RE: Was the civil rights struggle "a mass proletarian movement"?

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fred Feldman writes: "One point where I disagree with Jose is his
statement that the civil rights movement was not 'a mass proletarian
movement.'"

Fred is quite right, of course, in noting the Black civil rights
movement was overwhelmingly working class in composition. Much more so
than today, the Black nationality then was almost exclusively composed
of working people, the layer of professionals, managers and so on who
properly can be classified as petite-bourgeois was vanishingly small.
And this did mean that there was a tendency for civil rights struggles
to interpenetrate with the struggle of Black workers as workers.

I see the very same thing today in the immigrant movement in Atlanta. At
a shop steward training for UNITE that I attended as a volunteer
interpreter, the immigrant rank and files leaders were asked by the
union official leading one part of the session why shop stewards should
help organize other plants (this is in the large industrial laundry
sector). The answers, much to my surprise, were all *national*: things
like "because we Latinos have to stand up," "we've been oppressed too
long," "its the only way we're going to get respect," "even if I don't
get my rights, my children will have them," etc.

The narrow but quite valid economic trade union point, that unless the
entire sector is organized, better-paying union shops will tend to get
undercut by low-wage laundries that are even worse sweatshops, wasn't
mentioned by any of the rank and file unionists, although when one of
the union staff present raised it, everyone understood and agreed.

Some of these workers were also involved in helping to organize the
March for Dignity held last Monday (in fact, part of the shop steward
training session that day was a presentation by the central leader of
the immigrant movement, Adelina Nicholls, on the march, which was being
held a couple of weeks later). 

At the rally following the march, there was one point during what was,
in effect, Nicholls's keynote speech when she counterposed the charge
that immigrants are "illegals" to who they really are. "Who are we?" She
asked time and again. "We are workers," the crowd roared back, but of
course the word wasn't "workers" but "trabajadores," and the mere change
of language gives it an entirely different dimension that it does not
have in English.

For undocumented immigrants, the *class* and *national* questions are
inseparable. WE in our analysis treat them in a differentiated way;
they, in their daily existence, do not have that possibility. So we have
to look at this movement in response to this indissoluble union of class
exploitation and national oppression and note the forms it takes: the
*form* of the movement is NATIONAL, it is a movement against national
oppression. The ties that bind the movement together are not just those
of class, but of a shared elements of a linguistic and cultural heritage


(And actually this is a gross oversimplification: one of the things I
saw very clearly at the UNITE workshop is that the U.S. is *importing*
also the national question as it presents itself within Latin America.
For many people in Southeastern sweatshops, Spanish is not their first
language, but rather an Indian dialect. Who is coming into the U.S. is
not the relatively privileged Spanish- or European-descended privileged
layers, but native peoples.) 

It is easy to see that this immigrant movement is a national movement: a
Latino lawyer speaking in defense of drivers licenses is "one of us"; a
Black or Anglo labor leader saying exactly the same thing is embraced as
an *ally*, MOST OF ALL if the Latino lawyer speaks in Spanish and the
labor leader in English.

So it was of course one-sided of me to say that the civil rights
movement wasn't a proletarian movement, but it was consciously one sided
and for a reason. You cannot have a mass proletarian movement in the
United States that is not MORE than a strictly proletarian movement,
that doesn't also involve NATIONAL movements by oppressed peoples. The
national and colonial question is KEY to the future of the struggle of
the working people in this country. Whether at any given stage, CLASS
movements by workers as workers, or NATIONAL movements by oppressed
peoples, will be more prominent, is an open question. 

What we should note is that, contrary to the history of the PREVIOUS 50
years, the fist half of the 20th Century, for the LAST half century, it
is the NATIONAL movements of specially oppressed and super exploited
sections of the class that have been most prominent. And
internationally, that in just about every case where genuine mass
socialist revolutions have taken place since World War II, these class
revolutions issued from and became the vehicle for the fulfillment of
NATIONAL movements (I exclude, of course, East European no longer
"really existing" socialism, which was the byproduct first and foremost
of the Red Army's victory over German imperialism in the conflict). I
believe it is safe to say, and not just safe, but it MUST be said, that
IF there is to be a revolution in the United States, it WILL be ALSO,
and even perhaps most heavily, the product of movements for national
liberation by Blacks, Latinos and so on, and certainly NOT simply and
straightforwardly a "class" affair.

That conclusion comes first and foremost from the Civil Rights movement.
Although it was overwhelmingly working people in its social base, and
many demands of the most oppressed and exploited layers of the workers,
as workers, did find expression in and through this movement, the
movement itself did not view itself or express itself as a workers
movement, but rather as a NATIONAL movement. Even if this wasn't
entirely clear in the first few years, the evolution of the movement
itself showed it to be the case, unquestionably, beyond even the tiniest
possible sliver of a doubt. 

This is not simply a question of "form," that working class content just
"happens" to come in "national" bottles. There is a dialectical
relationship between form and content and the two cannot be arbitrarily
divorced. To try to *reduce* or *liquidate* the national question into
the class question because, after all, "in the last analysis," we
understand that national struggles arise from the underlying ground of
class struggle, is a mistake, and that is *precisely* what the SWP is
doing. 

The fact that they would include the NAACP, the oldest and one of the
most important organizations of Black people in this country among the
list of bourgeois "usual suspects" opposing prop. 54, as if that were
supposed to convince us that the opponents of Prop. 54 are just as bad
and bourgeois as the supporters, is indicative of how deeply this narrow
economist workerism  has undermined the SWP's understanding of the
national question in the United States.

So while I plead guilty to Fred's charge of having obscured underlying
class dynamics and composition of the Black Civil Rights movement, I
think it is extremely important that revolutionary Marxists take a
diamond-hard position against the primitive workerism and economism
being preached by the likes of the SWP, and not only. The real problem
on the Left in the United States has not been people reacting in a
sectarian and abstentionist and hostile manner to struggles by workers
as workers, but especially the left groups and currents trying to build
themselves as *multinational* organizations reacting in a sectarian and
hostile manner to the forms in which the national movement finds
expression. And of course, beyond the socialist left, among the labor
and progressive forces, the problem is even worse. 

Although the labor movement here in Atlanta, and figures from the
insitutionalized Black civil rights movement, did associate themselves
with the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, and the march spearheaded by
the Latino immigrant community itself, it would be a tremendous mistake
to not see the ways in which these sectors did not always treat the
Latino community and its leaders as full, equal partners. And, of
course, the tremendous potential for organizing these workers into
unions, which is really what the labor movement needs to be about first
and foremost TODAY in the United States, remains overwhelmingly
untapped. So BOTH in relating to the national movement of Latino
immigrants as an ally, AND in relating to them as workers, there remain
tremendous opportunities for organized labor to advance. 

The problem is not, and has never really been, a narrow nationalism on
the part of the oppressed peoples which seeks to gut the national
movement of its real class content, to divorce it from that. The
reformist and pro-capitalist forces in the Black community aren't
pro-Afro-American capitalism, they're pro- really existing capitalism,
White Anglo-American capitalism. 

The problem is and remains overwhelmingly the question of
self-determination, not just the promise of the decree on the
unconditional right to separate that will be adopted by the
revolutionary government(s) of what is now the United States, but as it
manifests itself right now, concretely, on the ground, even on the level
of what to do and say at a demonstration.

In doing theoretical analysis it is, of course, most satisfying to be
rounded, and I thank Fred for "correcting and amplifying" what I wrote
(as they say in bourgeois parliaments). 

BUT we must remember that our practice in this regard is
*overwhelmingly* directed against non recognition of, and lack of
respect for, the national movements of oppressed peoples, and that this
non-recognition and lack of respect represent and are part of the
ideological hegemony of the ruling class in the country, of which
*racism* is an essential component.

José


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