Re: [Marxism] Cynthia McKinney Announces Formation of DIGNITY

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Comment 
 
Anyone that seeks to understand the formation of DIGNITY, is required to  
familiarize themselves with the history of forming black organizations, whose 
 roots goes back to the Negro Peoples Convention Movement post the Civil 
War. 
 
Specifically, black organizations as organization of black people emerged  
after the counterrevolution overthrowing the Reconstruction governments and  
imposing legal segregation of blacks into their own communities. Even 
though  centuries of white supremacy gripped the population, before the 
overthrow 
of  Reconstruction, the progressive demands of these governments for things 
like  public education, land reform and voting rights were not black 
demands but  demands benefiting all of the poor and landless. With the over 
throw 
of  Reconstruction, the impact of segregation (enforced by the black codes 
and  Northern Jim Crow) was the social, economic and political platform for 
the  emergence of the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader and the black  
organization. 
 
This process began in the 1890's. This boundary of history begins and is  
delinated by  Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). This was the  landmark 
U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of racial  
segregation even in public accommodations (particularly railroads), under the  
doctrine of "separate but equal". 
 
All the legal frameworks for this boundary of history would be set in place 
 by the end of the first decade of the 1900's.  In the political sphere 
this  meant the poll tax and disfranchise of the blacks, held in place by extra 
 judicial terror. This legal, social and political form of rule gave rise 
to the  black community and the black organization as its voice. 
 
The black organization expressed the fact of social life in the black  
community, which riveted and pivoted on the harmonious existence of all classes 
 
amongst blacks within a neighborhood. The black community as a social 
fixture in  American society is called the black community NOT because the 
people 
are black,  but because it was a community housing all classes of blacks. 
 
This black community no longer exists anywhere in America. Marxists should  
understand that the change in a "social thing" generally takes place by its 
 underlying essence - content, changing first and then its external form 
changes  . . . leap forward as the conduit for the new content. Obama is not a 
black  leader, although he is black.  
 
Black doctors, accountants, entertainers, business folks and capitalist do  
not live in the same neighborhood as the black proletarians and welfare  
moms.  Look, I cannot just walk though Snoop Dog neighborhood or knock on  
Ushers door, although I can knock on MC Hammer's door for now. Class as an  
economic configuration is involved. There are communities with a black 
majority,  but we are talking about proletarian slums and not a damn "black 
community." 
 
Why claim to approach things from a Marxist and class perspective and  then 
jettison class as an economic reality and discard the dialectic of  change 
as form and content? A section of the black lower middle class co-exist  
with the lower paid black proletarians to the same degree as their white  
counterparts, with poor black and poor whites increasingly living in the same  
neighborhoods or areas adjacent to one another. 
 
The capitalist and people with big money "live way over there!" 
 
The obvious question ignored is the fact that the most poverty stricken  
section of our working class is overwhelmingly white. Our "key" to the social  
equation and path forward is organizing these workers and breaking them 
from the  grips of the Democratic Party, and it is this section of our working 
class that  today serves as the social and political basis of the Democratic 
Party and the  Obama administration. 
 
We just lived through an exciting and living process anyone can understand. 
 All we have to ask is who voted for who and what were the economic 
dimensions  (class) of the groups of people voting to the candidates? 
 
Specifically, a huge section of these workers, historically stable in  
economic matters and wedded to the Republican Party, were set into political  
motion as the result of the deepening of this stage of capital crisis. Obama  
captured this motion and on this basis swung the blacks over to his campaign 
as  the last social group to join his campaign. The blacks were the last 
grouping of  people swung to the Obama campaign, not the first or second.  
 
The black peoples were the last on the Obama campaign wagon. 
 
They were clinging to Senator Clinton's dress, in a way that made me say,  
"crap, seems like I might have to vote for Hillary and I hate the Clinton's 
for  what Bill Clinton did to welfare." 
 
Bill Clinton lowered, across the board, the living index of the entire  
American working class and them slapped the organized workers in the face with  
NAFTA. 
 
Yet, it seems that some lament, wondering, "what are the black proletarians 
 going to do?" 
 
Why not look at what they just did? 
 
The blacks swung behind the mass of working class whites spontaneously set  
into political motion. "Why?" Because of this tiny thing called "class," is 
 being felt in America  If the blacks swung behind the white workers and  
they did, then the key to the social equation is the white workers in their  
spontaneous motion and concentrating along this line of march.  Or rather,  
the key is jettisoning the idea "what are the blacks going to do." 
 
Dignity. 
 
Dignity? 
 
In 1969 we formed and called ourselves the League of Revolutionary Black  
Workers (LRBW). We formed in the political after shocks of Detroit July  
1967.  July 1967 Detroit was the greatest uprising against the state to  take 
place since the Civil  War. On the continuum of American history the  LRBW 
inherited the legacy of the previous formation of black proletarians and  
middle class insurgents as the old "Negro Labor Leagues"  The LRBW  completed 
and 
expressed a quantitative boundary in the evolution of America  inaugurating 
the post Jim Crow era, understood as the emergence of the era of  Black 
Power or the fight for black political representation within the political  
superstructure. Little did any of us know at the time that this boundary would  
not be definitively closed and the new boundary appear as Barack Obama. 
Barack  Obama understood the new boundary and describes it in both his books. 
 
What happened was that the LRBW split with a section going over to the  
radical left and us merging with the California Communist League and it 
becoming  the Communist League.  The Communist League would evolve and become 
the  
Communist Labor Party (CLP) running communist candidates for political 
office  who were black, in contest with the Marxist radical political left, 
also 
running  black candidates, in the person of Kenneth Cockrel Sr. The latter 
was  consciously tied to the Democratic Party. We were not. 
 
Yet, there was a political thread tying the CLP to the Democrats and  
Democratic Party through various black and multi-ethnic grouping supporting our 
 
campaign. These groups in turn expressed the economic composition of the  
industrial proletariat in Detroit, during the mid and late 1970's. These 
workers  were highly organized and amongst the best paid in the industrial 
world. 
Their  fighting capacity could not and did not eclipse an economic 
configuration, which  is the American middle class as it was formed on the 
basis of 
the organization  of the automobile industry. 
 
These industrial workers were the economic and political heart of the great 
 American middle class or what Leninists called the "political middle" tied 
to  the Democratic Party, as it fought for the interest of the middle 
class. 
 
One can scream communism and dictatorship of the proletariat from the house 
 top, only to discover that ideology and theory cannot overcome an 
economic/class  boundary. To the degree the middle class was stable and 
expanding 
political  revolution is out of the question at the front of the curve of 
industrial  development. 
 
The old League of Revolutionary Black Workers was the highest form of  
organization that blacks could achieve, as blacks, in American society and it  
had to split and leap in two directions: communism and radial black leftism. 
 
"Black Left"  . . . who comes up with such a political conception, 44  
years removed from Jim Crow segregation? 
 
A black left is impossible in a society that is not segregated. 
 
If one is African American and defines themselves as part of the left, the  
sum totally of these individuals do not constitute a "black left."  Does  
the sum total of Mexicans and Chicano's on the left constitute the "Chicano  
Left." Do the sum total of Asians on the left constitute the "Asian Left?" 
Do  the sum total of Anglos on the left constitute the "white left"  . . . . 
in  the environment of 2009? 
 
We should not think in ideological and political concepts appropriate to an 
 era now exhausted. 
 
I cannot think of one single issue a black left or black leader can raise  
that is not an issue of the working class and its most poverty stricken 
sector.  The black leader as a leader of black has been regulated to history 
along side  the spinning wheel but many leaders who are black do not understand 
the logic of  development and evolution. Marxists who fail to see change, 
especially when the  form of a process is leaping to another boundary, need 
to restudy their  countries history and dialectics. 
 
Bet you Obama understand the logic, because it is bound up in him as a  
person. Remember all the arguments over whether or not Obama was really "black" 
 as defined by the "black leaders?" 
 
Wonder what that was really about?  
 
The black leaders understood perfectly well that they were being put out of 
 a job. Why on earth would any black person need a another black person to 
"talk  with the man" on their behalf, when society is not segregated? Under 
conditions  of the destruction of Jim Crow, anyone can speak on anyone's 
behalf - (as  leader) and face no political structures based on color. It is 
not like all  classes of blacks are housed together and the "big black"  . . . 
the man  with the money and clout, is appointed to talk to the "man." 
 
That period of history is long gone. 
 
Here is why Obama tossed the Reverend J. Wright under the bus. The Reverend 
 is a Reverend and as a historical configuration the first personification 
of the  Black leader arising under slavery. The Church was the only social 
institution  allowed amongst the slaves and the Minister was the leader. 
Obama understood  that Rev. Wright as a black preacher/leader was expendable 
because the black  masses are divided and polarized into classes and are going 
to spontaneously  follow the path of class like everyone else, rather than a 
social struggle based  on color. 

Blacks are not incomprehensibly in love with the Obama administration! 
 
The majority section of the American working class that voted and elected  
Obama and is supporting him right now would seem to be as clear as a noon 
June  day. These workers made their presence felt in the largest open air 
rallies in  the history of  American presidential campaigns. 
 
Don't get me wrong. 
 
Dignity can fight for all the dignity it wants and we need dignity real  
bad. However, the working class seems to be defining its struggle in less  
ideological terms called meat and potatoes, house note, water bill and job. 
 
The good part is we can help define the form of the movement while it is in 
 the process of the leap . . . . transition, from one form to another. The  
content - essence, of the historic struggle of the blacks has changed. The  
blacks are not fighting a civil rights struggle. The problem is that none 
of the  old organizations are expressing the new content of the struggle of 
the blacks  and here is where communists can alter history and create a new 
line of history. 
 
A new form of struggle has to be consciously fought out, expressing the  
revolution in production and the impact of a new technological regime. 
 
The problem is that we have never been down this road before and therefore  
has to pay attention to all forms of struggle that nurtures and bring to 
the  fore class issues. 
 
WL. 
 
 
 
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