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NEWS & LETTERS, June-July 2006Black/Red View by John AlanDialectics of Black Freedom StrugglesI am turning over my column this time to a young activist and thinker, Makalani Adisa.--John Alan by Makalani Adisa In talking about the recent damage done to New Orleans, you can directly apply what's in the DIALECTICS OF BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLES by John Alan to what should be done right now after Katrina. There's no way in the world that we can't use this as a turning point, nationwide, to build a new kind of movement. All the typical ingredients of race and classism were involved, and just like Sept. 11, 2001, the whole country is upset across the board. Unlike what happened to the Twin Towers, there's no mysterious "terrorism at large" or "bogeymen" to blame except for the U.S. government. Everybody is saying this, not just Black folks for once. After people collectively figure out how best to help survivors, we need to build a revolutionary movement that has "Absolute" or "second negativity" as John Alan and News and Letters Committees suggests, with first negativity being throwing the slave master off our backs and second negativity meaning we don't use the oppressive tools of the slavemaster to run our own lives. This takes critical dialog and action to work. This is what 19th century German philosopher Hegel put out and was developed by Marx to mean a "permanent revolution." And if what we mean by revolution is not just "military, armed struggle" or "seizing power" or "taking over," which is most of what people mean, it makes total sense. We can't just overthrow what's going on. We have to build a totally new society based on a new set of human relationships (rules) we do want. This is one of the key contributions, along with the unity of theory and practice, which NEWS & LETTERS has been publicizing for over 50 years. They didn't come up with these theories, but they've been developing them, applying them and pushing for them in real people's struggles for the longest. A MOVEMENT OUT OF KATRINA Just imagine if a real massive people's struggle came out of Katrina. There's actually no excuse for one NOT happening. What about a movement that actually gets their hands dirty and does the grassroots work (like John Alan says about Ella Baker), but one that doesn't run away from talking about theory, philosophy or other difficult discussions? There's a book reviewed in THE NEW YORK TIMES, A PEOPLE'S HISOTRY OF SCIENCE, that puts ordinary working people as the originators of most inventions and basic scientific theories that we use today, including the methodology of what's known as scientific inquiry, and it ain't no surprise. Alan opens up by talking about the Supreme Court and how "diversity" is used whenever necessary to make the appearance of exploitation a little nicer. But since the book's been out, we can see an even more overt, up-front racism. Alan quotes former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott who says he prefers legal segregation. Nowadays they're lining up their super conservative Supreme Court--and not apologizing. Pretty soon abortion or walking down the street with more than two Black people might be illegal. Already we have Chicago's "gang loitering" and "mob action" laws. Black struggles for freedom are the "touchstone" of the effort to overcome alienation, but are just as often sold out by leaders that stop at a few dark-faced reps and a few measly hand-outs. This is called the "political" solution that folks stop at. Nameless and faceless poor Black women have been at the forefront of correcting this. How people were tokenized was known throughout the last 35 years. DIALECTICS OF BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLES even mentions a study that's still in a lot of homes, a paperback by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights made after the Watts riots. It blatantly says that they will pacify Negro masses by electing more Negro mayors and hiring large numbers of Negro policemen. They say this in plain English! Alan sums this up as a retreat from challenging capitalism. He then explains why ghettos in the U.S. have become what they are today, with the global rate of profit in the world declining in the 1970s, decades after WWII and numerous global people's struggles. Jobs were able to move oversees because Black, Latino and poor folks were stripped and sold out of employment and industry here. This was when they started finding bigger moneymakers for us--prisons. BLACK MASSES AS VANGUARD He mentions that Blacks have been at the vanguard or front position, with most to gain and most to lose, at every stage of U.S. militarization, when the U.S. has attacked people of the Philippines, China, Puerto Rico and Cuba. All this while domestic attacks on our rights as citizens are being done through racial profiling and police brutality. With the criminalization and massive lockup of Blacks and people of color, they're trying to eliminate the revolutionary legacy that we've been fighting for since we got here. He also says, "Too few have assessed what the African-American struggles in this country represent, historically or otherwise," and the modern day anti-war movement will be stagnated until it addresses these things. From what I see, this is very slowly happening. However usually in these formations there's a focus on demonstrating and direct action. Beginning with Chapter 5 it says that "racism needs to be recognized for what it is, the social manifestation of American capitalism." This makes sense in terms of Katrina. If instead of putting out that "this shit is racist" or that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people," Kanye West could've said that people are drowning and dying because of this capitalist government and that it's rotten to its core. I would just be careful and mention that contradictions like racism and sexism predate capitalism as a type of economy (by quite some time, especially in the case of exploiting women). So by doing away with capitalism, you don't automatically get rid of other forms of oppression. This is the line held by mostly white "class-only" analysis types and it's faulty. Pick any country that had a revolution. The way they made things weren't exploitative in the direct sense, but from day one they started to divvy up roles and responsibilities based on ethnic group, language and sex. DESTROYING CAPITAL However if you're talking about destroying capital (the social relationship of different, specialized or dominating classes in contradiction, that can exist whether there's straight-up capitalist production or not), then you're getting somewhere. Again, if you're talking about destroying capital, meaning all oppressive social relationships, and addressing them as we're fighting for the end of value production, then we got a fighting chance of getting free. White-led and most groups in general have got this one-sided approach to what capitalism is. News and Letters Committees is one of the few exceptions. So thinking like this leads to a basic 1-2-3 (algebraic) way of fighting. First factory workers, then, after we take power, we'll "give" and "empower" women, then Blacks and Latinos, then gays, and so on. But it never comes. Because we're not studying or talking about what capital is, we think it's only money as we can recognize it as such (and not credits or vouchers or other things they have in "socialist" societies). Like the meaning of "worker" has shifted to include those who help the formal worker maintain their position as a worker (at the point of production), we have to see what we really mean by capitalism or exploitation so we can break the whole thing down. John Alan is trying to say we can aim higher than just nationalism or guerrilla tactics as our core principles. JUST community control, JUST Black businesses or JUST Black unions is not enough, 'cause it ain't been enough. Raya Dunayevskaya, founder of Marxist-Humanism, is quoted in the book: "Dialogs and discussions have to turn into theoretical preparation of the revolution itself." I was always taught to study revolutionary theories because once the masses are moving and you have no personal control over when that might happen, some questions or dead-ends that we already know about have to be put out there, or we'll be right back where we were in the first place. The revolution will be reversed. And it's happened before. Grenada, a Black island country in the West Indies 90 miles from Venezuela, is mentioned at the end of this book by Dunayevskaya. In Grenada the first shot of counter-revolution was shot from within the old "revolutionaries" and against the people. That allowed the U.S. to come in and mop up all the people's forces and set them back indefinitely. The point is that without philosophic structure, the revolts invariably get pulled back into the framework of bourgeois politics, of who's getting elected instead of what do people need. * * * Adapted from a presentation to the Chicago News and Letters Committees, Feb. 27, 2006. |
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