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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2002
Column: Black-Red View by John Alan
Marx and Black freedom
Martin Luther King Jr. closed
his famous 1963 "I have a dream" speech by saying: "Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last." It seemed that African Americans
had won a victory over racism and a new period in American history had begun.
But the struggle against racism, poverty and police brutality goes on. Thus,
many African Americans are ambivalent about President Bush's "war on
terrorism." The NAACP's board of directors
has expressed this ambivalence in a statement published in the November/December
2001 issue of THE CRISIS. They say that while they fully support their country
against the attack of an enemy, "the struggle to eradicate racial injustice
from our society [and]...the goal of a truly just country is still so painfully
far out of reach that literally millions of Black lives are disintegrating this
very minute under the weight of discrimination, cruel and incompetent
institutions and greedy racist indifference to suffering." The "greedy racist"
and "cruel and incompetent institutions" that the NAACP board so
passionately condemn comprises nothing less than American civil society where
racism, individual egoism and the exploitation of labor reign. The NAACP and
other African-American organizations have, for eons, gone to the courts and
pressured Congress to legally purge racism from this society. They have won
cases, but essentially racism has only been modified and remains intact. African Americans have always
been moved by the idea of freedom. During slavery they destroyed the objects of
their labor, killed their masters and built an underground railroad to escape.
This opposition to slavery was the foundation upon which the white abolitionists
built their movement. Marx played a role in the abolitionist movement as part of
the labor movement in England. He fought against the British government jumping
into the U.S. Civil War on the side of the South. From the start Marx saw the
question of slavery as integral to world capitalist development as well as to
the emancipation of labor. In 1847 he wrote: "Direct slavery is the pivot
of our industrialism today as much as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery,
you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery
that has given value to the colonies; it was the colonies that created world
trade; it is world trade that is the necessary condition for large-scale machine
industry. Also, before the slave-trade in Negroes, the colonies supplied the Old
World with but very few products and did not visibly change the face of the
earth. Slavery is thus an economic category of the highest importance." Ending slavery was a crucial
dimension to opening a new epoch of human liberation. Marx closely followed
events in America like John Brown's slave uprising in 1859. These events
coincided with the anti-serfdom agitation in Russia. Marx wrote to Engels on
Jan. 11, 1860 that the movement of these slaves, Black and white, in such widely
separated parts of the globe marked the beginning of the emancipation of the
working class and was "the biggest thing now happening in the world."
In his greatest theoretical work, Capital, Marx brought in the struggle for the
normal working day and its phenomenal spread throughout the U.S. after the Civil
War as the first fruits of the victory over slavery. Where Marx saw the crucial role of Blacks in the emancipation
of labor, there has been a great deal of confusion among post-Marx Marxists on
what is the meaning of the African-American movement after the Civil War.
Socialists in general put it as a side issue detracting from the emancipation of
labor. A new chapter was opened with Lenin and the Russian Revolution. He saw
the independent struggle of African Americans as a new manifestation of the
national liberation which would not detract from, but enhance, the revolutionary
struggle. The U.S. Communist Party (CP) had over 70 years of various
theoretical/political positions on the African-American problem. At no time were
these political positions directly answering the instinctive striving of African
Americans for freedom. The CP was to be the teacher
and the Black masses were the pupils. The glaring contradiction in this is that
the independent action of African Americans did not often coincide with the
shifting policies of the CP and the Soviet Union. Thus, the American CP opposed
the 1943 March on Washington for equality and jobs during World War II because
Germany broke the Hitler/Stalin Pact and invaded Russia. Russia was now an ally
of the United States. The CP had a position at one
point that there should be a separate Black nation declared out of the five
Southern states, a kind of "Tajikistan for Blacks" in the U.S. What
they didn't comprehend is that the self-movement of the Black masses has its own
trajectory. It was hard for post-Marx Marxists of all stripes to grasp both the independence of the Black movement as well as its vanguard nature in the struggle for liberation from American capitalism. African Americans need to play an independent role in starting the struggle. But that independent role does not separate them from the general movement to emancipate labor and all oppressed groups. It was the slave revolts that brought the Abolitionist movement into being as well as the women's movement. |
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