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

[Octob1917@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 11/7/2004 2:30:07 PM Pacific Standard Time,
Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx writes:
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.

Sounds like an exercise in semantics here. Whilst I agree that blacks in the
US, due to being denied the investment in education, housing, jobs and social
services necessary for them to rise off the bottom rung of the economic
ladder, constitute a separate caste, it is in resistance to their oppression 
that
they assume the status of a nation. A unique history of apartheid within the
United States, of the fact that even now they are corralled into ghettoes and
forced, disproportionate to their number, into the prison or military industrial
complex, reflects a sustained and consistent policy by the State of separation
and dehumanisation.

Blacks have never stood idly by either. They've expressed their resistance to
this apartheid by carving out a separate and distinct culture within their
communities. And if you believe, as I do, that a criminal act is an unconscious
act of rebellion, then judging by their contribution to the over 2 million
currently languishing in US prisons, they are a people in revolt.

If a claim to self determination isn't the assertion of a common history of
oppression and resistance to oppression, what is it? After all, surely as
socialists we must reject the bourgeois and imperialist conception of the nation
state, given that it is steeped in the blood of entire peoples and the
eradication of cultures and histories.

JoeD



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