Re: Charles and Ract Theory

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

Sorry to push this discussion to pen. Problems with my system and posting to Marxline. System was down but I most certainly relied to all our comments. Here is one of 5 articles written i refutation of the race theory as applied to African Americans and the history of the national colonial question as understood by "my brand" of Marxism.


>>CB: What type of thing does Marx mean when he refers to a "Negro"CB: What type 
of thing does Marx mean when he refers to a "Negro" ? A national colonial group 
?  Or does he mean a group whose skin is "branded" or whose skin is a brand ? A 
group defined by its land, language, history ? Or a physical characteristic, a 
phenotype ?
 
Is not Marx using the concept of race when he refers to Negroes ?
 
^^^^^^^
 
Further Marx says, "Where the capitalist outlook prevails, as on American 
plantations, this entire surplus value is regarded as profit . . ." Capital 
Volume 3 page 804. 
 
Marx has a way with words. Comrade Charles please try and follow the logic or 
rather dialectic of the economic development that produced on the one hand a 
historically evolved people, not a race  - (stop pause and consider),
 
^^^^^^^^
 
CB: Here's what occurs to me when I consider: What type of group is Marx 
referring to when he refers to a "Negro" ? Obviously, he _is_ referring to a 
race, contra your comment here. 
 
Lets stop here. Lets dwell on this some.
 
 
Please focus your discussion on this point for a while, then lets move on to 
your other discussion.   Right now I am focusing on your answer to this 
question.
 
 
Charles Brown
 
 
 
Reply.
 
 
I cannot believe you asked what you ask:
 
> âCB: What type of thing does Marx mean when he refers to a "Negro" ? A 
national colonial group ?  Or >does he mean a group whose skin is "branded" or 
whose skin is a brand ? A group defined by its land, >language, history ? Or a 
physical characteristic, a phenotype? <
 
The folly of racial theory has not bounds. You seek to prove the impossible and 
miss the elementary. The presentation of the national question and its evolution is peculiar in America. The disjoint of the communist movement and the ideological pressure of our imperialist bourgeoisie has prevented the proletariat from being exposed to the communist presentation of this question. Thus, I could not confine myself to discourse over âraceâ but present concise synopsizes from the standpoint of the science of society in which the so-called Negro Question has played itself out. 
 
Marx is referring to a class of slaves whose origins are traceable to continental Africa when he says âNegro race.â Specifically, he is referring to the black slaves on the plantations of the American south. 
 
A misunderstanding exists concerning what is meant by the words national-colonial question, which as such did not emerge as such until during and after the first Imperialist War. Marx could not have meant a ânational-colonial groupâ because this configuration in history occurs 
after his death. 
 
Communist speak of the Leninist conception of the national colonial question 
because Leninâs name is associated with the evolution of a different presentation of the question in opposition to the leaders of the Second International. This is one of the reasons the Third Communist International was formed. Joseph V. Stainâs âMarxism and the National Questionâ was read and edited by Lenin and he considered it a great Marxist presentation. 
 
Marx is quoted extensively to present the economic analysis of why slavery  in the South was a unique system of capitalist production. Any group of human beings drawn into the vortex of capitalist production will evolve within a specific framework referred to as national development.  Development as fusion of various distinct peoples is markedly different under the estates within feudal social and economic relations. 
 
National development is placed within the epoch of rising capitalism and took place in the slaveholding areas of the South. The Negro People evolved as a people prior to the emergence of the national formation in the South and its attempt to win political authority and complete its political and economic development. The Civil War settled this issue in favor of the Yankee. 
 
The logic of American history has to be disclosed to grasp the essence of the Negro National 
Colonial Question. The Negro National Colonial question did not exist at the time of Marx. What existed was a class of black slaves Marx called the Negro race of slaves. 
 
The social motion of the African American people of the United States has always reflected the level of development of the productive forces, the productive relations and the political maneuvering of the ruling class to keep the two (productive forces, the productive relations) united. The political maneuvering and the social response of the African American people to the material conditions of their status and location within the societal infrastructure has kept them at the center of the countryâs history. 
 
The formation of the African American people is unique. Racial theory 
prevents the disclosure of this unique development and at every 
important juncture of history, prevented the communist from grasping the independent political assertion of the most proletarian sector of the Negro people. 
 
The word Negro is Spanish for black. The black people who constituted the human 
chattel driving slave production of commodities for the world market began to 
coalesce into a people as the result of the harshness of slavery. What began as 
various pre-capitalist groups of black people from continental Africa was weld 
together into a people with a common language â English, and a specific psychological 
make-up shapes as the result of terror. The internal unity that held the African American people together as a people was not a common land in the Marxist meaning. Common land means more than existence on a territorial landmass. Marxist speak of the historical evolution of a 
people and their transformation on the basis of passing from feudal social and 
economic relations to capitalist social and economic relations as the content of what is called a âcommon land.â  
 
That is to say the historic evolution of the towns as centers of commerce and trade, and their interactive relationship with the countryside, as they evolve within the vortex of capitalist commodity production. Trading companies colonized the United States. There were never any concrete feudal economic relations in our country, only certain feudal-like social and economic forms in which capitalist slavery evolved.  Nor was the consolidation of the African American people based on a unity tied to a common historically evolved religion. The historically evolved religion of the African was suppressed and wipe out. Yet a more than less homogenous group of people began evolving as a class of slaves. This people/class of blacks were different from the Haitian or black Nigerian or Ethiopian â a distinct people. 
 
The sharecropping system and the convict-lease system became new forms of slavery for the African American after the defeat of Reconstruction. The most brutal social and political oppression was necessary to carry out the extreme level of economic oppression at the hands of the Wall Street backed landlords and American Kulak. The sharecropping blacks, cheated by the Kulak, brutalized by the legal authorities, terrorized by extra-legal fascist forces were reduced to the level of the peasants of India. 
 
The near total isolation of the blacks through segregation laws and Southern 
custom â backed by a form of fascist state rule was necessary for that 
exploitation to take place. To ensure that the black slave and their descendant could never escape the specter of the plantation, a form of police rule was implemented in the Northern enclaves that housed the national minority workers. This system of rule exist to this very day and is based in the Dred Scott decision of the 1830s. 
 
 
The era of segregation, lasting some 95 years, isolated the mass of African Americans to a greater degree than slavery. This isolation and oppression based on color â the most identifying characteristic of the black former slave, was the condition for the final stages of their development as a people. 
 
The African American people are not a âraceâ or even a so-called ethnic group. Our unique 
profile defies the general logic of history as transition in the mode of production, which fuses various peoples together, and has baffled the Marxist for generations. There was no âNegro Questionâ as such in Europe and it was left to the industrial proletariat to hammer out and carry forth the Marxist presentation of this question based on the historical conclusions of the Bolsheviks of the Third Communist International. 
 
There are no internal contradictory dynamics â as development driven on the basis of the mode of production, to hold the African American people together. The force that formed the African Americans into a distinct people has always been the legal and extra-legal pressure and terror of the whites. 
 
Segregation created the black bourgeoisie â that is, a black petty capitalist 
based on the âcaptiveâ black market. The victory over segregation began to 
disperse this black market. The defeat of segregation meant that the African 
Americans would individually enter their respective classes. Each social class 
benefits unequally from desegregation. There would therefore be greater economic 
and ultimately social inequality between the African Americans of different 
classes, than between the blacks and whites within the respective classes. 
 
I strenuously object to the idea that I â as African American have more in common with all African Americans than with my Anglo-American proletarian counterpart. I object to the petty bourgeois black so-called leaders whose money, prestige and social status are based on maintaining the myth of black unity and defeating the proletarian assertion. The day of the so-called black leader is limited and what prevents his ouster is the petty bourgeois nationalist â the political middle. There are no internal contradictory dynamics to hold the African American people together.
 
The terrorist rule of the sharecropping system is historically spent. The ideological categories that justified fascist rule â white chauvinism, are not going to disappear but are being sublated. The mass of the most poverty stricken proletarians directly faces the capitalist state authority as a class, not a ârace.â What is needed is a class program to defeat the so-called black petty bourgeois leader and his counterpart â the chauvinist. The chauvinist within Marxism, are all those who do not put forth a class program and adhere to a âracialâ or âgenderâ conception â approach, to history. The dialectic of evolution asserts itself and clinging to pass formulations merges one with reaction. 
 
The African American can only take advantage of their victories as individuals 
becoming more equal to their white counterparts in a fundamentally unequal 
society. This is inevitable because class society is by definition unequal 
because one class owns the means of production. 
 
What does all this mean? 
 
All of this means, Comrade Charles that you seek to ground down the debate into 
defining a non-existence social phenomenon called race or the theory of race or 
the theory of biological âphenotypeâ â your word, instead of grasping the class 
configuration that has characterized the development of a new people. 
 
 
Here is what you state: 
 
>CB: Here's what occurs to me when I consider: What type of group is Marx referring to when he refers to a "Negroâ? Obviously, he _is_ referring to a 
race, contra your comment here. <
 
The type of group Marx is referring to in an economic category in which is contained a group of people. This is why Marx on Slavery as an economic category was quoted extensively. You state that Marx is referring to a so-called biological factor when everything I quoted from Marx is clearly a description of economic logic.  Thus you adopt the standpoint of the petty bourgeois intellectual. 
 
Here is some of the history of the last period of the social movement. 
 
The old League of revolutionary Black Workers split precisely because as a 
people, the workers cannot harmoniously coalesces with other classesâ on the 
basis of a proletarian class program. I reject the slogan âall power to the 
Partyâ as that of the petty bourgeoisie. We rejected this slogan when the old Black Panther Party raised it. We spoke of black workers being in the vanguard of the social revolution and stated to the petty bourgeois that âOne Class Conscious Worker is Worth a Hundred Studentsâ â slogans that are inappropriate to todayâs world. 
 
This was during a time where Katherine Cleaver spoke of âbombing the workers out of the plants.â Was not Ms Cleaverâs assertion âpetty bourgeois radicalismâ merging with the terror of the historic fascist movement? Because she is a black woman the revolutionaries accepted her criminal statements and contempt for the working class in silence. Our brand of Marxism before we began Marxist rejected the slogan âAll Power to the Peopleâ as phony populism, which is not hard to do in the industrial heartland of America. 
 
In âUnion Town USAâ the consciousness of the industrial workers transcended âtrade union consciousnessâ a century ago and formed the core of the Anarcho-syndicalist movement, which became expressed a deviation within Marxism by a section of communist back in the early 1920s. My point is that we had to throw off anarcho-syndicalism and bourgeois nationalism/chauvinism, not petty bourgeois radicalism and Marx meaning of the word Negro race. 
 
Skin color is not race because races of people do not exist on earth. 
 
>What type of group is Marx referring to when he refers to a "Negro?â Obviously, 
he is referring to a race, contra your comment hereâ is rather absurd, especially since you have presented Eric Foner and his conception of racial theory as supporting evidence. 
 
Well Comrade, what Marx is referring to almost 150 years ago is a class of 
slaves who skin is black and I will state this one-thousand times until it is understood. It is not really a question of what Marx is referring to but rather what are you referring to by stating there is a Marxist conception of race? 
 
What you infer by stating there is a âracialâ and âgenderâ approach to history is clearly misunderstood by scores of revolutionaries whose Marxism has not merged with the historic movement founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. There is a materialist conception of history and we approach this from the standpoint of productive forces and the relations of production. Within this framework we examine all social phenomenon and this most certainly includes the Women Question and the national-colonial question.  
 
You most certainly represent the black petty bourgeois on this question. All 
black people are not subject to the same social pressure in society, âas a race.â This is the underlying them of the Marxist of the theory of race.  The 
greatest society pressure is economic deprivation and the fundamental inequality 
African Americans face is that of class. This does not mean discrimination has 
disappeared, but the quantitative expansion of capital and the reconfiguration of the infrastructure presents the question differently.
 
The day of the so-call black leader and this âall power to the peopleâ nonsense is limited and the proletariat is going to take attendance o this question. Whose side are you on? That of the so-called black leaders, racial theory, Marxist conception of race or the proletarian Marxist conception of the national colonial question?
 
What is scary is that you do not grasp why this is an extreme polarity in the working class movement.  Consider this: in the old period we organized the black workers on the basis of their inequality as proletarians and the fight against police violence ad extra legal terror. That is why the revolutionary movement supported us despite our backwards ideology. Everyone understood we were not the petty bourgeois ideologist and made allowances for our growth â which we took advantage of. 
 
Melvin P