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

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mike wrote:

African Americans do have an identity born out of oppression, I'm sure you
wouldn't deny this. That over time this has given rise to common traditions
and ethos, forms of struggle and institutions also seems non-controversial.
In this sense of nationhood, the piece of land is yet to be defined and is
defined in the course of struggle.

Reply:

That is more or less how I understood it also, and insofar as socialists try
to get groups to work together, you try to have due regard for the meanings
that people themselves have. As I said, there are various definitions of a
nation, nationality and nationalism. I am not particularly bothered with the
concept of a black nation itself, I am trying to grasp what practice is
behind that.

So I think the question is then what the political, tactical or
organisational consequences of it are - do you tail-end the nationalists on
the ground that they are the quintessence of radicalism (leftists often fall
in love with some or other personality or tendency perceived to be the
"exemplar"), or do you think for yourself, and try to evaluate objectively
what nationalist activists and thinkers actually do, and whether that really
makes political sense.

Capitalist society throws up all sorts of oppositional movements all the
time, but that does not mean that socialists support all of them, for the
sake of oppositionism. Fred Feldman is however much better placed than I am
to make a specific analysis of this particular nationalist tendency. My
personal experience is limited to Maori nationalists, not American black
nationalists. There may be some similarities, but also big differences.

In general, my own orientation is that socialists aim for co-operation
between ethnic groups, not for nationalist exclusivism. This thought goes
back to Marx himself, who framed emancipation as universal human
emancipation based on social equality for all, so that individual
differences no longer have the social consequences that they have in a class
hierarchy. That was the real program. All the rest was tactics and strategy.

For Marx there was no salvation in identity politics, because identity
politics achieved at most that one was raised a peg in the class hierarchy
or status hierarchy, it did not tackle the deeper problem of the social
relations and social conditions which caused identities to be denied in the
first place. One had to think through to the end, about what caused the
social conditions enabling people to reap where they did not sow.

In Marx's view, the system could always co-opt or accommodate identity
politics, such that the advance of one group just meant that another group
became the underdog. But that was no emancipation; real emancipation meant,
that individual or group differences no longer had status consequences, that
all were considered socially equal as human beings, that their human dignity
and human worth was respected, and that they had equal rights and
responsibilities before the law and in civil life; and that on such a basis,
they could realize their potential.

I think that if Marx was alive today, he would say e.g. that if the Jews
thought they could emancipate themselves by building their house over the
corpses of Palestinians, then the Jews were just wrong about that. Such an
approach would never work in a million years. A Jew emancipated himself by
finding the common bond with other people as human beings, and participating
in the fight against the injustices of the class order. Thus he himself cast
Judaism aside and set about probing critically the real meaning of capital.

Identity politics might be progressive as an initial stage of becoming
self-aware and asserting that self-awareness (in the Hegelian sense,
perhaps, or as the right to exist and to be recognized), but
organisationally carried to its ultimate conclusion, the realization of that
identity was still predicated on the oppression of the Other, UNLESS it
included the Other in the process. Hence my previous remarks.

Marx pursued this emancipatory thought very consistently: thus, he argued
that no nation could be free, if it oppressed another nation. But from this
it did not follow that a nation should be artificially invented, rather that
nationalist barriers should be broken through, in an internationalist
spirit, to reveal the common human concerns.

Engels summarised the principle loftily as follows: the liberation of each
depends on the liberation of all, and the liberation of all depends on the
liberation of each. There was ultimately no individual way out, no
exclusivist way out, the way out was only by joining with others,
acknowledging thereby the co-operative nature of human beings as social
beings, all worthy of being there.

Jurriaan


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