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

[Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx]

Fred Feldman writes:

>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. <

This is more than a stretch. Both Robertson and North deny that American 
blacks are a nation. Robertson, following the late underappreciated Trotskyist, 
Dick Fraser, defines American blacks as a racially oppressed color-caste. 
Fraser, despite lack of academic credentials did some of the more interesting 
work 
in the 1950s SWP on the 'black question.' His influence on grass roots civil 
rights leaders was such that Fannie Lou Hammer and other members of the 
Mississippi Freedom Delegation travelled to Seattle to confer with Fraser prior 
to the 
1964 DNC (after he'd left the SWP).

As I understand the Robertson/Fraser position blacks are a caste because they 
are permanently segregated at the bottom of American society by race. But 
caste status alone by no means suggests the requirements for nationhood, or its 
corollary, self-determination. As a color-caste American blacks are an 
especially oppressed section of a multiracial working class. While not 
constituting a 
separate oppressed nation, neither are they simply an ethnic fraction of the 
proletariat like Italian or Russian Jewish immigrants, as the pre-WW1 Socialist 
Party insisted. This is especially true today, when productive employment has 
been decreasing, at least since 1975. In normal periods of cyclical swings in 
the economy, as in the period of the postwar boom (1945-73), the black 
population played the role of an industrial reserve army of the unemployed. But 
in 
the post-1980 deindustrializing US economy, the mass of American blacks have 
been consigned to the rotting hellholes of the urban ghettoes. Or simply thrown 
on the scrap heap of the prison-industrial complex by the racist War on Drugs. 
The fact that a thin sliver manages to escape into the middle class, or that 
Oprah is worth $20 billion, doesn't change this demographic, nor suggest that 
black capitalism offers any solution for the black masses. Black Nationalism, 
as Earl Ofari demonstrated in 'The Myth of Black Capitalism,' also requires at 
least a nascent black bourgeoisie. No agglomeration of Bill Cosbys, Spike 
Lees, Michael Jordans, and Oprah Winfreys could possibly constitute even the 
embryo of a black capitalist class. They're entertainers, pure and simple. 
Those 
are the upscale roles circumscribed for blacks by American capitalism. The key 
word here is segregated. The urban ghettoes are the result of long term 
structural underemployment, bank lending practices like 'redlining' (refusing 
to 
grant housing mortgages to blacks outside a given radius), and  political 
decisions taken by municipal officials and judges like Garrity in the Boston 
busing 
case of the '70s to confine desegration to the central urban areas rather than 
expanding it to the white suburbs. Martin Luther King ran head on into this de 
facto segregation when he brought the Civil Rights movement north to 
integrate housing in Chicago. He was given the run around by the Democratic 
Party's 
Daley machine, and got zero support from the same influentials in business and 
finance who politically supported the struggle for formal bourgeois democratic 
rights in the South. 

This is not to say that black nationalism as a militant expression of 
resistance to racial oppression can't play a very important role in specific 
historical circumstances such as when Malcolm X counterposed it to 
assimilationist 
integrationism. But historical context is key. In the days of Malcolm and the 
Panthers the demand for equality 'by any means necessary'', raised as an 
extension of the victories against Jim Crow in the South, was generalized among 
the 
black urban masses of the US. Malcolm X had the prescience and analytical 
capacity to eventually see that black equality in the US  would take more than 
either integration or nationalist separatism.  As George Brietman's "Malcolm X: 
Evolution of a Revolutionary" chronicled, by the time of his death Malcolm 
realized that the achievement of black equality in the US would require a 
revolutionary transformation in the economic base of the society along 
socialist lines. 
Conversely, in the post-1980 period the major nationalist leader, Louis 
Farrakhan has been explicitly separatist and black capitalist. The last thing 
Farakhan lead was the MMM (Million Man March), which though impressive in 
numbers, 
essentially had no program of struggle to offer other than urging black men to 
be 'more responsible.'  

This is the one area where I think 'sectarians' like the Sparts can be 
helpful, at least in the area of theoretical analysis. Jurriaan's statement 
that 'no 
intelligent person can believe that American blacks are a nation' may strike 
you as something that could only emanate from a 'non-American' source. But as 
another list member said in this thread, the burden of proof at this point 
lies with those who continue to assert axiomatically that the simple historical 
breadth and the depth of black oppression in America constitutes nationality. 
Similarly, the case for black nationhood would have to make a solid argument 
that American blacks are not a specially oppressed part of an increasingly 
multiracial American proletariat. I don't see analytically how one can have it 
both 
ways.
Ilyenkova

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