[Marxism] A brief summary of my view on Blacks as a nation

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Juriaan claims that no intelligent person can believe that Blacks are a
nation.  Well, I can sure tell that he doesn't live in the United
States, where I don't think anyone -- not even David North or James
Robertson or their like -- could get that sentence out of their mouths.
It is just a bit too alien to the native grounds.

I want to is is not offensive to me.  I think I am intelligent, but I
also think that George Bush, Hitler, Jack Barnes, Tim Wohlforth, Stalin,
Bob Avakian, General Patton,  and Pol Pot were intelligent, as well as
Fidel Castro, Lenin, Einstein, and untold millions and millions of other
people -- including, of course, my humble self who does think the
unthinkable -- Blacks are a nation..  I don't put so much store by
intelligence.

I am going to make a few remarks on the national question.  Bizarre
though it may seem, I wrote probably hundreds of pages on the subject in
the Socialist Workers Party, most of which I know longer have.

I am convinced that the shaping of Blacks as a distinctive American
nation -- not an African nation carried off to the a foreign land, but
an American nationality -- begins during the Middle Passage and slavery.
Blacks came out of slavery a very distinct people, the experiences of
reconstruction and Jim Crow counterrevolution tremendously deepened it,
the civil rights movement brought national solidarity and consciousness
to a new high,  and the process has continued with the new segregation
of the masses and other conditions of this day.

Completely "separate development," as they used to say in South Africa?
Of course not.  But a different nation than the general American nation,
always feeling differently, always acting somewhat differently, and
always laboring somewhat differently than the rest.  The United States
has never been one nation.  Never, although a kind of American nation
was forged in the civil war and its wake, it was not non-racial and it
has not become non-racial. Since the Civil War, and in some respects
before (the Taney court's attempt to deprive all Blacks of citizenship
was a non-starter despite the prevalent racism among whites) the
American nation-state has a nonracial citizenship, but the American
nation is not quite the same thing.

It is not quite white in the old sense -- it tries to reach out and grab
the others, and many naturally respond (the material advantages are
obvious).  I see no evidence that the civil rights movement changed
this.  On the contrary, I think the common struggle (even with the
support of many, many whites such as myself) only brought the
development of the Black nation to a higher stage of development.

I don't believe that the civil rights movement succeeded in integrating
US society or eliminating national differences, although it did crack
the Jim Crow and create a more advanced bourgeois-democratic form of
relations. But segregation and the more "voluntary" separate existence
as a people is still widespread, and for the masses has grown.  I
recommend  Andrew Hacker's "Two Nations." I think the US ruling class is
basically white, including in its consciousness, and that other groups
are present as allies, hangers-on, and to some extent very wealthy
window dressing. The vast and widening differences between Blacks and
whites in terms of family wealth reflect the overwhelmingly proletarian
composition of Blacks, but also -- like many other aspects of oppression
-- CUT ACROSS CLASS LINES.

The fact that the civil rights movement opened the door to a larger
Black bourgeoisie and a MUCH larger petty-bourgeosie does not contradict
Blacks being a nation.  Division into classes is characteristic of all
modern nations, oppressed and oppressors.  The civil rights movement
resulted in Blacks catching up somewhat with this.

I think Stalin's article on the national question reflects an early
point in the development of Lenin's position, when he was moving beyond
his early Kautskyism on the national question, but had not thought
through sufficiently the development of imperialism, and the deepening
-- not disappearance and assimilation -- of national oppression and
national conflicts. The Stalin pamphlet also has a narrow rule book
character, which has been proven very convenient character for
sectarians (and sometimes for governments) that want to deny national
roots for groups whose geography, language, or structure deviate from
the rules.

I believe national oppression is carried out not only by the oppressor
ruling class, but above all by the state.  The US state is the main
force that denies self-determination to Blacks. The fact that Blacks and
whites TEND overall to get along better than they did before the civil
rights movement in no way eliminates this national oppression.

Are the whites in the United States an oppressor nation.  I do not think
such a formation has ever completely gelled.  The closest we came to
having a  white nation counterposed to Blacks was during the height of
slavery from the 1830s to the civil war, when racism was used to unite
the new immigrants to the American nation, and in the first decades of
the Jim Crow era.  The class struggle, with the Black struggle very much
a part of which, erican nation, the real glue of which is the state and
the expanding capitalist economy, is an oppressor nation.  To the extent
that whites identify themselves as a distinct group -- which in the
United States happens only against the other (the Indians, the Blacks,
the Mexicans, the Asians) -- their tendency is to an act as an oppressor
nation.  Yes, racial oppression is carried out by the ruling class and
its state, but we should not get soggy about the role of racism.  It is
deep and will exist as long as the US is a capitalist society.  Its
source is the ruling class, the state, and the actual social relations
between oppressor and oppressed. It is objective, not purely subjective
and still less primarily ideological.

I do not believe that self-determination requires separation -- in fact
I doubt that there will be such a thing, unless things go pretty badly
for a long time.  But I do not think that Blacks can exercise
self-determination without sovereignty as a group.

I do not think that race is everything in the United States, but in the
framework of class relations and the imperialist state, the relations
between the oppressor imperialist state and the oppressed nations and
nationalities, especially the Blacks.

I do not see that the fact that there are oppressed nations and
nationalities in the United States cuts across or obviates or cancels
out the need and possiblity for class solidarity across national lines.
I don't think that Blacks being a nation dictates that Blacks must hate
whites or vice versa.  Things will have to go very badly for the
relations between Blacks and whites to end up like the Sinhalese and
Tamils in Sri Lanka for instance. I think that Black workers are among
the most deeply class-conscious sections of the working class precisely
because of their situation and experience, including extensive struggle
experience.

I think the Black question in the United States  is a tremendous power
for radicalizing the working class and enabling it to fight for power.
I don't think that it primarily holds back the working class today as it
did, for example, before the Civil War.   I think that potentially the
United States is a more revolutionary country, and I include the white
workers in this assertion,  because this question exists. I am not one
of those who thinks that the presence of the Black nationality has
irretrievably divided the working class, corrupted the white workers
hopelessly. I think the Black national struggle will be part of what
unifies the working class against capitalism, and that the working class
cannot be unified without it. I do not think the Black struggle will
necessarily be nationalist in the narrow sense.  It can be nationalist
in the broad, proletarian-peasant outreaching way that Cuba is and
Venezuela is becoming. That is it can be proletarian internationalism,
deepened and made more powerful by the experience of oppressed
nationhood.

I believe that the American will be a combined -- that is, a democratic
as well as a socialist -- revolution, and the Black liberation struggle
is at the center of this concept, although the other oppressed peoples,
women, gays, and others form a part of this single revolutionary
process.

I believe that the Black question doesn't so much dampen the
working-class struggle in this country as  light a fire under it.  This
is something we have lost touch with in decades of relative quiet, and
worsening of conditions without really massive resistance including from
Blacks.

I've held this opinion for a long time and it has been formed by a
lifetime of experience, including in the civil rights movement, and
observation.  I don't think my having an opinion on it violates Blacks'
right to self-determination, any more than my having an opinion on what
happened to the Black Panther Party violates it.
I actually thought my opinion of the Black Panthers would be the more
controversial item, because there is so much carrying on every time a
white person has an opinion on Iraq or the Black struggle.  This is
really just pressure on people (including pressure on Blacks) to
identify with your position by threatening them with a label.  If my
opinion is wrong, try to show me why.

This is a very short summary of my views.  There is a kind of book
buried in my head about this, but I will almost certainly never write
it. There is talk about making me part of an oral history project that
some ex-SWPers are working on, and that may be my best bet for fully
laying it out.

Fred Feldman







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