Black-Red View
November 2000

'Million Family March'

by John Alan

The modern family ... contains in itself in miniature all the antagonisms that later develop widely in society and its state.
--Karl Marx

Last month, on the fifth anniversary of the 1995 Million Man March, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, led the Million Family March to the Mall in Washington, D.C. Neither march reached the magic million mark. Actually the word million was self-advertisement implying that Minister Farrakhan was the great African-American leader in the vanguard of the struggle for African-American freedom in this country. To thoroughly debunk this claim and its power to disorient the movement, one should review and critically think about what happened ideologically on Washington's Mall on Oct. 16.

First, the Million Family March was far from being a protest demonstration. According to Farrakhan, who co-sponsored the March with Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, the march was "a day of atonement, a day of reconciliation, a day of responsibility." It was also a very well-organized event with excellent entertainment. Singers like Stevie Wonder, Macy Gray and Regina Bell were lined up to perform for the crowd.

While the obvious focus of the Million Family March would be the family, there was nothing in the reported main presentations of Farrakhan or Rev. Moon that addressed directly and concretely the real social and economic problems that the great majority of African-American and working-class families are compelled to face daily in the United States. It is even more amazing that an organized, gigantic meeting on the family did not have one major presentation by a woman.

Instead, what the Million Family March projected was a male, conservative version of the family and Farrakhan's dreadful judgement that there is an absolute moral crisis in all families. In his words: "The human family-black, brown, yellow and white-we all seem to be frozen on a subhuman level of human existence." Farrakhan did not expand on the meaning of his universal "subhuman level of human existence." However, it can be speculated that, from the point of view of a Muslim male, he does not mean materially subhuman, that they don't have material means to live, but are spiritually deprived, socially subhuman.

During his two-hour speech, Farrakhan declared that "The family is the basic unit of civilization, so everything must be done to take care of the family unit." Farrahkan does not explain why the "family unit" is the "basic unit of civilization." Is he only speaking about the present day accepted monogamous family form, that is often violated in the American and European capitalist societies? Or does he include all the various family forms that have appeared in all the civilizations of Europe, Asia and Africa?

A serious objective examination of the history and development of the "family unit" reveals that it is not created in a spiritual heaven, but here on earth in the social organization and the division of human labor. For example, as Marx noted, in the Roman slave civilization "the word family had no relation to the married pair or their children, but [was used] in relation to the body of slaves and servants who labor for its maintenance and were under the power of the pater familias."

Here in the United States during the period of slavery, the African-American "family unit" was totally dehumanized. Slaves produced commodities for the world market and made more slaves to work in cotton fields and rice swamps. This historically dehumanized form of the African-American family was the original foundation upon which American civilization was built. The social consequences of that historic dehumanization and alienation of African-American labor still remain with us today. Today's forms of capitalism continue the dissolution of the African-American family in a pit of poverty and imprisonment of a million African Americans in federal and state prisons and local jails.

The inverted consciousness at this march focused on "atonement" like the Million Man March before it. This is a diversion meant to turn attention away from the need to totally uproot the social conditions that mean incarceration for one out of every thirty African Americans, permanent unemployment and a diminishing amount of public welfare allotments to the African-American poor and other non-whites in this nation. The persistent theme of these "million-march-ideologues," now with the added insult of the arch-conservative Rev. Moon, is to reinforce the patriarchal family as opposed to the striving for new human relations. They would transform marching on Washington from a reach for self-determination and a new society to a moral cry and a ritualistic mass "sacred marriage blessing."

I remember in the tremendous revolutionary ferment of the 1930s the Muslims of Elijah Muhammed were a fringe religious grouping most radical Blacks laughed at. Malcolm X broke them out of their narrow religous nationalism by reaching for more social involvement in the Black struggle for freedom of the 1960s. He paid with his life for that breach. Farrakhan went back to the religious self-help concept and social conservatism.

The danger of an ideologue like Farrakhan is that his Million Man March diverted the passion of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion from a total challenge to this society into a religious self-help inwardness that even Clinton could endorse. This diversion's logical conclusion is the sorry spectacle we saw Oct. 16.

For Black radicals, it is not enough to condemn the ideology of accomodation to capitalism Farrakhan preaches. We have to help develop a revolutionary alternative to this society both in philosophy and in practice.