growing, and now the largest minority affected are Latinos. We, as fighters for a revolutionary vanguard party, point to the common interests of all sections of the oppressed. Our task is to combat not only anti-black racism within the immigrant milieu, but the anti-immigrant chauvinism of many black workers and black people. This is critical from the standpoint of fighting for socialist revolution in this country. What we see is that the ruling class has thrown increasing layers of the population on the scrap heap.

In the annals of judicial history, what they call "Brown I" was the Supreme Court decision in 1954 that struck down Plessy v. Ferguson. And in "Brown II," the second decision a year later, the Supreme Court ordered desegregation with "all deliberate speed," i.e., slowly. In other words, they gave the green light to Southern segregationist foes of integration to obstruct the implementation of that decision. Consequently, by early 1964, a full decade later, only 1.2 percent of black children in the eleven Southern states attended schools with whites. So the law is one thing, and the reality on the ground is another.

These legal decisions are never made in a vacuum, but they are a product of social struggle. Thus, far from being friends of black people, many judges opposed Brown. For example, leading segregationist Mississippi Circuit Court judge Tom Brady, in line with the white-supremacist Citizens Councils, asserted that this was "Black Monday" and that the Supreme Court was leaning toward Communism. The segregationists in Little Rock were circulating questionnaires essentially asking whether black boys would be permitted to solicit the white girls at school soirées? Would they be allowed, white girls and black boys in drama classes, to get together? Someone could really do an interesting study on when was the first time, if ever, Othello was performed in that part of the country.

When the first Brown decision was handed down, it was trumpeted by U.S. imperialism as an expression of American democracy in its finest hour. In 1954 Secretary of State Dean Acheson underlined their interest in Brown:

"Other peoples cannot understand how [school segregation] can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy. The sincerity of the United States in this respect will be judged by its deeds as well as by its words."

— International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941-1960 (2000)

And of course, they were increasingly embarrassed because the Soviet Union reminded them quite frequently and regularly of the vicious, legalized segregation, while the U.S. rulers railed against "Soviet Communist totalitarianism."

The State Department didn't waste any time in trumpeting the progress in race relations: within an hour of the Supreme Court's decision, the Voice of America broadcast the news all over the world in 35 different languages. And Carl Rowan, a black journalist who was the face of the State Department abroad, traveled far and wide to convince the Third World that America was finally making progress.

Of course it was bull because, in the aftermath of the Brown decision, white racist defiance quickly developed. Autherine Lucy, a black woman who wanted to get into graduate school, was attacked by mobs at the University of Alabama when she tried to attend school there in 1956. That angered a lot of European and African governments.

A year earlier, in 1955, Emmett Till fared worse. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi. He was lynched for the alleged "crime" of whistling at a white woman. His horribly mutilated body was shown. His mother insisted upon an open casket funeral, and all over the world people saw the barbarity of lynch law. Thousands of black people all over this country marched after that, and many say that the beginnings of the civil rights movement began with the demonstrations around Emmett Till. A couple of weeks ago the New York Times (22 March), in an editorial titled "The Ghost of Emmett Till," said that there is a reinvestigation of his murder being planned by the Justice Department because they have new information on Till's murder. If somebody is nailed, he'll probably be 95 years old, on a respirator with one lung, one kidney and one hour to live. And if it's not that, the system is still one of murderous legal lynchings and racist frame-ups that keeps on keeping on. Just look at the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal and the many other class-war prisoners in this country, like Jerry Dale Lowe.

Every step forward for workers, black people, women and all the oppressed has been won by militant struggle against the racist capitalist system. Reliance on the bourgeois courts politically disarms the workers and oppressed. The unions in this country were built by defying the bourgeoisie's laws against trade unions, laws that called unions "criminal conspiracies," which the capitalists could revive again.

Black youth hurled themselves against the infernal machine of the racist, segregationist, law-and-order establishment, playing a very important role in shattering the McCarthyite Cold War consensus and atmosphere in the South. The law had to adjust to the new facts on the ground. In other words, it was no thanks to good-hearted and benevolent judges that the walls of Jim Crow segregation came tumbling down.

Robert Weisbrot, the author of Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement, noted that before the Brown decision:

"Sporadic local protests also sent a message of growing Negro assertiveness, but few, black or white, received it. In November 1953 forty-eight black soldiers in Columbia, South Carolina, were arrested and fined more than $1,500 because one sat next to a white girl on the bus. That same year a Negro boycott of buses in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, lasted a week before officials permitted blacks and whites to occupy some seats on first-come, first-served basis."

Now, after several decades of bipartisan racist reaction and attacks on the standard of living of the working masses, sections of the ruling class openly embrace the "ghosts of the Confederacy" and their heirs. For example, Attorney General John Ashcroft has expressed his admiration for the Confederacy. Trent Lott, the Republican Senator, got a slap on the wrist for openly stating his support for the segregationist Strom Thurmond. Thurmond was the rabid segregationist who led Southern racist resistance to the integration of the armed forces under President Harry S. Truman and bolted from the Democratic Party to form the Dixiecrat Party in 1948. And none other than the current head of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, wrote a memo in support of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This is the ruling class that is in power.

The Failures of the Civil Rights Movement in the North

When the civil rights movement went North, it ran into a brick wall. It went up against the bedrock of the economic oppression of the black population. It was not de jure (in law) segregation but de facto segregation that they had to contend with. The collapse of that movement flowed from Martin Luther King's and the SCLC's bankrupt, liberal pacifist program of reliance on the racist federal government and the Democratic Party. That is what crippled that struggle.

As a result of the inability of the liberal-led civil rights leadership to address the capitalist roots of black oppression, many black activists embraced a separatist road and rejected integrated class struggle, which is not only in the interest of blacks but is in the interest of the entire working class. The result was that the best of an entire generation of young black militants, particularly embodied in the contradictory radical-nationalist Black Panthers, was cut down through murderous FBI Counter-Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) repression, facilitated by murderous internal factionalism.

Some of this history is being revised in the anarchist milieu. You have, for instance, the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC). They recently had an article, "A Synthesis of Race & Class: A Look at the Black Panther Party & Its Goal of Liberation" (Northeastern Anarchist, Summer/Fall 2003). What the anarchists say is quite interesting because it indicates why their rejection of a Leninist vanguard party makes them incapable of understanding the fact that what really led to the demise of the Panthers was not simply FBI repression. It was not simply what the anarchists call the Panthers' "authoritarian, top-down structure" or their advocacy of a vanguard party (which was of course vanguard in name only, because there was male chauvinism within that organization). What NEFAC says is this:

"The Black Panther Party was the most important revolutionary organization in America during the late 20th century.... [The party] was able to develop a truly revolutionary political platform that presented a more just and viable alternative....

"Perhaps the party would have benefited and maximized its potential as a Revolutionary Black Nationalist organization by broadening its struggles to both remedial and immediate programs as well as more militant activities so long as they were both aimed at a common and revolutionary goal: the necessity for black people to gain control of the institutions in their own communities, eventually transforming them into cooperatives, and of one day working with other ethnic groups to change the system."

This petty-bourgeois rejection of the working class is exactly the Panthers' type of New Left sectoralism. Thoroughly anti-working-class, it is based upon the utopian, classless notion of a "black community," or "black communities," which are really impoverished ghettos. What are you going to control? The Panthers were nationalists; they were radical nationalists. They wanted social revolution, but they rejected mobilizing the integrated working class to sweep away this system. This is the key reason for their political demise. It wasn't simply that the state was all-powerful. There was sympathy among white workers in the Bay Area. In the early 1970s we had supporters who worked in a General Motors auto plant in Fremont, California. This was a factory where the Panthers briefly had a caucus, which they later liquidated.

Today, the effects of the destruction of the Panthers' organization and the defeats of the movement are deeply felt. The black population is leaderless. Under the conditions of relentless racist attacks today in the name of the "war against terror" at home and abroad, it is vital to know who our friends and who our enemies are. Things didn't have to turn out this way. If you really look at the road forward, it has to be based on this program of class-struggle revolutionary integrationism, by forging a revolutionary workers party that tells the bitter truth. In that regard, we have to clear the ground of the reformist and centrist obstacles that block the road to power.

Don't be fooled by the occasional socialist rhetoric. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) is a good example of what we're talking about. Time and again, they stand with the Democrats against workers and the oppressed. On 23 October 1999, they were out there in the rally organized by Sharpton to defend the Klan's right to march. He went to court on behalf of the Klan, whereas the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, along with the Labor Black League, mobilized a mass labor-centered mobilization that stopped the Klan.

So what does the ISO say is the way forward? In a recent article called "Racism in America Today" (International Socialist Review, November-December 2003), they say that, despite the persistence of institutional racism in America,

"It would be wrong, nevertheless, to conclude that things are just as bad as they were before the civil rights movement. Many of the legislative gains from that period—from affirmative action to ending segregation—are under attack. But the impact of the movement has been longstanding, fundamentally changing the attitudes and perceptions of millions of people about African Americans."

Where do you start, right? One thing to say is that the lie of black inferiority, the recrudescence of "scientific racism" in this Bell Curve book, which was a bestseller at the time it was published in 1994, which preached the genetic inferiority of black people, struck fertile soil. The point is that the civil rights movement failed to end black oppression because it was tied to the Democratic Party, and these fake socialists cover up that fact because they are busily tailing the Democrats today. There was nothing in that article about breaking with the Democratic Party. I think it is because the ISO's whole perspective is to reform this racist, capitalist system. And, of course, they supported every counterrevolutionary nationalist movement, every anti-Soviet struggle in the past, which culminated in the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state.

So their program is very illustrative of what we are dealing with out there. We have so-called socialists in this country who practically ignore the growing resegregation of the U.S. In the case of the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), they actually openly champion segregation—for example, opposing school busing in Boston. Their virulent hostility to integration is no accident since they are virulently Stalinophobic, anti-Soviet. Rejecting defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution led to accommodation to American imperialism at home on the strategic question for proletarian revolution in the U.S., the fight for black liberation.

The kind of "integration" that the ruling class is interested in aims to recruit the best of those minorities whose skills and training can be utilized to defend the capitalists' interests at home and abroad. This involves being able to intervene into countries with large non-white populations, sitting astride regions where there is oil, gold, diamonds and the like. So the white ruling class will drop the color bar to get a Colin Powell and a Condoleezza Rice to do their bidding in enslaving and murdering thousands of dark-skinned peoples, and other oppressed peoples, around the world. This has nothing to do, of course, with the obliteration of the color line, but rather the obliteration of horribly impoverished people around the world. So the class enemy has a consistently counterrevolutionary strategy and program, and we have to have a consistently revolutionary strategy and program.

If you want another example, look at the support from sections of the U.S. officer corps for retaining affirmative action at the University of Michigan last year. Why? They remember their long, losing and dirty colonial war against Vietnam—which was conducted with a racially torn military. Now, they have a Hispanic commander leading troops in Iraq.

The bourgeoisie wants "integration" insofar as it furthers their struggle for unbridled exploitation. We defend affirmative action as one of the remaining minimal and very inadequate gains of the civil rights movement, which were wrested from the white ruling class in struggle. However, affirmative action does not and cannot attack the race and class biases inherent in this system. In the universities, we fight for open admissions, free tuition and a fully paid state stipend, especially to enable minority and working-class youth to attend those schools. Very recently, the Spartacus Youth Club mobilized actions at Columbia University against an anti-affirmative action "bake sale" sponsored by the Conservative Club, which is in cahoots with an assortment of sinister racist imperialist elements, such as the pro-slavery ideologue David Horowitz. The Conservative Club had in their cross hairs blacks, Jews, Hispanics, gays and others. We mobilized against their racist provocation at Columbia while organizations like the ISO refused to endorse the SYC-initiated action because they were basically trying to pressure the administration to defend minority students.

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

We fight to build a vanguard party that bases its program not upon the current consciousness of the working class, but upon its objective interests, its interests as a conscious revolutionary class. This is really the hallmark of what we're fighting for, a party that is a tribune of the people. Under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party, the workers of Russia smashed the outmoded capitalist system. This was the first and the only successful workers revolution in history. Today, U.S. imperialism is seeking to destroy the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states in China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. Despite the political misrule of the Stalinist bureaucracies in these countries, the smashing of capitalism there is a good thing for the workers internationally. We Trotskyists unconditionally defend those workers states against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. It's a good thing that North Korea has nukes. Otherwise, the U.S. imperialist bandits would have obliterated them a long time ago. We fight for workers political revolution in those countries to oust the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracies whose anti-internationalist, anti-working-class program facilitates the imperialist drive toward capitalist restoration. To be a Marxist, a Trotskyist, a fighter for world revolution, you have to be a proletarian internationalist. Our task here is to build that revolutionary Trotskyist party and finish what the Bolsheviks started in 1917 by fighting for new October Revolutions.

The class-struggle program for black liberation is directly tied to the struggle for proletarian revolution. In this regard, every generation comes to revolutionary consciousness in their own way. My personal road was tortuous, starting as a follower of the petty-bourgeois radical-nationalist Frantz Fanon, who seemed to be offering an uncompromising assault on the citadel of racism and imperialism—looking for the "wretched of the earth" to rise up spontaneously to drive off the imperialists. Only when I joined the Spartacist League did I learn that Fanon's "radical" nationalism was an expression of the prevalent New Leftism which propagated the myth that the working class was not the agent of revolutionary change, but had been "bought off" and integrated into the racist capitalist system. I'll skip some of the other delusions that I had to discard along the way.

We've learned a lot from the Bolsheviks. When you look at some of the history of what the Spartacist League has fought for, such as the struggle for busing in Boston, it is really important to see how we swam against the stream. I was fortunate to spend some time with Dick Fraser, along with other comrades, in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. We tried to assist him in various ways—he was a very sick man at the time. We had one friend in common, a guy by the name of Earl Ofari [Hutchinson], who was a friend of mine, and Dick had done some writing with him too. In the early 1970s, Ofari played a role in breaking me from the dead end of "revolutionary nationalism" and in telling me over and over again that a woman's work is never done. He wrote a useful book called The Myth of Black Capitalism which really assisted me in developing a class perspective.

We had a big argument in 1974-75 about the demand, which Ofari supported, that the government send federal troops to Boston to protect black schoolchildren, who had been bused to integrate schools in South Boston, a white enclave. At the same time, Ofari denounced the Maoist Revolutionary Union, the predecessors of today's Revolutionary Communist Party, which capitulated to the racist anti-busing forces in Boston and came out with an infamous headline in their press: "People Must Unite to Smash Boston Busing Plan" (Revolution, October 1974). This was a gross capitulation to the racist scum from the Nazis and the Klan to Louise Day Hicks, who was a leader of the racist outfit called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights).

Ofari's main fire, however, was directed at the so-called "sectarian" Spartacist League. We were in the forefront of fighting for mass integrated labor-black defense to defend the black schoolchildren against the howling racist mobs in South Boston. We fought for low-rent, racially integrated public housing, for quality integrated education for all, and for the implementation of busing and its extension to the suburbs as a minimal—although inadequate—step toward black equality. We weren't successful in getting the labor movement organized along those lines. However, this was in the interests of workers and the oppressed.

The trade-union misleaders in that city didn't lift a finger so as not to alienate the Democratic Party so-called "friends of labor," such as Teddy Kennedy and others. Initially, Kennedy made some mild support statements, and they ran his butt off the stage.

We linked this fight to the struggle for socialist revolution and a workers government. In contrast, the reformist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) called for federal troops to "defend" black people and tailed behind the petty-bourgeois liberal NAACP. In pursuit of their class-collaborationist bloc with the liberals, the SWP sought to rewrite history by claiming that through mass pressure the armed forces of imperialism could be made to fight for the oppressed. They consciously distorted history to suit their reformist appetites. They tried to erase the indisputable fact that every time troops were called in, particularly in response to black rebellion, it was to suppress those who were fighting back. The capitalist state—its cops, its courts, its armed forces—is not neutral. These bodies are instruments of capitalist rule and racist repression. The Workers World Party of Sam Marcy was tailing behind this black Democrat, Bill Owen, who opposed busing and was looking for a political career. Marcy put out a pamphlet, Busing and Self-Determination, which should have been titled "The Right to Tailism." In it, they stated: "Separation or Assimilation—It's Up to the Oppressed." So they simultaneously tailed the petty-bourgeois liberals of the NAACP and the Black Muslims. They betrayed the struggle for black equality.

Finally, the fight against the resegregation of America cannot be separated from the unrelenting ruling-class offensive against labor and oppressed minorities, which has resulted in increased concentration of wealth at one end of society and increased segregation and misery at the other. The recent five-month-long, bitter, sold-out UFCW grocery workers strike in Southern California indicates that there are today thousands of workers determined to resist the capitalist attacks. They fought, and it was not impossible for them to have won. But the treacherous trade-union bureaucracy isolated that strike, refused to extend it nationwide and played by the bosses' rules. That's why we say you need a class-struggle leadership of labor to unleash its power. Such a leadership is based upon the recognition that the fight for the emancipation of the working class is inseparable from the struggle against the brutal, racist oppression that is endemic to this capitalist system.

How can this power be brought to bear? A powerful message would have been sent to the bloodsucking capitalists had there been ten thousand transit workers, hospital workers, city workers downing their tools to protest the racist killings of black woman unionist Alberta Spruill and black youth Timothy Stansbury. Or, a few years ago, Amadou Diallo. Or the several Latino youth killed by New York's "finest" racist killers. Or in defense of class-war prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal. That social power must be mobilized. The capitalists would be forced to take notice if there were a significant presence of workers out there on behalf of women's rights—especially in the fight for abortion, which is under attack. The possibilities of integrated class struggle are palpable and, on a modest scale, very real. White, Latino and Asian workers were out there together on the picket lines during the recent UFCW strike. They fought, and their union wasn't broken, even though they were bitterly sold out.

How do we get that kind of leadership? By drawing the class line. By breaking with the program of class collaboration that preaches the lie of a "community of interests" between the workers and the bosses and of "lesser-evilism," which is pushed by the reformists and labor fakers. That party will be built by unmasking the enemies of the workers and the oppressed, no matter what their color or nationality is. A necessary task for the working class in this country is the forging of such a revolutionary workers party, a political weapon to advance a fight for jobs for all through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay, for free medical care, for free universal education, for full citizenship rights, for immigrant rights, for militant defense of the rights of gays. The fight for free abortion on demand, the fight for freedom of all class-war prisoners is a fight for a socialist America. And this fight will be realized through expropriating the capitalist class.

I want to end with this quote from a black youth in Roxbury, Boston, who was inspired by the struggle for integration in that city. It underscores one of the points that we've made, namely, that in the past, on most occasions, the black population has sought every opportunity to fight for integration and equality as opposed to opting for a separatist road. It is only in periods of defeat and out of despair that some have turned toward pseudo-nationalism. Reflecting the egalitarian sentiments of a significant number of black people in the civil rights era, an eleven-year-old black youth said: "Busing's just got to be, man. Got to be. We got it coming to us. We got to open up ourselves, spread out. Get into the city.... Go to good schools, live in good places like white folks got.... That's why they're busing us" (Brown v. Board of Education [2001]). To realize this dream of genuine equality, you must fight for a socialist revolution. You can't get it unless you have a party that swims against the stream and that bases itself upon the lessons of the class struggle and the fight to smash capitalism on a world scale.

Friday, February 19, 2016

From The Archives- Alabama, Goddam- The Late Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird"- A 50th Anniversary Encore-

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of a section of the movie based on Harper Lee's novel, "To Kill A Mockingbird", as background for this entry. May this literary gem be read and watched for another fifty years.





DVD REVIEW

To Kill a Mockingbird, Gregory Peck, black and white, 1962


This film is an excellent black and white adaptation of Harper Lee’s book of the same name. The acting, particularly by Gregory Peck (and a cameo by a young Robert Duval), brings out all the pathos, bathos and grit of small town Southern life in the 1930’s. The story itself is an unusual combination, narrated by Peck’s film daughter Scout (and presumably Lee herself), of a coming of age story that we are fairly familiar with and the question of race and sex in the Deep South (and not only there) with which we were (at the time of the film’s debut in 1962) only vaguely familiar. That dramatic tension, muted as it was by the cinematic and social conventions of the time, nevertheless made a strong statement about the underlying tensions of this society at a time when the Southern black civil rights struggle movement was coming into focus in the national consciousness.

The name Atticus Finch (Peck’s role) as the liberal (for that southern locale) lawyer committed to the rule of law had a certain currency in the 1960’s as a symbol for those southern whites who saw that Jim Crow had to go. Here Finch is the appointed lawyer for a black man accused of raping a white women of low origin- the classic ‘white trash’ depicted in many a film and novel. Finch earnestly, no, passionately, in his understated manner, attempts to defend this man, a brave act in itself under the circumstances.

Needless to say an all white jury of that black man’s ‘peers’ nevertheless convicts him out of hand. In the end the black man tries to escape and is killed in the process. In an earlier scenario Finch is pressed into guard duty at the jailhouse in order to head off a posse of ‘white trash’ elements who are bend on doing ‘justice’ their way- hanging him from a lynching tree. On a mere false accusation of a white woman this black man is doomed whichever way he turns. Sound familiar?

The other part of the story concerns the reactions by Finch’s motherless son and tomboyish daughter to the realities of social life, Southern style. That part is in some ways, particularly when the children watch the trial from the “Negro” balcony section of the courtroom, the least successful of the film. What is entirely believable and gives some relief from the travesty that is unfolding are the pranks, pitfalls and antics of the kids. The tensions between brother and sister, the protective role of the older brother, the attempt by the sister to assert her own identity, the sense of adventure and mystery of what lies beyond the immediate household that is the hallmark of youth all get a work out here. But in the end it is the quiet dignity of solid old Atticus and the bewildered dignity of a doomed black man that hold this whole thing together. Bravo Peck. Kudos to Harper Lee.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

The Irvine 11: Guilty of Being Muslims in America - by Stephen Lendman

Commentary :: Human Rights
The Irvine 11: Guilty of Being Muslims in America
by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 24 Sep 2011
persecution
The Irvine 11: Guilty of Being Muslims in America - by Stephen Lendman

Post-9/11, America targeted Muslims ruthlessly for political advantage. Law-abiding citizens discovered they're living here at the wrong time.

Police state repression endangers growing millions, including Muslims for their faith, ethnicity, and forthrightness to confront injustice no one should tolerate.

Many lawlessly prosecuted stand out, including the Irvine 11. They were wrongfully targeted for exercising their fundamental First Amendment right without which all others are threatened.

Charges against one were dismissed. The others stood trial, accused of interrupting Israeli ambassador Michael Oren's February 8, 2010 University of California-Irvine speech, criticizing him and Israeli injustice.

Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas filed misdemeanor criminal charges, accusing them of disturbing a public meeting and engaging in a conspiracy to do so.

During Oren's UCI speech, students rose one at a time to interrupt. It's everyone's constitutional right, except when Israeli lawlessness is challenged, especially by American Muslims called criminals for defending right over wrong.

UCI suspended the Muslim Student Union, placing it on disciplinary probation. Imagine the outcry if done to B'nai B'rith. University officials would be fired. Prosecutors would be replaced. Jews and Christians can get away with anything. Muslims are vilified for demanding justice.

On September 24, Los Angeles Times writers Lauren Williams, Nicole Santa Cruz and Mike Anton headlined, "Students guilty of disrupting speech in 'Irvine 11' case," saying:

"....(A)n Orange County jury has found 10 Muslim students guilty of criminal charges for disrupting (Oren's) speech....on the UC Irvine campus last year."

Facing up to one year in jail on multiple misdemeanor charges, they "were sentenced to three years of probation, 56 hours of community service and fines. Each was convicted of one misdemeanor count of conspiring to disrupt Oren's Feb. 8, 2010 speech and a second count for disrupting it."

Pro-Israeli District Attorney Rackauckas called their behavior "thuggery." "In a civilized society, we cannot allow lawful assemblies to be shut down by a small group of people using the heckler's veto."

It's OK, however, for Israel to occupy Palestine illegally, persecute its people, attack them lawlessly, imprison them en masse for demanding their rights, torture them to confess to crimes they didn't commit, steal their land, and wage war against defenseless civilians.

It's also OK for America to supply billions of dollars in aid, the latest weapons and technology, and full support for Israel's worst crimes. Only victims are held accountable for wanting to live free in peace. Only supporters are vilified and prosecuted for courageously supporting what's right.

On September 24, a Los Angeles Times editorial headlined, "Punishing the 'Irvine 11,' again," saying:

The students were convicted "in a case that never should have been filed...." As a result, they'll "forever have to answer yes if they are asked by, say, potential employers whether they were ever convicted of a crime."

"The whole sad affair (should have been) handled more appropriately by university officials" instead of letting it end up a judicial lynching.

Islamic Shura Council of Southern California Executive Director Shakeel Syed reacted, calling the verdict "absolutely unbelievable. I believe the heart of America has died today. This is clearly an indication that Muslims are permanent foreigners, at least in Orange County."

In fact, they've victimized in large and small communities across America.

Attorneys for the students vowed to appeal.

Jewish leaders applauded the verdict. According to Shalom Elcott, Jewish Federation & Family Services president:

The student disruption "crossed the moral, social and intellectual line of civility and tolerance. While we accept the right and requirement of a public institution to provide an unfettered forum for diverse points of view, we do not, nor will be ever, support 'hate speech.' "

In other words, free, honest, accurate comments are hateful when Muslims state them. Jews and Christians can say what they please.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, Los Angeles (CAIR/LA) headlined, "Muslim Groups Appalled by 'Irvine 11' Guilty Verdict, Declare Travesty of Justice," saying:

"Leaders of four prominent Muslim organizations" expressed outrage over an appalling verdict, "convicting 10 of the 'Irvine 11' students on (unjust) misdemeanor counts...."

Muslim Public Affairs Council President Salam Al-Marayati called it a "sad day for democracy when nonviolent protestors are criminalized by their government and are found guilty for exercising a constitutional right."

"You can heckle the President. You can heckle high ranking government officials, but it you heckle an Israeli diplomat you will be prosecuted."

Quoted above, Islamic Shura Council of Southern California Executive Director Shakeel Syed also said:

"Justice was jaundiced (for the) UCI-11 students and America must worry for its democratic future."

CAIR/LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush said:

"When history books are written, the 'Irvine 11' will stand alongside other great American civil rights heros like Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. They peacefully and courageously stood up against injustice, and they defended our collective freedom of speech."

"No topic should be off limits and no public official or country should be above criticism. They are true American heros."

Muslim American Society, Greater Los Angeles President Khaled Bahjri added:

"It is with the deepest disappointment and sadness that we heard the jury's verdict on the Irvine 11. The jury decided that the 10 defendants are guilty on both counts. This is a huge step backward for our American principles of freedom and justice."

In fact, democracy in America always existed tenuously at best. For Native Americans and people of color it never existed. Post-9/11, it died! Ask persecuted Blacks and Latino immigrants.

Ask American Muslims. They'll explain more eloquently than our best and brightest!

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com


This work is in the public domain

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Paul Robeson

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Paul Robeson.

February Is Black History Month


Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February, and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

*Films to While Away The Class Struggle By-"Free At Last: Civil Rights Heroes"- Hats Off To The Lesser Known Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement

Click on the title to link to a YouTube film clip on Emmett Till.

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

*******

DVD Review

Free at Last: Civil Rights Heroes, film documentary, Image Entertainment, 2005


Every major (and most minor) progressive social struggle in America from the struggle for independence from Great Britain through to the struggle for slavery abolition up to the struggle for women’s rights and gender equality today has had more than its share of heroes and martyrs. The purpose of the documentary under review, Free At Last: Civil Rights Heroes, rightly, highlights some of those lesser known heroes and martyrs from the struggle for black civil rights that came to national prominence in the1950s and 1960s (although, arguably, that struggle goes back to the 1930s and before).

Although, in the end the question of black equality had to be addressed (and still has to be addressed) nationally the thrust of the black civil rights movement that is featured in this film is the struggle for something like a democratic revolution by blacks and their supporters in the police state-like American South in place since post-Civil War times. That barbaric de jure and de facto Jim Crow system officially, as a matter state and social policy, held blacks in second class citizenship (or lower). The struggle to overcome that ingrained (and profitable, profitable for whites of almost all social strata) was almost, of necessity, going to create more than it share of heroes and martyrs.

The case of fourteen year old Chicago resident Emmett Till and his horrible murder at the hands of white marauders in Mississippi in 1955, the first of the three separate segments that make up the film graphically highlights the problem. For the mere allegation of “whistling at a white woman while black” (if that allegation had any substance) young Emmett was brutally mangled and thrown into the local river. When his mother, righteously, made a cause out of this bestial murder all hell broke loose, at least on the surface. And the case galvanized blacks and whites nationally, alerting many for the first time to the hard fact that something was desperately wrong down in Mississippi (and not just there). But justice, Mississippi justice, to paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, is justice deferred. As detailed in almost all the cases highlighted in the film those directly responsible for the actions against the civil rights workers were either never brought to justice or only after something like a long drawn out legal civil war. No one should forget that aspect of the struggle either.

The other cases highlighted from the assassinated Medgar Evers to the four Birmingham girls murdered in their church when it was bombed to the three civil rights workers slain in Philadelphia, Mississippi that drew nation-wide attention to slain white civil rights workers Viola Liuzzo and Reverend James Reeb, murdered for “being white while working for black civil rights” exhibit those same kinds of sickening results. Let me put it this way after viewing the film footage here, especially Bull Connor’s attack dogs being let loose on civil rights demonstrators in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama that was one of the first visual images that drove me into the civil rights struggle, I still wanted to throw something at the screen. And you wonder why fifty or so years later I still say Mississippi (or fill in your preferred state) goddam. Kudos here.

Friday, August 06, 2010

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Phil Och's "There But For Fortune"

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

***********

Markin comment:

This is a continuation of entries for folksinger/songwriter Phil Och's who back in the early 1960s stood right up there with Bob Dylan in the protest songwriting category. The entries on this date testify to that. However, early on I sensed something special about Dylan and never really warmed up to Ochs. His singing style did not "move" me and that counted for a lot in those days. The rest just turned on preference.

********

There but for Fortune Lyrics

Intro: G Cm G Cm G Cm

G Cm G Cm
Show me a prison, show me a jail,

G Em Am D
Show me a prisoner whose face has gone pale

Em C Am
And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why
Bm G Am D
And there but for fortune, may go you or I

Show me the alley, show me the train,
Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain,
And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, may go you or go I -- you and I.

Show me the whiskey stains on the floor,
Show me the dunken man as he stumbles out the door,
And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, may go you or go I -- you and I.

[Extra verse... written by Noel Paul Stookey]
Show me the famine, show me the frail
Eyes with no future that show how we failed
And I'll show you the children with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I.

Show me the country where bombs had to fall,
Show me the ruins of buildings once so tall,
And I'll show you a young land with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or go I -- you and I.
You and I,
There but for fortune, go you or go I -- you and I.

Here it is in French (supplied by William Curtis):

Je vois le prison
Je vois la nuit
Je vois le prisonnier qui pleure sa vie

Et je me dis souvent
Quand je m'endors dans tes bras
Ou va la chance, a toi ? a moi ?

Je vois des blessures
Jamais gueries
Je vois le vagabond
Quit dort sous la pluie

Je vois cet homme
Au coeur perdu
Qui boit pour ne plus voir
Ce qu'il est devenu

Je vois des villes
Dont les maisons
Un jour sous la guerre
Ont croule sans raison

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Phil Och's "Going Down To Mississippi"

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

***********

Markin comment:

This is a continuation of entries for folksinger/songwriter Phil Och's who back in the early 1960s stood right up there with Bob Dylan in the protest songwriting category. The entries on this date testify to that. However, early on I sensed something special about Dylan and never really warmed up to Ochs. His singing style did not "move" me and that counted for a lot in those days. The rest just turned on preference.

********

Going Down To Mississipi Lyrics

I'm going down to Mississipi
I'm going down a southern road
And if you never see me again
Remember that I had to go
Remember that I had to go

It's a long road down to Mississipi
It's a short road back the other way
If the cops pull you over to the side of the road
You won't have nothing to say
No, you won't have nothing to say

There's a man waiting down in Mississippi
And he's waiting with a rifle in his hand
And he's looking down the road for an out-of-state car
And he thinks he's fighting for his land
Yes, he thinks he's fighting for his land

And he won't know the clothes I'm wearing
And he doesn't know the name that I own
But his gun is large and his hate is hard
And he knows I'm coming down the road
Yes, he knows I'm coming down the road

It's not for the glory that I'm leaving
It's not trouble that I'm looking for
But there's lots of good work calling me down
And The waiting won't do no more
No, The waiting won't do no more

Don't call me the brave one for going
No, don't pin a medal to my name
For even if there was any choice to make
I'd be going down just the same
I'd be going down just the same

For someone's got to go to mississipi
Just as sure as there's a right and there's a wrong
Even though you say the time will change
That time is just too long
That time is just too long

So I'm going down to Mississipi
I'm going down a southern road
And if you never see me again
Remember that I had to go
Remember that I had to go

***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Phil Och's "Here's To The State Of Mississippi"-Mississippi Goddam, Once Again

Click on the title to link to YouTube to hear the above-mentioned Phil Ochs song.

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

***********

Markin comment:

This is a continuation of entries for folksinger/songwriter Phil Och's who back in the early 1960s stood right up there with Bob Dylan in the protest songwriting category. The entries on this date testify to that. However, early on I sensed something special about Dylan and never really warmed up to Ochs. His singing style did not "move" me and that counted for a lot in those days. The rest just turned on preference.

********

Here's to the State of Mississippi Lyrics

G Em D
Here's to the state of Mississippi,
G F
For Underheath her borders, the devil draws no lines,
G F
If you drag her muddy river, nameless bodies you will find.
G F
whoa the fat trees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes,
G Em Am D
the calender is lyin' when it reads the present time.
G Em C G
Whoa here's to the land you've torn out the heart of,
G Em D G
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of!

Here's to the people of Mississippi
Who say the folks up north, they just don't understand
And they tremble in their shadows at the thunder of the Klan
The sweating of their souls can't wash the blood from off their hands
They smile and shrug their shoulders at the murder of a man
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

Here's to the schools of Mississippi
Where they're teaching all the children that they don't have to care
All of rudiments of hatred are present everywhere
And every single classroom is a factory of despair
There's nobody learning such a foreign word as fair
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

Here's to the cops of Mississippi
They're chewing their tobacco as they lock the prison door
Their bellies bounce inside them as they knock you to the floor
No they don't like taking prisoners in their private little war
Behind their broken badges there are murderers and more
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

And, here's to the judges of Mississippi
Who wear the robe of honor as they crawl into the court
They're guarding all the bastions with their phony legal fort
Oh, justice is a stranger when the prisoners report
When the black man stands accused the trial is always short
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

And here's to the government of Mississippi
In the swamp of their bureaucracy they're always bogging down
And criminals are posing as the mayors of the towns
They're hoping that no one sees the sights and hears the sounds
And the speeches of the governor are the ravings of a clown
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

And here's to the laws of Mississippi
Congressmen will gather in a circus of delay
While the Constitution is drowning in an ocean of decay
Unwed mothers should be sterilized, I've even heard them say
Yes, corruption can be classic in the Mississippi way
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

And here's to the churches of Mississippi
Where the cross, once made of silver, now is caked with rust
And the Sunday morning sermons pander to their lust
The fallen face of Jesus is choking in the dust
Heaven only knows in which God they can trust
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

From 'The Rag Blog- Jonah Raskin : 'Mockingbird' is Muddleheaded and Superficial- A Very Different View

Click on the headline to link to a The Rag Blog entry reviewing Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird on its 50th anniversary- Jonah Raskin : 'Mockingbird' is Muddleheaded and Superficial Different View.

Markin comment:

I, and most leftists, especially those about six of us still left from the 1960s, can appreciate the critique by Mr. Raskin. However, he has the advantage of 50 years of improving political consciousness on the question of race in America, formally anyway. At the time the book , and later the movie, had a powerful effect, if for no other reason that they were (and are) good literature and cinema. Beyond that, as literary critic and great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky noted, one cannot reasonably go. The other stuff, the political fight for black liberation in "real time" stuff, was (and is) up to us-forward in the black liberation struggle.

Note: Needless to say any two pages of Richard Wright's Black Boy or Native Son or any of James Baldwin's work, especially The Fire Next Time has more truth about the racial core of American society than all of Lee's book. But that is a different non-literary question.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- "The Cold War And The Civil Rights Movement"- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to Part Two of the "Workers Vanguard" article, dated April 23, 2010, "The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement".

Markin comment:


The presenter, Paul Cone, in the article posted below (Part Two is linked above) , “The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement”, made a point at the beginning of Part One of referencing his own personally tangential relationship to the events of the 1950s and early 1960s in the black civil rights movement. That, in turn, triggered some of my own remembrances from that time. Although I was thinking at the time about, and thinking through, in my own odd, half-formed early teenage way a lot of political questions in those days the struggle in the South caught and focused my attention for most of that period until things started to unravel in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and that fight took center stage.

This civil rights focus was hardly unique to my own personal political development. Virtually every memoir that I have read , every personal anecdotal piece of evidence, every even minimal instinct to fight for some sense of social justice by those that I have called for convenience sake, the “Generation of ’68, American division, tells the same tale. Lunch counter sit-ins, walking picket lines, voter registration drives, fair housing fights, school desegregations, books for Alabama school kids, bake sales for Mississippi freedom fighters, you name it but some almost cosmic sense of social solidarity drove us to ally ourselves with that struggle. And, we were not wrong to do so either, although I would argue, as does the presenter, that too little was gained for a number of political reasons for such massive effort. That, however, is a separate question.

I have, sputteringly and haphazardly, written various commentaries in this space over the past few years about different signposts in my political coming of age, starting with the period under discussion. I have mentioned the Kennedy boys, John and Robert, the first little unilateral nuclear disarmament demonstration that I attended on Boston Common, my youthful amorphous “softness” toward things Soviet, and things “communist”, and my “hard” left liberal take on the main questions of the day. And so on. Those need not be repeated here, nor do I intend to bring out every possible event and my reaction, or lack of reaction to it that dominated the era. Rather I want to pick a few events that stand out, and that draw some “lessons” about how political consciousness is formed when “big events” are in the air.

What does need some explanation, first, is how a dirt-poor, and I am being kind here, Northern teenage boy from a hard-drinking, hard-bitten, hard-hating, hard working class Irish Catholic neighborhood in the suburbs of Boston who had no black school classmates, ever, and did not know any blacks under any circumstances come to identify his sense of the rightness of the universe with the struggles down South. And who, moreover, had a father, who for all his hard-working efforts to raise and support a family that mainly went for naught and who faced his own insults to his dignity as a Southerner in the North, never in all his life ever even with the most fearsome coaching was able to call a black person anything better than “nigra”. Yes, that certainly calls for some explanation.

And the answer was already contained in the above paragraph, or perhaps you missed it. The dirt-poor phrase. Who knows on what day I came to realize down in that old public housing project that I grew up in (hereafter, “the projects”) that we, my family and I, were poor. All I know is that it was pretty early on and that it was pretty late in the day when I also realized that some, a lot, maybe, of people were not poor. I might add, we were not just “poor as church mice”, because that is too respectability poor for what I am talking about. We are talking about something just a little less primitive that Ohio Democratic Congressman and left liberal gadfly Dennis Kucinich’s living out of an old automobile when growing up.

So when I saw photos or news film of old black dirt farmers struggling to get to the courthouse to vote, or just to register to vote, or of old black women, probably maids or some other such lowly service occupation, who just wanted to rest their weary toes in some part of some bus, but not always the back, or, most famously, when I saw well-dressed (to me) black teenage kids being taunted by hate-filled, but also well-dressed (to me), white kids down in Little Rock, Arkansas and prayed, maybe literally prayed too in those days, that President Eisenhower would do the right thing (which he never really did) I had some primordial affinity that no words, no gesture, no high-flung doctrine could express. And we go from there.

I mentioned in a recent review of a DVD film documentary produced in the wake of the re-opening of the Emmett Till case in 2005 that I was just a little too young to have noted the import of that case, or of the Rosa Parks bus struggles down in Montgomery, Alabama. What I was riveted to, and riveted each morning on the “Today” television show that I watched for news before school was the Little Rock situation. Even today looking at the pictures of those hard-bitten white thugs taunting some black kids, who just wanted to go to a decent school, outrages me. And, we indeed, go from there.

Probably though the first sense that I could take some action against the Southern situation was in support of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins down in Greensboro, North Carolina (bloody Greensboro then, and now). First, and this is important for those interested in the way that political consciousness gets formed down at the base of society, we had a Woolworth’s in our town which we could picket, and there was also a family-famous one in downtown Boston that my grandmother took us to as a “treat” sometimes. Probably, in those days half the towns of any size in America had a Woolworth’s so I could not understand what the big deal was in trying to exclude people, any people, from having a turkey club sandwich (on white, extra mayo, please). Or a frappe (I will not even bother explaining what that one is, except that it is NOT a milk shake). Or a lime Rickey or chocolate sundae, or whatever. That, my friends, is what that bloody struggle came to, on the surface.

As part of that effect to publicize the Woolworth struggle I was also in contact with NAACP-types from the other side of our town. No, not black representatives, there were no blacks in town, period, as far as I knew but whites, mainly Jewish I think, from a local college who were putting together books for schools down in Mississippi. Now, as I have mentioned in other commentaries even when I was nothing but an ordinary, low-life hoodlum in the making, or at least a wannabe hoodlum, I always had an inordinate regard for books. So when I was asked to go around getting books there was not problem in my linking that little, little effort with the struggle down South.

Now I am a child of the television age, like most of you. So when pictures on the news started coming though of the cops running wild in trying to stop, or start, or whatever they were doing to keep black people from voting , or black kids from going to school where they wanted to, I flipped out. I am personally going South, one way or another. I will save that story for another time because it deserves its own space and as the about already should make clear I am already deeply committed to the black liberation struggle, as I understood it. But know this: if you want to get a sense of what titanic social struggles were and how they “lift all boats” and how they change social consciousness in ways that are not apparent in more settled times think about some of the points above, and, if I know my intended audience, think through those episodes of your lives that brought you to leftist political consciousness. Then organize like righteous hell.

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Workers Vanguard No. 956
9 April 2010

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement

Break with the Democrats!

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Part One


We print below a Black History Month Forum given in the musicians union hall in New York City on February 20 by Workers Vanguard Editorial Board member Paul Cone.

With pictures of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie—the fathers of bebop jazz—looking upon us I thought it would be appropriate to recall a short story called “Bop,” first published in 1949 by the great writer Langston Hughes. Through his character, Jesse B. Semple, Hughes describes the origins of bebop. According to Semple, it’s “From the police beating Negroes’ heads. Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club, that old club says, ‘BOP! BOP!...BE-BOP!...MOP!...BOP!’... That’s where Be-Bop came from, beaten right out of some Negro’s head into them horns and saxophones and piano keys that plays it.”

That was written on the cusp of the civil rights movement. With some modifications, Semple’s observations are no less applicable today. The billy club has been replaced by the retractable truncheon, the revolver has been replaced by the semiautomatic and the cops have added the Taser stun gun to their arsenal. In the first nine months of last year, nearly half a million men, women and children were subjected to the degrading “stop and frisk” by New York City cops—84 percent of them black or Hispanic. As Hughes’ character, Semple, pointed out, “White folks do not get their heads beat just for being white. But me—a cop is liable to grab me almost any time and beat my head—just for being colored.”

Welcome to our Black History Month forum. We study the history—often buried—of the struggles for black freedom, which are strategic for the American socialist revolution. Our pamphlet series is named Black History and the Class Struggle precisely to express the inextricable link between the emancipation of the proletariat and the fight for the liberation of black people in the U.S.

We meet here today a little over a year after Barack Obama became the first black president of the U.S.—the Commander-in-Chief of the most rapacious imperialist power on the planet. Obama governs on behalf of the capitalist class, whose rule is maintained on the bedrock of black oppression. Obama’s election was hailed by bourgeois pundits and reformist “socialists” alike as the realization of Martin Luther King’s “dream”—a dream that, as King put it in his famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington, was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” Malcolm X saw things quite differently: “I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.... I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare” (“The Ballot or the Bullet,” 3 April 1964).

While Wall Street barons wash down lobster dinners with 25-year-old single malt Scotch—paid for by government bailouts—the past year has seen the devastation of the lives of many workers: the loss of jobs, homes, savings and medical coverage, hitting the black population disproportionately hard. I work near 125th Street in Harlem and regularly pass an ever-increasing number of apparently homeless and obviously desperate people asking for help to buy a cup of coffee or some food; blaring from the loudspeakers set up by merchants is Obama’s voice boasting of “change we can believe in.”

Obama has beefed up the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, threatened crippling sanctions against Iran; he has built on the police-state measures implemented first by Bill Clinton and enhanced by George W. Bush in the name of the “war on terrorism,” and escalated attacks and repression against immigrants. Before the election, the Spartacist League declared: “McCain, Obama: Class Enemies of Workers, Oppressed” (WV No. 923, 24 October 2008). We gave no support to any bourgeois candidate, Democrat, Republican or Green like Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic Party Congresswoman supported by reformists like the Workers World Party.

Just as the reformists’ forebears followed King to John F. Kennedy’s Oval Office, today’s reformists deliver their followers to Obama’s doorstep. Workers World (27 November 2008) proclaimed Obama’s election “a triumph for the Black masses and all the oppressed.” Today, Larry Holmes still recalls the “shock and elation” while watching Obama’s inauguration (Workers World, 18 February). The International Socialist Organization (ISO) enthused in their Socialist Worker (21 January 2009): “Obama’s victory convinced large numbers of people of some basic sentiments at the heart of the great struggles of the past—that something different is possible, and that what we do matters.” To the extent they have any influence, what the reformists do is prop up illusions in the capitalist Democratic Party.

The Demise of Jim Crow

The title of this forum is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not narrowly about the Cold War. I want to try to explain a bit the context in which the mass struggles for civil rights took place. In the Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League, we wrote regarding the civil rights movement:

“The bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to the demand for legal equality in the South, both because Jim Crow segregation had grown anachronistic and because it was an embarrassment overseas as American imperialism sought to posture as the champion of ‘democracy’ in the Cold War, particularly in competition with the Soviet Union in the Third World.”

And that is roughly what I will be talking about. But not yet.

As Marxists, we see the motor force of history as the struggle between oppressor classes—today, the capitalist class, which owns the means of production like the banks, land and factories—and the oppressed classes. Under capitalism, this is the proletariat, workers who have nothing but their labor power, which they sell to the capitalists in order to live. Capitalism is an irrational system based on production for profit, born “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” as Marx put it in his classic work Capital (1867). The capitalist rulers, who claim the banner of “freedom” and “civilization,” have carried out mass murder and torture on an immense scale in their drive to secure world markets, cheap labor and raw materials. And history has shown that this system cannot be made to be more humane or the imperialist rulers more peace-loving. Nor can capitalism provide for the needs of the world’s masses, despite the vast wealth it possesses.

In order to preserve their class rule, the tiny capitalist class has at its disposal the vast powers of the state—which at its core is made up of the army, cops and courts—and means of ideological subjugation through the schools, press and religion. The capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed. On the road to revolution, it must be smashed by the revolutionary proletariat, and a workers government established in its place.

A key prop of capitalism is to keep the working class divided along ethnic and racial lines, which in this country means foremost the segregation of black people. We fight for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integrationism: while the working class must fight against all instances of racist oppression and discrimination, genuine equality for black people in the U.S. will only come about through the smashing of capitalism, preparing the road to an egalitarian socialist order. This perspective is counterposed to liberal integration, which is premised on the utopian notion that equality for black people can be attained within the confines of this capitalist society founded on black oppression. It is also counterposed to go-it-alone black nationalism—a petty-bourgeois ideology of despair which at bottom accepts the racist status quo.

Freedom for blacks in the U.S. will not come about without a socialist revolution. And there will be no socialist revolution without the working class taking up the fight for black freedom. As Karl Marx wrote shortly after the Civil War, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky that led the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. This was the greatest victory for the working people of the world: it gave the program of proletarian revolution flesh and blood. The proletariat seized political power and created a workers state based on soviets (workers councils). The young workers state eliminated laws discriminating against women and homosexuals and recognized the right to self-determination of the many peoples oppressed under tsarist/capitalist rule. The Soviet government proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education.

The Russian Revolution was not made solely for Russia, but was seen as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital. It was an inspiration to the oppressed masses of the world and had a direct impact on the struggle of black people in the U.S. The American rulers have always seen a connection between the Russian Revolution and the struggles of black people in the U.S.—and rightly so. The Bolshevik Revolution was popular among wide layers of urban blacks and even among moderate black newspapers and organizations. The Messenger, published by prominent Socialist Party member A. Philip Randolph, who would later become a vicious anti-Communist, captured this sentiment with articles like, “We Want More Bolshevik Patriotism” (May-June 1919).

It was the intervention by the Communist International in the 1920s that turned the attention of the American Communists to the necessity of special work among the oppressed black population—a sharp break from the practice of the earlier socialist movement. After the Russian Revolution, J. Edgar Hoover railed that “a certain class of Negro leaders” had shown “an outspoken advocacy of the Bolsheviki or Soviet doctrines,” had been “openly, defiantly assertive” of their “own equality or even superiority” and had demanded “social equality” (quoted in Robert Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the Present [1978]). The government immediately put together an apparatus of surveillance, harassment and terror that would be a model for the later FBI COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) in the 1950s through the 1970s. COINTELPRO meant massive wiretapping, burglaries and surveillance against even tame civil rights leaders like King, and the killings of 38 members of the Black Panther Party and imprisonment of hundreds more. As Martin Dies, head of the witchhunting House Committee on Un-American Affairs declared in the mid 1940s, “Moscow realizes that it cannot revolutionize the United States unless the Negro can be won over to the Communist cause” (quoted in Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War [1986]).

From the beginning, the young Russian workers state was surrounded and besieged by hostile capitalist countries. The Revolution prevailed in a bloody civil war against the counterrevolutionaries and the forces of 14 invading capitalist powers. But the poverty, backwardness and isolation of the country, especially following the defeat of the 1923 German Revolution, laid the ground for the development of a bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin, which expropriated political power from the working class. The nationalist outlook of the bureaucracy was given expression in Stalin’s proclamation in the fall of 1924 of the anti-Marxist “theory” that socialism—a classless, egalitarian society based on material abundance—could be built in a single country, and a backward one at that. In practice, “socialism in one country” came to mean opposition to the perspective of workers revolution internationally and accommodation to world imperialism—leading to the sellout of revolutionary opportunities—and in particular the propping up of capitalist rule in West Europe after World War II.

Despite the profoundly deforming bureaucratic means employed by the Stalinist regime, which undermined the Bolshevik Revolution’s gains, state ownership of the means of production and economic planning made possible the transformation of what had been an impoverished, backward, largely peasant country into an industrial and military powerhouse within the span of two decades. The Soviet Union provided a military counterweight to U.S. imperialism, making possible the survival of overturns of capitalism in East Europe and the social revolutions in China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam.

We fought to the end to defend the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and counterrevolution, while at the same time fighting for a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist misrulers and restore the working class to political power. Today, we continue to defend the remaining deformed workers states of China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 was a world historic defeat, not merely for the working people of the former Soviet Union but also for the international working class. The collapse of the USSR has meant U.S./NATO imperialist slaughter from the Balkans to Iraq and Afghanistan—accompanied by devastating attacks on the workers and oppressed minorities domestically.

The Civil Rights Movement

We study past struggles—victories and defeats—in order to politically arm ourselves and the proletariat for future battles. There are very few historical conjunctures in which a small Marxist propaganda group with a few hundred members could within a few years have transformed itself into a workers party leading a significant section of the proletariat. The South in the early 1960s offered such a rare opportunity.

The mass mobilization of black people in the Southern civil rights movement, and the subsequent Northern ghetto rebellions, disrupted and challenged the racist American bourgeois order. It shattered the anti-Communist consensus and it paved the road for the mass protest movements that followed—against the U.S. dirty war in Vietnam, for the rights of women, gays, students and others.

The civil rights movement achieved important—though partial—gains for black people largely in the realm of formal democratic rights whose main beneficiaries have been a thin layer of the black petty bourgeoisie. Public facilities were desegregated, black people won the right to register to vote in the South, and mandated school segregation was outlawed. But the liberal-led civil rights movement did not and could not challenge the root cause of black oppression. The hellish conditions of ghetto life—the mass chronic unemployment, racist cop terror, crumbling schools, poverty and hunger (the “American nightmare”)—which remain the lot of the mass of black people nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act was adopted are rooted in American capitalism. The civil rights movement smashed its head against this fact when it swept out of the South and into the North in the mid 1960s.

From its onset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black middle-class leadership allied to Democratic Party liberalism. The aim of this leadership—whose most effective exponent was King—was to pressure the Democratic Party administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to grant formal, legal equality to blacks in the South. Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers (UAW) and Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—assisted by elements of the decomposing American social democracy like Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington as well as by the Stalinized Communist Party (CP)—worked to keep the civil rights movement within the confines of bourgeois reformism and the Democratic Party. And this they did very well. Ultimately, millions of youth, whose opposition to racist oppression and growing animosity toward U.S. imperialist depredations were leading them to seek revolutionary solutions, were channeled into the Democratic Party of racism and war. In his classic work in defense of the Bolshevik Revolution, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) Lenin nailed Karl Kautsky, the granddaddy of the later social democrats and reformists:

“Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the ‘democracy’ of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution! And now that the era of revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon it and begins to extol the charms of moribund bourgeois democracy.”

If you didn’t live through it, I think it’s hard to appreciate how tempestuous and volatile this period was, and how the struggle for black rights dominated domestic politics for over a decade. That era has become sanitized in movies, newspapers, books and the accounts of many of its participants—even former militants from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party, who are today comfortably ensconced in the Democratic Party.

Now I’ll confess, I was a bit young, only ten years old at the time of the March on Washington, for example, so I wasn’t a participant in these events like some of my comrades. A lot of my focus that year was on the upcoming Dodgers/Yankees World Series; the Dodgers swept them. But even at that age and younger, I was surrounded by the images of the assassination of Medgar Evers, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett blocking the steps of the University of Mississippi to blacks, the burning churches, the vilification of one of my childhood idols, Muhammad Ali, when he appeared with Malcolm X by his side after winning the heavyweight title. I recall the fear that Malcolm generated, seen in the eyes and heard in the voices of the bourgeois press corps and politicians, who in turn embraced the same conservative civil rights leaders whom they earlier castigated for wanting to move “too fast.” I also remember the cities in flames, starting with Harlem in 1964.

Largely ignored by accounts of that period is the ferment in the North, where black people had already attained the formal rights blacks in the South were fighting for. But discrimination in housing was public policy. In New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee and other cities of the North, black newcomers were forced into overcrowded ghettos, where they paid high rent for rat-infested slums; black children were sent to inferior schools, and black adults had few job opportunities and few, if any, public facilities. By 1962-63, there were as many protests in the North and West as in the South—for jobs, an end to segregated housing, and for school integration.

Fueling this rage was the grim reality that the economic advancement of much of the black working class—which came with wartime employment, U.S. industrial dominance and, most importantly, unionized jobs—was coming to an end. Between 1947 and 1963 Detroit lost 140,000 manufacturing jobs. In New York City, over 70,000 garment industry jobs were lost in the 1950s. The same was happening to meatpacking workers in Chicago and longshore, warehouse and shipbuilding workers in Baltimore, Newark, Oakland and Philadelphia. In large part this was because the capitalists were increasingly moving production to the South. Much of the industrial Northeast and Midwest was soon rendered rotting hulls. This was largely a product of the union tops’ failure to organize the South—a failure that stemmed from the anti-Communist purging of militant organizers during the Cold War, the union tops’ allegiance to the Democrats and failure to take up the fight for black rights.

On 13 May 1963, in solidarity with blacks in Birmingham, Alabama, who were fighting back against the racist terrorists and in protest against brutal cop terror in their city, some 3,000 black teenagers in Chicago pelted cops with bricks and bottles. In New York City, 1963 and 1964 saw thousands of Harlem tenants forming tenants councils, withholding rent and winning services and repairs from the slumlords. This was met with a vicious bourgeois campaign of racist hysteria. The purpose was, as we wrote at the time, “preparation and justification for the smashing, through police terror, of the coming stage of the Negro rights struggle” (“Negro Struggle in the North,” Spartacist No. 2, July-August 1964). In July of 1964, New York City cops exploited the protests against the police killing of 15-year-old James Powell to justify a full-scale offensive to smash every sign of these struggles. Such cop terror as that in Harlem would trigger many of the ghetto upheavals that took place in over 300 cities over the next three years. In New York, as the cops sealed off Harlem, we Spartacists launched the Harlem Solidarity Committee, which organized a protest of 1,000 in the garment district.

Adding to the civil rights movement’s turbulent character was the fact that activists were on a daily basis forced to confront and grapple with questions of where their movement was going. Such questions ultimately bring to the fore the nature of the capitalist state, class divisions in society, the “rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism”—leading to the heart of the question of reform vs. revolution. This played out in the first instance in the issue of armed self-defense or the strategy of “non-violence,” which was the calling card of King. For this, King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. This prize itself has no noble history. It was also later awarded to such peace-loving people as Menachem Begin, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and now Barack Obama.

In 1960, Trotskyist activists got a first-hand view of how the question of armed self-defense was perceived by student activists during a visit to Southern black campuses shortly after the student sit-in movement was launched at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s in February. While the student militants were for peaceful picketing—perfectly correct as they were outnumbered—the influence of pacifist ideology was slight, and, notably, the students undertook self-defense measures to protect their campus and themselves from the racist terrorists.

Armed defense of meetings of black activists in the Klan-ridden South had been a well-established tradition, stemming not least from the efforts of the Communist Party to organize sharecroppers in the 1930s. This had been a necessary measure to make sure such gatherings took place without anybody being killed. This tradition however was anathema to the accommodationist wing of the civil rights movement led by King. Be clear: this question was not an issue of whether or not an individual whose home or family was under attack would repel the invaders. In a well-known 1959 statement, King himself acknowledged this basic human impulse. The issue was quite different. By pledging non-violence, the civil rights leaders were pledging allegiance to the white power structure, asserting that the movement could not go beyond the bounds set for it by the liberal wing of the ruling class represented by the Democratic Party. To say that the civil rights movement had the right to defend itself against racist terror was to say that you didn’t accept the rules of the capitalist ruling class and its racist “democracy.”

The ISO portrays King’s statement as part of a “debate” with black militant leader Robert F. Williams. This was no “debate.” King’s statement was used by the NAACP leadership in suspending Williams as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter. Williams was targeted by the state and ultimately driven out of the country in 1961 for organizing black self-defense against KKK terror. To King’s argument that “violence” by black Americans “would be the greatest tragedy that could befall us,” Williams responded, “I am a man and I will walk upright as a man should. I will not crawl!” (quoted in Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, 1999). We defended Williams. In 1965, the SL initiated a fund-raising campaign for the defense of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa, Louisiana, who also organized armed self-defense. In doing so we advanced our class perspective—the revolutionary mobilization of the working class independent of the capitalist rulers.

During the civil rights movement, as government forces, not only the Southern municipalities but at the federal level, either stood by or facilitated the beatings of activists, the question of the nature of the capitalist state was brought to the fore. In part, dealing with such issues accounted for the receptivity among students to Marxist literature during that 1960 trip to the South I just referred to. Notable as well was the absence of the social democrats and Stalinists, which also provided openings for Marxists, and the distrust by many student activists of the adult leadership groups that acted as a brake on the movement—specifically including King and preachers identified with him.

The RT’s Fight for Revolutionary Integrationism

It is during these years that our organization originated as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). (Among the founders of the RT were the former editors of the Trotskyist Young Socialist, who had initiated a nationwide campaign of picket line protests at Woolworth’s in support of the Greensboro sit-in.) Our strategic perspective was to transform the left wing of the civil rights movement into a revolutionary workers party capable of leading much of the black working class and impoverished petty bourgeoisie in the South.

The SWP had for decades been the Trotskyist party in the U.S. It maintained a revolutionary course through the difficult World War II years and the immediate period thereafter. In 1941, under the thought-crime anti-Communist Smith Act, 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters leaders were sent to prison by the Roosevelt administration for their opposition to the imperialist slaughter of World War II. During the war, the SWP took up and publicized the defense cases of black soldiers victimized for opposition to Jim Crow segregation. In the aftermath of anti-black riots in Detroit in 1943, they fought for flying squadrons of union militants to stand ready to defend blacks menaced by racist mobs.

In contrast, following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Stalinist CP hailed U.S. entry into World War II in December and worked overtime to enforce the trade-union bureaucracy’s “no strike” pledge. They demanded that the black masses forsake their struggle for equality in the interest of the imperialist war effort. The SWP viewed black liberation as the task of the working class as a whole, and intervened in the struggle against racial oppression with a militant integrationist perspective. The party won hundreds of black recruits, including a major breakthrough in Detroit. However, under the intense pressure of the Cold War period, most of them left the party over the next few years.

By the early 1960s, the SWP had lost its revolutionary bearings and tailed non-proletarian class forces, seen domestically in its policy of abstention from the Southern civil rights struggle and later embrace of black nationalism. By 1965 it had become a thoroughly reformist party. As opposed to the SWP majority, the RT fought the party’s criminal abstentionism and pointed out that the young radicals would not come to a Marxist program simply by virtue of their militancy—the intervention of a revolutionary party was necessary. Building a revolutionary vanguard necessarily meant participating in and building a revolutionary leadership in the current struggles of the working class. The RT fought inside the SWP for the party to seize the opportunity to recruit black Trotskyist cadres to their ranks. The RT put forward a series of demands linking the fight for black rights to broader struggles of the working class and addressing immediate needs such as organized self-defense and union organizing drives throughout the South.

Many SNCC activists were open to a revolutionary perspective. Shirley Stoute, a black member of the RT, received a personal invitation to work with SNCC in Atlanta, which the SWP majority had to accede to. Then they called her back to New York on a pretext a month later. After a bitter political fight over this and other questions, the RT was expelled from the SWP in 1963-64, going on to found the Spartacist League in 1966.

In an August 1963 document, “The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership,” the Revolutionary Tendency wrote: “We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.” Had the SWP remained a revolutionary party and concentrated its forces in the Southern civil rights movement, it could have won to Trotskyism a large fraction of those young black radicals who eventually became black nationalists. After being expelled from the SWP, we intervened with our small forces in the civil rights movement in both the South and North. We called on militants to break with the Democratic Party. Our call for a Freedom Labor Party was an axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. As we elaborated in “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League/U.S. in 1966:

“Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through struggle with the rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an egalitarian, socialist society.

“Yet the struggle of the Black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class…. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution….

“The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of this struggle unbreakable bonds will be forged between the two sections of the working class. The success of the struggle will place the Negro people in a position to insure at last the end of slavery, racism and super-exploitation.”

The Rise of the Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement did not just fall from the sky. The elimination of legal segregation cannot be portrayed as an idea whose time had come, as the fulfillment of American democracy’s supposed “moral mission,” as the realization of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or, as Martin Luther King claimed, the cashing of a promissory note from the “founding fathers” to blacks whose ancestors were enslaved. As I mentioned earlier, the Jim Crow system, designed to control and terrorize blacks in the rural South, had become anachronistic—i.e., it no longer served the needs of the U.S. bourgeoisie. This is important to understand.

The Civil War, America’s second bourgeois revolution, had smashed the slave system, paving the way for the development of industrial capitalism in the U.S. as a whole. But after the betrayal of Reconstruction by the Northern bourgeoisie, “the Negro was left in the South in the indefinite position of semi-slavery, semi-serfdom and semi-wage slavery” as then-Trotskyist Max Shachtman put it in his 1933 piece “Communism and the Negro” (reprinted as Race and Revolution [2003]). Sharecropping and tenancy formed the labor backbone of Southern agriculture. Sitting atop this was the system of Jim Crow, the systematic legal segregation of black people in the South enforced by legal and extralegal violence. It was designed to prevent blacks from voting, becoming educated or fighting for their rights. When blacks did challenge Jim Crow—either by personally refusing to follow its rules or, more rarely, by organizing against it—they faced racist terror, whether by the local sheriff or the Klan (who were often one and the same). At least 3,000 black people were lynched between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1960s.

Black people in the U.S. constitute a race-color caste integrated into the capitalist economy at its lower rungs while socially segregated. As historic Trotskyist leader Richard S. Fraser noted:

“Discrimination and prejudice in the rest of the United States derives directly from the southern system, feeds upon it, and like racial discrimination throughout the world is completely dependent upon it.... In every possible way it [the capitalist class] perpetuates the division of the working class by establishing throughout the entire nation the basic reciprocal relations between discrimination, segregation and prejudice which are so successful in the South.”

—“The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953), reprinted in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of His Work,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990

Fraser added, “the scar of race antagonism” serves to fortify and stabilize “the structure of American capitalism by dividing the population into hostile racial groups, who find it difficult to get together in defense of their common interests against the master class.”

The industrial needs of both world wars, and the murderous terror blacks faced in the South, led to mass emigration out of the South and into Northern and Western industrial centers. Rural sharecroppers were transformed into proletarians in modern mass production industries. Following the strikes in the 1930s that formed the CIO labor federation, black workers were integrated into powerful industrial unions.

At the same time, by the 1930s, Southern agriculture in this most advanced capitalist country was still economically backward, retaining significant remnants of the slave system. In search of cheaper labor markets, and to accommodate the economic needs of World War II, American capitalism had been forced to abandon its earlier conception of the agrarian South as mainly a source of raw materials and very limited industrial development. By the Depression, textile, iron, coal, steel and chemical industries had been developing in the South. The urbanization and industrialization of the American South during and after World War II created large concentrations of black workers, and proletarianized poor agrarian and middle-class whites. This created a clear identity of interests between white and black exploited industrial workers, establishing conditions for the emergence of broader class struggle and the struggle for black freedom. The practice of landlords and sheriffs picking up isolated tenants, sharecroppers or black transients at will, and forcing them into the prison slave-labor system (powerfully depicted in the book Slavery by Another Name [2008] by Douglas A. Blackmon) was not very effective when dealing with black workers concentrated in factories—particularly if organized into unions.

For black people, the Deep South in the early 1950s remained a racist totalitarian police state. When black soldiers came back from integrated units in the Korean War, they swore they would no longer submit to Jim Crow. The emergence of a mass movement of blacks in the South that not only protested but also defied racist legality posed a problem for the Northern bourgeoisie, which controlled the federal government. They could either go along with the suppression of the civil rights movement by the Southern state authorities and local governments, or they could utilize the federal government to favor policies that would introduce to the South the same bourgeois-democratic norms that existed in the rest of the country.

Dominant sections of the Northern bourgeoisie concentrated in the Democratic Party opted for the latter. They would use the federal government to pressure, but not compel, their Southern class brethren to grant democratic rights to blacks. The Eisenhower and Kennedy/Johnson administrations engaged in a continual series of compromises between the civil rights movement and Southern authorities. At the same time they did very little to prevent the violent suppression of civil rights activists by the Southern authorities and sometimes collaborated in that suppression. For instance, when asked what the government would do about attacks on civil rights activists, Kennedy answered, “We’ll do what we always do. Nothing.”

It is to this wing of the bourgeoisie that the leaders of the civil rights movement shackled the fight for black freedom. The bourgeoisie could acquiesce to partial gains for blacks—desegregation of public facilities, voter registration, as well as a degree of school integration—as these did not undermine their class rule. Moreover, continued denial of civil rights to blacks in the South was a liability to the ambitions of U.S. imperialism internationally. In short order, as the federal government granted civil rights concessions, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations and celebrities would be signing on to the Cold War against the Soviet Union and anti-communist witchhunts at home—even as they found themselves in the gun sights of the McCarthyites, HUAC and their Southern replicas.

[TO BE CONTINUED]