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NEWS & LETTERS, OCTOBER 2003Special FeatureDialectics of Black Freedom Struggles: Race, Philosophy and the Needed American RevolutionPreface | Table of Contents | Excerpts | How to order From the Preface On June 23, 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court gave narrow approval for the use of race in determining admissions to the University of Michigan Law School. At the same time it rejected an affirmative action program at the University of Michigan undergraduate school whose admissions policy was seen as a quota system because it awarded points to minority applicants. Sandra Day O'Connor was one of the swing votes in the 5-4 decision. Her concern was not in remedying injustices but in what she called "the compelling public interest in diversity." Even though the administration had earlier weighed in with its own opposition to affirmative action, George W. Bush stated shortly after the decision that he applauded the Court for "recognizing the value of diversity...one of America's greatest strengths." The U.S. military and multinational corporations, both of which are marketing the U.S. all over the globe, are strong advocates of "diversity" as a "compelling public interest." Their use of diversity as a symbol polishes an apple for market that is thoroughly rotten to the core. None of this "diversity" is about helping individuals but is about selling American militarized capitalism to the world, using Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as the face of U.S. imperialism. Booker T. Washington, in the post-Reconstruction period, played this kind of role for the emergence of American capitalism in the South. The truth is that the racist core of American capitalism is as prevalent as ever. Unemployment among Blacks today is rising at a faster pace than in any period since the mid-1970s. Most of the jobs lost have been in manufacturing, where wages for Blacks have historically been higher than in other fields. Under these racist economic conditions we can't expect African Americans to remain quiescent. We know from American history that the Black revolt is ongoing and permanent. This statement is being issued on the 40th anniversary of the original publication of AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL: BLACK MASSES AS VANGUARD, which was issued at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 and republished with new Prefaces and Introductions in 1970 and 1983. The following statement, authored primarily by John Alan, "Black/Red View" columnist for News & Letters newspaper over the past 30 years, has been worked out through a collective process of dialogue and discussion in News and Letters Committees, the only Marxist-Humanist organization in the U.S. AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL is a comprehensive study of the historic struggles of African Americans to be free, from a dialectical and humanist perspective. It remains central to working out a Marxist-Humanist perspective for today's freedom movements. The task is not simply to repeat or update the conclusions of AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL, but to re-create its dialectical methodology in light of the struggles, contradictions, and questions facing us today. Needed more than ever is what Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., called in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, giving "a philosophic structure to concrete events."(1) That is, the challenge is to understand ongoing history not merely as a sequence of events, nor even to uncover the root cause of ever-resurgent racism and classism, but to grasp the self-movement of the freedom idea within the revolts in civil society. That is the only way to discern the elements of the new society which are present in today's spontaneous revolts. Without a philosophic structure, the revolts invariably get pulled back into the framework of bourgeois politics. The philosophic structure developed by Marxist-Humanism is itself an aspect of the self-determination of the Idea of freedom. It is a way to fully appreciate once again the continuing African-American opposition in our post-September 11, 2001 world. African Americans are revealing that the Idea of freedom cannot be relegated simply to overcoming terrorism and religious fundamentalism, of which we have a version here at home with the Christian Right which surely has the ear of George W. Bush. Rather, the Idea of freedom has to be worked out and deepened from within this racist, alienating society. That means taking on all political-theoretic-philosophic tendencies that truncate the aspirations for full freedom and self-determination. The critical need today is to work out a new unity of theory and practice, rooted in the self-activity of the subjects of revolt. For Marxist-Humanists that unity rests on what Hegel called "absolute negativity"—not alone the destruction of the old, but the creation of the new.(2) Hegel's dialectic is based upon the full realization that "every beginning is the result of some other mediation."(3) This means we cannot stop with opposition to this racist society, but must work out what we are for in terms of the power of the Idea of freedom. The persistence of the African-American struggle has created many new mediations in the freedom idea in this country. The point of recollecting the history of these struggles is to overcome the tendency to accept any new stage as a fixed result, instead of realizing the power of mediation—dialectical mediation, the struggle for altogether new, human beginnings. As the Introduction to the 1983 edition of AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL put it, "To separate a philosophy of liberation from the struggle for freedom is to doom us to yet one more unfinished revolution such as has characterized the U.S. from its birth, when the Declaration of Independence was meant for white only and left the Black enslaved...it has become clear since the 1960s that even the greatest actions need the direction that comes from a total philosophy of freedom. What is needed now is to concretize such a philosophy of freedom as the reality for our age." We believe this book will make an important contribution to achieving this goal. —The National Editorial Board, News and Letters Committees NOTES 1. See "Dialectics of Revolution and of Women's Liberation," in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY: SELECTED WRITINGS ON THE DIALECTIC IN HEGEL AND MARX, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, p. 301. 2. For a full discussion of the concept of absolute negativity, see PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION: FROM HEGEL TO SARTRE AND FROM MARX TO MAO, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003 [orig. 1973]), especially chapter 1, "Absolute Negativity as New Beginning: The Ceaseless Movement of Ideas and of History." 3. See "Notes on Hegel's Phenomenology," in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, p. 43. |
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