Re: [Marxism] Black History Month part 2

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

James and Grace Boggs were inspirational mentors to a group of young 
revolutionaries in the 1960s Detroit.  His small book, âPages from a Negro 
Workers 
Notebookâ is worth reading as a historical document. My writings on the 
African 
American Question are to honor Mr. Boggs and Nelson Perry and are further 
writings from a Negro Workers Notebook. 

Every year African American history month presents the communists with an 
immense responsibility. In the history of the Marxist movement, Joseph V. 
Stalin 
remains the leading Marxist theorists on the national colonial question, or as 
it exists today, the national factor. Anyone remotely familiar with his 
immense contribution knows that the national factor has never revolved around a 
definition.  The national factor remains a question of the political oppression 
and exploitation â genocide, of a non-sovereign people. The issue is imperial 
colonization and the oppression of one people by another. 



Stalinâs âMarxism and the National Questionâ can be appreciated in the 
context of the era in which it was written. He is universally hated by the 
world 
bourgeoisie and a section of the intellectual corps of the historically evolved 
world oppressing peoples. All of Stalinâs writings on the national factor are 
remarkable historical documents that can be measured against all the other 
writings of the period in which they were written. 

Marxism and the National/Colonial Question has not faired well in the 
American Union. Marxism and the African American Question do not exhaust the 
scope of 
the national factor in the American Union. One can always consult the 
intellectual corp. of the children of Atzlan and/or the various Indian and of 
course 
the white Southern. 

The crux of Marxism and the National Question, written at the knee of 
Vladimir, is the characterization of peoples and social groups â classes, 
during the 
transition from landed property relations to industrial society. As such, the 
economic environment â the market, or how people are regrouped around a new 
technological regime provides the historical setting. Who controls the national 
institutions â not simply the state power, on behalf of who â not simply 
the 
master class and the property less, emerges as an important form of the 
political battleground. 
                                                                              
                   
The fundamental deviation concerning Marxism and the National Question and 
the African American national factor has been that of white chauvinism.  The 
historical ranting against bourgeois (black) nationalism position the equation 
incorrectly. That Marxists refer to bourgeois nationalism as âbourgeoisâ 
defines itself. 

 White chauvinism is the historically aggressive form of American national 
chauvinism and in our history is tightly linked with anti-communism. Chauvinism 
is an outlook that does way with class outlook and substitutes in its place 
the national imperialist ideology. White chauvinism is the form of imperialist 
bribery that grew out of the destruction of the Indian peoples and the 
enslavement of the black. It is an aggressive form of American national 
chauvinism. By 
no means are the African American immune to this chauvinistic outlook. We are 
all familiar with the idiocy of black Americans condemning and heckling 
immigrants or the legal Mexican immigrant harshly protesting the illegal 
immigrant. 

In the realm of theory and politics, anti-communism, white chauvinism and the 
general theory deviations on the national question, merge as an assault on 
Stalinâs theoretical brilliance on the national factor. He correctly 
describes 
every important juncture in the evolution of the national factor during his 
life time. These celebrated text are simply to numerous to list. His legacy 
also 
contains the methodology by which to establish the line of advance. I have in 
mind such articles as âConcerning the Strategy and Tactics of Russian 
Communists,â âThe October Revolution and the Tactics of Russian 
Communistsâ and of 
course all of his international reports. His methodology is that of the 
insurgent pursuing a bold class approach, riveted to that sector of the working 
class 
in hot combat with bourgeois property. 



Today, we are in a new economic and political era. The old political forms of 
organization of the black masses are destined to fail because we face a 
different alignment of class forces. The African American Question has gone 
through 
great changes since the end of the Second World Imperial War. The class 
factors have dramatically changed and crossed over. An entire class of farmers 
â 
petty bourgeois producers, has been liquidated from history. History itself has 
more than less resolved the question of the âmiddle strataâ or what is 
called 
in our history, the matter of the proletariat and peasantry. This class 
configuration no longer sits at the basis of the national factor. 

Four distinct elements converge to describe the new era of presentation of 
the African American Question as it further evolved in the post war period. 
First and foremost is the determined and militant struggle of the African 
Americans themselves. Seldom in history has such a small percentage of a 
population 
carried out such a militant battle against such a pervasive brutal ideology and 
state apparatus.  Without this element none of the other elements could have 
brought about the change that has taken place. 

The tendency of Marxist writers to describe history from the standpoint of 
political groupings and political ideology is unworthy of communists. No one 
disputes the role of heroic individuals and the stead fastness of the communist 
in our history. The fact of the matter is that Montgomery Alabama exploded in 
the mid 1950s under conditions of a political vacuum created after the CPUSA 
dissolved the party in the South and abandoned the Marxist line on the National 
Question.  

It was William Z. Foster who imported into the treasure house of Marx, the 
absurd theory of the American Union as a nation within a nation. The African 
American people were described as a nation within a nation. Apparently, this is 
Stalinâs fault also, although he never wrote anything resembling this and was 
dead when Montgomery erupted. 



For reasons of history â slavery, class composition and ninety years of 
segregation, the political forms of organization of the black masses have 
always 
been tightly linked with the Church and organizational forms dating back to the 
1790s. Yes, the communists have played an honorable role but they are not the 
element that excites the social process and communist as such did not exist as 
such in the 1790s. Anti-clericalism is soundly rejected in favor of a 
materialist conception of the spiritual life of a people. 

Unlike comrades Lenin and Stalin, the form of our struggle has never embraced 
the Church â as a fundamental polarity, existing as the holder of landed 
property during the transition in the form of wealth from landed property to 
movable property â money and gold. America is very bourgeois. Our strategy 
has 
always been and remains the splitting of the Church between the âhavesâ and 
the â
have not.â Who does not understand the meaning of âhave not?â 



Thus, the first element is the fight back of the black masses or their 
intractable social position as second class citizens within a very powerful 
multi-national state. We communists acknowledge the Pettis Perryâs., Charles 
P, Mann, 
Harry Haywoodâs, Claudia Jones, as well as Revered King and the Minister 
Malcolm X.. 

Thus, the communist of the last period reject wholesale the accusation that 
we are reductionists. Fight back and resistance is a subjective respond of â
beingâ that exists in relationship to something. Mode of production has not 
determined the resistance and fight back of the black masses, but rather 
describes 
the framework within which the historical narrative unfolds. 

The second element was the mechanization of Southern agriculture. This 
mechanization was the basis of the freedom movement and the basis for the dest
ruction of the sharecropping system. As this process accelerated an end was 
brought 
to ninety years of race riots, the lynch rope and the general contempt handed 
to the black masses by the Anglo-American people. In the past the imperialist 
bribery of the Anglo American workers made it possible and profitable to 
brutally murder and rape black women and children, to burn their churches and 
homes 
and meet appeals for justice with an indescribable bloody violence. There can 
be no doubt that history will place a collective responsibility upon the 
Anglo-American people for the horrors of the burning stake and the lynch rope 
of 
that period. This era â quantitative boundary, in the evolution of the 
industrial system began ending with the outbreak of the Second World Imperial 
War and 
the emergence of the second element. 


Melvin P 

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