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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2006Limitations of politicsby John Alan In light of renewal of the Voting Rights Act pending in Congress and the upcoming mid-term elections in the U.S., we reprint John Alan's Nov. 1981 column, "Attack on Voting Rights Bill."-Editor. The House of Representatives has voted to extend the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but the Act is still under challenge from the reactionary U.S. Senate, especially from Strom Thurmond, the racist head of the Sentate Judiciary Committee... The [Congressional] Black Caucus may have been active [for the act], but protest and demonstrations across the Black South certainly had their impact as well, and may need to be intensified to achieve passage in the Senate. The attack on the Voting Rights Act is not an isolated event. It is Blacks who face the cutting edge of a real depression and the invading racism of Reagan's administration... It is a policy to weaken the enforcement of every civil rights act that directly pertains to Blacks, women, Hispanics, and other minorities. There is nothing new about this political method of bourgeois rule which curtails civil rights in actuality, while at the same time endowing these rights with constitutional and legislative "legitimacy." The Voting Rights Act had been effectively "amended in practice" long before it came up for extension by Congress. In Mobile, Ala. a system of voting-at-large has successfully prevented Blacks from being elected to the powerful three-person Commission that runs the city in the interest of white-owned businesses. The U.S. Supreme Court has given objective sanction to voting-at-large by ruling last year, in the Wiley L. Bolden vs. the City of Mobile case, that the mere fact that Blacks can't get elected in a voting-at-large election is not enough to prove discrimination. What must be proven, the court asserted, was intent to discriminate. This is difficult, if not impossible, to prove. Neither has the Voting Rights Act prevented racial gerrymandering of districts and the annexation of white suburbs to prevent the election of Black officials. However it would be an historical error to look at the right to vote, or any other civil right that the masses of people may have, as a mere question of legislation or judicial decisions, as many Black politicians and leaders want to convey. These rights had to be fought for by masses acting as a social force within capitalist society. The history of this country abounds with such struggles-of labor to organize and to limit the working day, of women for the right to vote but also to end racism, an endemic characteristic of American capitalist society. The state gives nothing on its own. The present Voting Rights Act is a child of one of the greatest mass movements that this country has ever experienced-the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Reagan's Administration has assumed that they can dismantle or ignore civil rights victories which took Black revolts more than a decade to achieve. The Administration has taken advantage of the current crisis of capitalism to ignore Black rights. Under the rubric of "getting Washington off the backs of the people," they hope to turn the clock back to some unrestrained period of capitalist exploitation. This would take a veritable counter-revolution that would be resisted by workers, Blacks, women and youth, the potential of which was shown by the tremendous turnout at the Solidarity Day gatherings in Washington and in other cities throughout the U.S., opposing Reagan's "cut back, take back" economic programs. To resist counter-revolution, the criticism is not enough. We must escape from the narrow alienating thought that there is a "political solution" that can open the future to Black liberation. "Political Emancipation certainly represents a great progress. It is not, indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical emancipation." The above quote by Karl Marx, writing on the insufficiency of political emancipation, pinpoints the flaw in the thinking of Black politicians. They constantly repeat, in various forms, that Black liberation can be achieved within the framework of the "prevailing social order" of capitalism-a social disorder in which human beings are exploited, debased and neglected, where there is no room for human freedom or development. By doing this, these politicians have ignored the whole of history-that real emancipation on an oppressed people or a class is an act of the self-movement of the masses to transform the reality of an oppressive society into one where the full human potential is free to develop. |
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