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

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joe wrote: "it is in resistance to their oppression that they [i.e. black
people] assume the status of a nation", but this statement is ambiguous,
because the question is whether they ARE a nation, and whether or not black
nationalism can really emancipate black people in the United States (instead
of being co-opted by the very system that black people experience as
oppressive).

Anybody can claim that they are part of a nation, fascists do this also (the
"white nation"), the question is whether there is any substance to this
assertion, or what it means.

If black nationalism cannot emancipate black people, because it is in
reality impossible to form any black nation in the United States with its
own state, then hallowing black nationalism as the quintessence of
radicalism might just be a form of opportunist tail-endism and rhetoric,
since it does not, in practice, lead to genuine independence for black
people, and merely enthrones a new stratum of administrators claiming to
speak in the name of a black nation which doesn't exist.

Nationalism draws its strength from a bid for independent organisation by an
ethnic group asserting its identity, but the whole point is that by that
very fact, it does not lead to alliances with other groups in the
population, it sets its own identity AGAINST the identity of other groups -
and as I am sure Marxists would point out, nationalism glosses over class
and socio-economic relations, and therefore misrepresents what the real
problem is, who the real enemy is, and how it is to be fought.

It is not sufficient here to repeat rote Marxist-Leninist dogma's about the
"nationalism of the oppressors and the nationalism of the oppressed", but
makes a specific analysis which shows what, if anything, is progressive
about it.

The Trotsky-Breitman-Feldman type of analysis really boiled down to the idea
that since black people in the United States are overwhelmingly proletarian,
therefore Black nationalism is a force for workingclass unity and class
emancipation, essentially because in this specific case, class and nation
are IDENTICAL concepts. Thus, in this specific case, a nationalist struggle
by black people is SIMULTANEOUSLY a class struggle. But it is that view I am
skeptical of, in part precisely because black nationalism sets black people
against white people, and therefore fails to achieve its original objective.

If others argue that black people are not a class of their own, but instead
a caste, then this is a subtlety of categorisation which does not appear
substantially to alter the argument (except possibly in the sense that caste
consciousness must grow over into class consciousness; but then the pathways
need to specified along which this can occur). Personally, I distrust all
Trotskyist analyses of race and ethnicity, I regard all of them as
unreliable, that is my experience.

When Trotsky expressed sympathy for black nationalism, he did so because he
sensed a revolutionary impulse in it, a radical impulse towards the
self-organisation of black people who were becoming politically aware and
wanted to do something about their situation. But Trotsky had no profound
experience of the situation of black people in the United States, he was
basing himself on his experience of the nationalities question in Europe and
the Russian empire, in the first decades of the 20th century. He realised
the sensitivity of the issue and the need for a specific analysis, and hence
his comments remained rather general and cautious.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I think identity-politics represents an
initial stage in becoming politically aware and asserting independence, just
as an adolescent rebels against his parents. That is the dialectic of
freedom. But unless identity-politics grows over into a more profound
understanding of the emancipation problem, then it is just bought off and
co-opted by the system, which finds a place for that identity, and then
proceeds to empty out its radical and profound content.

My own experience was that in the 1970s you had socialist movements,
environmentalist movements, feminist movements, anti-racist movements and
gay movements. What happened subsequently? They all split. The socialists
split according to where they thought the workers' paradise was according to
subtleties of Marxist dogma, and according to whether they would work within
the system or not. The feminists split into black feminists, lesbian
feminists, socialist feminists, green feminists, black dykes and what not.
The anti-racist movement split into numerous groups from liberal
anti-racists to black anti-racists and black nationalists. The
environmentalist movement split into Red-Greens, Deep Greens, Gaia Greens,
and Government Greens and so forth. As regards gay and lesbian people, they
split into leftwing and rightwing groups and so on. Why all these splits?
Because it was essentially an immature identity-politics, because the
economic recession caused greater social competition through which class
forces asserted themselves, because part of the movement was co-opted,
because there was a lot of rhetoric about class, but very little political
or cultural analysis of what the classes were actually doing, and what their
situation was. Nowadays you have state departments for women's affairs,
state departments for environment, state departments for ehtnic affairs, and
all sorts. But has the situation overall got better, or is it worse ?

Along comes the Bush team and they focus on just a few themes, like the
non-existent "fight against terrorism" and gay marriage. A lot of people go
wild about it, and it's sufficient to split and unify public opinion
precisely in the way that suits them. Before we get so deeply into the
intricacies and subtleties of Marxist doctrine that we can no longer see
where people are really at, maybe we ought to learn a political lesson from
the winners. And basically what they did, was not to try and convert people
directly to a different view, or attack windmills, but affirm, play on and
frame what was already there.

Jurriaan


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