Re: [A-List] Imagine - the whole thing

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In Indian Country I talk Marx, Lenin and Mao all the time but  sometimes
without labels or sourcing but just focusing on the core constructs  and
their potential applicability to our own realities. I also talk about  some
of the more "Eurocentric"-based constructs and how they may have to  be
modified and/or not apply to our reality and how we have to stand on  the
shoulders of "the classics" and make our own innovations and  contributions
based on our own histories and realities and imperatives of  survival.
 
Jim C.


Comment 
 
Poor people, however they define themselves and how they are defined  
socially and statistically, have always kinds of ways for explaining and  justifying 
their poverty. "If I would have turned right instead of left," Karma,  fate, 
bad decisions; lazy parents . . . . I am not going to work that hard . . .  got 
caught up on drugs,  . . . I should not have had three babies at a  young 
age; should have went to school; "the poor will always be amongst us and I  am 
it;" poverty is a state of mind . . . rich people still have problems . . .  God 
gives me what I need when I need it . . . . and the list goes on. 
 
Outside the ruling class and its political and administrative elite, only a  
small section of the middle class understands the meaning of a "class stance" 
or  "what are my political and economic needs based on the state of 
development of  the country." 
 
Although I cannot prove it, I believe the vast majority of the peoples of  
America possess a fundamental decency that is part of a general American  
ideology and an imaginative longing more than capable of respecting and  
guaranteeing the rights of the individual or a modern sense of what constitutes  "fair 
play."  
 
It is a complex of imaginative longing and the ideology of the rights of  the 
individuals that demands that our government censor all information and  
prevent the American people as a whole from witnessing 16 year murderous  campaign 
against the people of Iraq and to hide the real history and  current plight 
of the Native peoples in our state system. 
 
Marx cannot help us overcome or instruct us in this battle for ideas. Most  
Americans do not know of the murderous campaigns of rape against the Native  
women that has continued unabated for 400 years. Most Americans know little of  
Wounded Knee I and II or even heard of something called the "Trail of  Tears." 
 
Freedom for the various Indian Nations is incompatible with bourgeois  
capitalist economic relations, because our state system and economic structures  
were founded and constructed on the basis of the destruction of the Native  
Peoples. And these Indian Nations are re-re-emerging on the basis of  speculative 
capital, rather than the capital described by Lenin and Hobson as  financial 
industrial capital, and we are in for some new things. 
 
The Casino economy is only metaphor for those whose eyes do not bare  witness 
to the fact. The union allowed me to travel into places I would have  never 
gone and got my ass kicked along the way because I am African American. 
 
I worked in a Casino after retiring because on a basic level I want to know  
and as much as I love books, action helps me understand. Engagement . . . man. 
 
OK . . . the truth. 
 
The Casinos come to Detroit and my first cousin was an early organizer of  
the union at MGM Detroit and we got together on a Bar B Q to talk about how to  
set the union up. My brother a biggie in the UAW and we talked about how the  
union would operate. Fuck anyone coming to Detroit without a union and hiring  
massive amounts of  blacks. Without a union there would be no blacks or  very 
few. Part of the dynamic is that we entered the proletariat last . . .  
except for the Indian, and we tend to be less refined in the modern sense and do  
not tip, betraying our lack of understanding of capitalist exchange. 
 
"A tip?" . . . yea . . . the tip of my knife. 
 
This is an imaginative narrative.  
 
That Indian is probably worst and this is not said in a derogatory sense. I  
can see a group of Indians, traveling from the reservation on an occasion to  
frequent a decent restaurant and at the end of the meal do not leave a 
generous  tip, because they deeply feeling that the waiter should be tipping them for 
 coming. 
 
After all you did in fact take my country. 
 
And I laugh my ass off . . . because I do get it. 
 
The problem is that there is no social space for the imaginative that is  not 
totally bourgeois and corrupt.
 
The class issue means "Who side you on" and only the lower classes and most  
poverty stricken of the proletariat loses nothing with the Indians Nations  
achieving Freedom.  
 
Layers or at any rate, small grouping of real people of the American  middle 
class and mutherfuckers with money and wealth, have a vested interest in  the 
continued degradation of the Indian Nations because they live of their land  
illegally and violate their water and land rights. These small groupings find  
political unity - identity, with corporate interests in swindling the Indian 
and  using the state to beat him down and take his land. 
 
This is not the case with the poverty stricken proletariat as a class  
fragment because they have no economic interest oppose to any politics of  Indian 
Freedom.  
 
Jim . . . ain't no one going to say this like this but me. 

The imagination - not just morality, of our working class has to be  enlarged 
on the basis of ideas and striving dear to the most poverty stricken  
workers, who themselves lack imagination with any concrete forms of class  striving. 
Our working class only possess a very hazy imaginative narrative  concerning 
the Indian Nations, which is reduced to "the plight of the Red Man"  rather 
than the question of genocide. The issue of unequal treaties as the legal  basis 
for the continuing genocide, and state to state relations is only  understood 
as the rights of the Indian Nations not to pay federal taxes and  buying cheap 
cigarettes. 
 
A huge section of the working class in America still believes that through  
hard work it can still improve itself and today is going through a level of  
competition with itself - over $10 an hour jobs, I have never experienced, and I 
 am talking about primarily the Anglo American workers. This is a tricky 
social  question because a large segment of the Anglo American workers will in 
fact  accept being reduced to the economic level of slaves is grouping of people 
are  below them on the economic ladder. This means developing the means to win 
a  section of them over to the cause of their own freedom, which is still 
being  measured on the basis of "the people in Africa," . . . "the ghetto blacks" 
or as  it is, the Natives peoples on reservations. 
 
This is real tricky because the most poverty stricken blacks do not live in  
"the ghetto," which in the American ideology is a construct to obscure  a 
class thing and wed it to the concept of Jewish victimization. The most  poverty 
stricken blacks live in proletarian slums. 
 
Could not the Jew, escape "the ghetto" by renouncing their religion? The  
poverty stricken proletariat cannot escape the slum on the basis of renunciation  
of anything. Protestant work habits and less babies will not allow escape -  
dissolution, of/from an economic class. At best individuals can get lucky and  
escape but the class of poor is growing at a break neck pace and we are 
moments  away from the great awakening.
 
We are not dealing with a phenomenon called "the ghetto" or the Warsaw  
ghetto, but the modern proletarian slum and the impediment to clarifying  the 
imaginative narrative as class, is non other than the "black leader" as a  symbol 
of the political middle, because as a black leader, rather than a  leader that 
happens to be black, he requires a compact black political  basis for his 
existence as "black leader." That is to say, he requires the  existence of 
segregation in new class forms, in order to hold his political base  together. What 
on earth is the meaning of "ghetto blacks" other than poverty  stricken 
proletarians and the majority of these poverty stricken proletarians  are white. 
 
I do not say how the struggle within the Indian nations should proceed for  
two reasons: first of all I do not know and if I did know it is not my place 
and  would only complicate the issue: not because I am African American or an  
outsider but I am a citizen of a different nation and subject to a slightly  
different set of political regulations. Then my life has been within the better  
sector of the industrial proletariat and my fight has been "right there" 
where  reaction and privilege are most intense. And this fight could not be won . 
. .  and I still didn't give a fuck. 
 
See . . . you never win what you are fighting for on the chain of history,  
only that, which the previous generation could not win . . . and the beat goes  
on. You fight to the death and in the process become a leader and then you 
are  really fucked, because the dialectic - logic, of change and transition 
kicks in. 
 
Everything in America is done backwards . . . wrong, because we are wrong,  
or rather constituted on the basis of an ethnic/class pecking order. For  
instance the modern symbol of the environmentalist movement should be a modern  
Indian leader in negotiation with the capitalist corporatists over the basis of  
land use, water supplies and bio-sphere integrity. What blocks this is class 
and  not in the big general Marxist sense of the word, but as classes live and 
act  out their lives with political elites that must project themselves 
forward to  secure economic stability and well being. 
 
We have entered the era of the undiscovered country . . . way ahead of  
Soviet socialism in its concrete class and infrastructure relations (not  property 
rights) and several generation beyond Marx and Engels. There is no  blueprint 
. . . only a general lie of march, which is helpful for political  
organizations of a class nature, but quite useless in the day to day battle  against 
ignorance and class interest. Who damn side our you on is the issue and  question. 
 
The African American Factor is resolvable as it has existed, within the  
framework of capitalist economic relations. The African American Factor no  longer 
exists as the historical presentation of the National and Colonial  Question. 
This does not means the color factor has vanished or racism no longer  exists 
and there is plenty of old fashion racism left. I know this in the most  
personal sense, not from just being black but traveling the back roads and the  
boulevards. 
 
I am in Florida now which I swore I would never even visit, because of the  
treatment of the Seminole, man who escape long ago out of Mississippi. This is  
the only southern state I had never visited or lived in. It is not actually  
Southern, accept in its uppermost "northern" part. Brother, this a long way 
from  Detroit. The riot in St. Petersburg was a mere 12 years ago and I do a lot 
 of passing as a member of a different class, than that of the proletarian 
slums.  The African American National factor as Jim Crow has been fundamentally  
resolved, or I could not pass. Knowing this has not stopped me from momentary 
 lapses into "some nigga shit" when ignorant mutherfukcers start following me 
 around in the bookstore to see if I am going to steal something. 
 
My wife does not help, because she goes the fuck off . . . with her  
yellowish Louisiana, "you can't tell what I am and it is none of your fucking  
business anyway" . . .  thing. The racism thing is real and alive and well,  but the 
fact of the matter is that my brown ass and her yellow ass and our  Northern 
status allows us to successfully pass in the class sense of passing.  The more 
I cling to blackness, the more it slips through my hand and reveals  class . . 
. hard currency . . . money my friend and the imaginative class  narrative as 
lived and breathed in America. 
 
I do not mean Marx concept of class but something more real . . . if not  
refined to American conditions. Then the age thing kicks in. A nigga over 50 is  
not stopped as much by the police, but I get followed and tracked by "Five O' 
-  the police, as a way of life. The police punch up my license plates and say 
this  a old nigga without a criminal record and speed off to get the next 
nigga. Yes .  . . I am aware that life expectancy of the Indian male is less than 
that of the  black. . . but Jim, I am not on a reservation. Or rather, I 
operate in the  prison yard rather than solitary confinement. 
 
Lenin called Russia a "prison of nations." 
 
This shit a nation of prison-states.  Yes, I can escape to the yard  and 
pass. 
 
We will never escape the Indian Factor . . . and nothing less than freedom,  
as defined by the Indian Nations, which have been drawn into the economic cha
in  of imperial reaction, will suffice. 
 
In other words I view the Indian Factor . . . . (I resent the "Question" in  
the historical presentation of the National Question because, the matter of 
the  oppressed is not a fucking question except to those lodged within the 
oppressing  peoples) as the basis for the conquest of the Americas and capital 
development  world wide. 
 
Marx is different for me and capitalism comes to the fore . . . not  bouncing 
out of Venice and some agricultural shit but in the quest for gold . .  . El 
Dorado . . . man and 14th century crap. Here is the genesis of the Indian  
Factor four centuries before Lenin. 
 
And I like Lenin. 
 
Sorry but I be getting pissed off. U do not suppose to let a ngga live pass  
30 without being incarcerated for at least 5 years and ensnared in the penal  
system for 15 years,  . . . most certainly not pass 50 and I slipped  through. 
I slipped through because of my middle class status and the old  industrial 
workers in America were middle class. 
 
You have some middle class stuff coming down the pike. The various Indian  
leaders and their trucks and things? I don't have nothing to say about stuff  
like that. 
 
I think someone in the not so distant future is going to characterize the  
1990's and first decades of the 21st century as a period of "middle class  
revolutions" or counterrevolutionary period. 
 
All of us pass on various levels and betray our class to varying degrees  for 
the imaginative narrative. 
 
And yea . . . I tend to adopt the attitude of the imaginative bottom  because 
it feels right and is fun as hell. What are individuals to do who betray  
their class? 
 
Melvin P. 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 



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