|
|
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2008
Black/Red View
Black Dimension and Communist Manifesto
by John Alan
Editor's note: On this, the 160th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, we are printing excerpts of a talk given by John Alan on its 150th anniversary.
The Communist Manifesto does not specifically mention the African-American dimension. Its main focus is on the coming European working class revolution of 1848 and the workers' opposition to the capitalist form of production. . . When Marx speaks about the world market, he is also speaking about labor-power as a world market commodity as well as human beings in the form of slaves as a commodity. For instance less than a year before writing the Communist Manifesto Marx wrote the following:
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 (Letter to Pavel Annenkov, Dec. 28, 1846).
Within the Communist Manifesto Marx also characterized the proletarian movement as the "...independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air." Marx extended the meaning of this when he wrote an Address for the First International to President Lincoln congratulating him on his election: "While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of the Civil War."
The emancipation of African Americans from the bondage of slavery awakened in the consciousness of white labor that it itself was not free labor. Thus, after the Civil War, there was a nationwide struggle for the 8-hour day. . . Marx reorganized his greatest theoretical work, Capital, on the basis of the Eight Hour Movement which swept the U.S....
What we can't lose sight of is the way Marx tightly tied his analysis of the objective development of capitalism in a global context to a new freedom reaching beyond capitalist reality--the new revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat. In this way he anticipated the revolutionary explosion throughout Europe in 1848. What that means for today is to challenge the sense of estrangement from the masses that infects many intellectuals today.
For example, the Black brain trust at Harvard University posed an historic riddle in a series of interviews Henry Louis Gates conducted for Frontline. Professor Gates. . .interviewed a ghetto youth of today. The youth, who survives by hustling in the streets, expressed total contempt for the dead end McJob future this capitalist society offers. Instead of seeing reason and a critique of the whole past practice of the movement in this new L.A. Rebellion generation, Gates reflected how distant he felt from this youth. According to Gates he might as well have been from "Mars." We need Marx's understanding of the dialectics of revolution in the Communist Manifesto to overcome this estrangement.
Struggles in Steel, a documentary film, tells the story of the 25-year struggle of African American steel workers in hazardous, low paying jobs throughout the years of the Civil Rights Revolution. And then, after these Black workers won their court battles using civil rights legislation, they found out that their jobs had evaporated due to the restructuring of steel production and world-wide competition. Struggles in Steel ends in the late 1980s with dynamic images of the destruction of one steel plant after another and unemployed Black steel workers standing on the dismal streets of steel towns contemplating their bleak future. These Black steel workers struggled to overcome alienation in production--a struggle inseparable from the Civil Rights Movement. Their victory also led them to discover that capitalism's process of accumulation can completely pull the rug out from under you.
. . .The task for today is not retraining of African Americans to adjust to technological changes in production. The story of the steel workers shows that technology in this society is used as a weapon against the movement when it achieves new gains....The 1965 Watts Rebellion which preceded the 1992 L.A. Rebellion by over 25 years. . .was reaching for a new universal of freedom. It was reaching for a concept of freedom that didn't stop with new particular gains. To reach such a new universal not only calls for recognizing the subjectivity of the Black masses but also the need to unite theory with their practice in a new way. Recollection of the persistence of the Black revolt is a way to realize, first in our minds and then in the world, that the idea of freedom doesn't stop but is in the ongoing process of determining itself.
--May 3, 1998
|
