Re:Charles and Race Theory 2

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>CB: Yes, your specific interpretation of Marxism may prohibit you, but not all interpretations of Marxism, >including Marx's own interpretation of Marxism do not prohibit Marxists from speaking of race as an >authentic concept of a Bolshevik strategist and tactician. As I have pointed out to you several times, in >_Capital_ he gives a specific strategic and tactical pronouncement using race as an authentic concept; >Labor in white skin will not be free while labor in Black skin in branded.  

>You have not responded to this. It is a devastating critique of your claim that race is not an authentic >concept for Marxism.  

>Respond to this: MARX HIMSELF USES RACE AS AN AUTHENTIC CONCEPT CRITICAL TO THE >AMERICAN WORKNG CLASS STRUGGLE AND STRATEGY.


Reply

Marx uses the word âniggerâ and this does not make him a racialist or chauvinist. Marx use of the words âNegro raceâ does not create a theory of race. In fact, Marx use of the words Negro race is equivalent to the words African American people as a historically evolved people and is not an âauthentic conceptâ of race. 
 
The issue before us is the framing of the âNegro Questionâ as a modern national colonial question not simply âLabor in white skin will not be free while labor in Black skin in branded,â â as was the case prior to 1865. âMARX HIMSELF USES (The words Negro) RACE AS AN AUTHENTIC CONCEPT CRITICAL TO THE AMERICAN WORKNG CLASS STRUGGLE AND STRATEGY before the rise of modern imperialism and in the context of latifundia slavery. Nowhere does Marx use race as an authentic concept. Repeat: No where does Marx use race as an authentic concept.
 
Where Marx uses the words âNegro raceâ and Eric Foner uses the words âracial harmonyâ radically different conceptions of reality are being expressed. Marx us of the words âNegro Raceâ means the class of citizens that were slaves in the Southern portion of America. Eric Fonerâs use of the words âracial harmonyâ means all people who are not white, and is devoid of class as is his âExecutive summary,â which you choose to publish because that is your particular view. 
 
âNegro raceâ in the hands of Marx means the class of slaves. Eric Foner and the Marxist of the concept of race mean all people on earth who are not white. That is the difference. In Marx hand we have a word imbued with class content; in Fonerâs petty bourgeois hands, we have a word devoid of class and history. Foner specifically means all people who are not white or what he calls a racial minority.  
 
I am attacking your class less presentation called âracial harmony,â which you claim is Marxism and an authentic concept of race. Here is what you sent to Marxline for consideration:
 
>In the 19th century, the abolitionist movement argued for a purely civic understanding of American >identity, insisting that genuine freedom meant civic equality. In the era of Reconstruction, American >society formally embraced these principles. But this experiment in interracial democracy lasted only a >little more than a decade. By the early 20th century, a new system of racial subordination had been >established in the South, effectively nullifying the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, while in the >North blacks were denied access to industrial employment. 


This is the intellectual posture of the petty bourgeois intellectual. Let us examine your authentic concept of race, based on the material you provided Marxline. Foner states: 
 
âIn the era of Reconstruction, American society formally embraced these principles. . . this experiment in interracial democracy lasted only a little more than a decade.â 
 
The above statement is political fakery and an affront to the thousands of solider who died on the battlefield overthrowing the slave power. Marxist hold such classless formulation in contempt and label them for what they are â the striving of the petty bourgeoisie as an _expression_ of material conditions of existence outside the proletariatâs motion as a class and âbelowâ the bourgeoisie as a class. 
 
The abolition of slavery was a social revolution without a corresponding or preceding economic revolution in the Southâs means of production. That is, the instruments of production of the agricultural South did not advance; but the North imposed a revolution in social relations upon the South with the freeing of the slaves. In other words the revolution imposed on the South changed class relationships not so-called âracial relationship.â 
 
The emancipation was revolutionary and destroyed property worth some four billion dollars in the form of the slaves â proletarians in chains. The next stage of the social revolution would have to break up the plantations and parcel them out to the freemen and the landless poor whites. This would have finished the planters as a class, and such wide spread ownership of productive property would have democratized the South. 
 
The second stage of the social revolution is called Reconstruction and was not an experiment in âracial democracy.â The passage of the 14th amendment to the Constitution gave large numbers of ex-slaves the right to vote and threw the mass of the people/class into the political arena. Thousands of Anglo-American revolutionaries from the North flooded into the South to carry out the task of smashing the political power of the landlord planter. This was class struggle and not some damn âexperiment in racial harmony.â 
 
Reconstruction was the second phase of an authentic social revolution imposed on class relations in the slaveholding South. With the historic honeyed mouthed liberal in the CPUSA â tied to capital by a thousand tiny threads, the Negro People and our working class has never had a chance to evolve a class conception of American society, due in part to what Mr. Eric Foner â and you Comrade Charles, call a ârace and genderâ approach to social relations. 
 
I put forth a Marxist conception of American society that is simple and understandable by any comrade that reads these assertions. I profoundly understand your Marxist conception of race and challenge you to present evidence that indicates that someone other than âmy brandâ of Marxism have unravel social relations on the basis of the Marxist method and in conformity to Lenin, in whose tradition you claim to speak. You speak for the petty bourgeois liberal â a section of capital, on this question. 
 
What in fact is the second stage of the social revolution, which Lenin won under conditions that mirrored the period of Reconstruction in all its class configurations, down to the amount of railroad tracks laid? (Railroad tracks were a gauge to indicate the degree to which the âtownâ and âcountrysideâ are linked into an economic unit.â In other words, national development.)
 
The transition from slave to yeoman farmer could have taken place and was possible given the alignment of class factors. There was plenty of land. Land from the planters and traitor could have been confiscated. There was plenty of abandoned land but this land was grabbed by the banks â Wall Street, at tax sales and should have went to the freedmen or in the case of Russia the peasants. A dictatorship of the workers and peasants was in fact possible. 
 
Such a transition would require that the social revolution be pushed to its conclusion of radical land redistribution and not some freaking âracial harmony.â The existing means of production were applicable to small farming as the sharecropping system proved. The reality was than an alliance with an economically dependent and politically subordinate Southern ruling class was in the interest of the Northern industrial ruling class, who during this era was becoming increasingly under the domination by the financial sector of capital. 
 
A new class of independent farmers in the South would pose an economic and political threat to the industrial-financial oligarchy in the North. Furthermore, the plantations were not entirely Southern owned. A good number of Northern investors had sunk lots of money into Southern agriculture and were not about to give it up with emancipation and expropriation. 
 
Christ man, to equate in any way the second stage of the social revolution with a theory of race is the repudiation of elementary Marxism and a misunderstanding of Bolshevik strategy and tactics. 
 
The increasing world demand for cotton and tobacco coupled with the absence of an economic revolution was the conditions for the political alliance of the planters with the Northern industrialist-financial capital. This alliance in turn made a new form of slavery a historical movement and the content of the counter-revolution. The words âeconomic revolutionâ means a revolution in the means of production or the emergence of the mechanization of agriculture. 
 
Lenin and his Bolsheviks face the exact same alignment of political forces and economic condition when they came to power in Russia and appropriated the agricultural program of the Socialist Revolutionaries and broke the power of the landlord planter class with radical land distribution. The decades long battle against petite bourgeois conditions of production is the historical demand for the mechanization of agriculture or in Leninist policy liquidation of the Kulak as a class. Stalin in fact carried out the second stage of the social revolution â Leninâs policy, and the petty bourgeois cry babies have no conception of the intensity of the class struggle, why petite bourgeois production spontaneously breeds capitalism as it past through its historical stages and evolution. 
 
âMy brandâ of Marxism is authentic, consistent and absolutely proletarian in every detail and carries forth the legacy of Bolshevism - Comrade of an âauthentic concept of race.â This is such because it does not repudiate our collective history and emerged on the basis of the assertion of the industrial proletariat. Your âauthentic concept of raceâ prevents you from grasping and articulating class relationships.  
 
You bring to Marxline Eric Fonerâs description of the revolutionary essence of the social process as an âexperiment in racial harmony.â  I scream from the top of my lungs and spit venom because what you bring is horrendous and the repudiation of everything Lenin stood for and obliterate every fundamental tenet of Marxism. 
  
This second phase of the social revolution â Reconstruction, gave birth to the Populist movement. The revolutionaries face the same task as the Northern financial capitalist from different sides of the social equation. Revolution and counter-revolution by definition evolve as a unity â the dialectic of transition, as each struggle to achieve a new level of dominance, on the basis of the others subordination. 
 
The Northern financial capitalist was not face with the task of âdestroying racial harmonyâ but the delicate task of politically defeating the slave oligarchy without disrupting the existing capitalist property relations. The revolutionaries were not face with the task of âpreserving racial harmonyâ but the delicate task of politically defeating the slave oligarchy on the basis of disrupting the existing capitalist property relations through radical land distribution.
 
The Populist movement became a vehicle of the counterrevolution because Populism by definition is a popular social movement devoid of class concepts. âPoorâ people were thrown into the struggle against ârichâ people or the âbig banksâ without consideration to class. The importance of fighting for a clear class program today is going to determine our life and death as revolutionaries. Those who cling to a âracial and genderâ analysis of history are destined to evolve and merge with reaction. Class is the inescapable fundamentality of our life and everything else is secondary or minor in comparison. 
 
As the position of the financial capitalist was consolidated the horror of the Ku Klux Klan, now under the direction of Wall Street was unleashed on the class of freemen would could be identified on the basis of color. The counter-revolution took on the aspects of the slaughter of a people. The âWhite Terrorâ â not a racial concept but the historic description used by the Bolsheviks to indicate counter-revolutionary violence, unleashed was ferocious. 
 
By concentrating the attack against the class of freedmen the planters made it appear that the majority of poor whites were out of the line of fire. Centuries of white supremacy led most of the poor whites to believe that uniting on the basis of color would give them privileged status over the blacks. The failure of the revolutionaries to articulate a clear class program opened the door for Populist concepts devoid of class and the poor whites were maneuvered out of the struggle against capital. 
 
The resulting segregation and discrimination against the blacks guaranteed that the whites could not escape the slavery of the sharecropping system. The defeat of Reconstruction guaranteed that more whites than blacks would be condemned to the sharecropping system.
 
To present the Negro National Colonial Question as a question of race, or rather through the prism of the ideological framework of the bourgeoisie is a level of subjective idealism that merges with the counter-revolution. To insist that I am really saying the same thing as you â the African American people as a people means race, is simply untrue. Together, you and I constitute the two historic poles within the communist movement in our country o the National Colonial Question. 
 
Your man Mister Eric Foner states: 
 
> âBy the early 20th century, a new system of racial subordination had been established in the South, effectively nullifying the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments . . .â < 
 
By the early 20th century, a new system of racial subordination had been established in the South; effectively nullifying the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments is an insult to the thousands of freedmen and thousands of Anglo-American revolutionaries who fell on the battlefield against capital. Eric Foner and racial harmony indeed. 
 
The road to hell is of course paved with good intentions. 
 
The tools, the sharecropping system and the energy source â human labor, changed very little from 1870 to 1940 and the South was mired in extreme poverty. Race and racial theory does not enter the picture. The invention of the cotton picker in that year and the development of weed-killing chemicals in 1952 provided the economic revolution for the social revolution of 1864 to stand upon. Soviet history proves that advanced means of production for agriculture was deliberately withheld from the South. The social revolution then moved forward to completion, on the basis of capitalist production relations and gave rise to what became the Civil Rights Movement. 
 
With each passing year, Stalinâs leadership looks better and better. Those who seek to cloth Lenin in the garb of Jesus Christ should read his writings from the period of 1920 until is death. 
 
Reconstruction gave the franchise to the poor Anglo Americans. The newly enfranchised Anglo-Americans from the hills were maneuvered out of the struggle against the landlord planters and the monopolies, imbued with rabid white supremacy and turned against the Negro masses. What took place at the birth of modern imperialism and fascism was a skilful maneuver, which relied on white supremacy to co-opt the Populist movement, grab it in the mantle of the Ku Klux Klan and push it onto the stage of history as the hangman of democracy. This counter-revolutionary movement was financed by capital. 
 
The overthrow of the Reconstruction governments gave rise to the world historic fascist movement and became the prototype for fascism worldwide. Stalin defeated the corresponding counter-revolutionary movement in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930 and then defeated European reaction during the Second imperialist war. Thousands of revolutionaries in the Soviet Union who could not grasp the logic of the fight against capital, became tangled in a seemingly complex wed of political and ideological assertions and lost their lives. The class struggle intensifies in new form with the defeat of the property class. 
 
The form of state rule imposed on the former slave holding South is called fascism. What made up the ideological character of the fascist movement was not simple its violence, brutality or even rabid white supremacy. Fascist movements cloak themselves in the mantle of saving the âSouthâ or saving âGermanyâ from the power of big banks, monopolies or the money hungry traders. The counter-revolution attacked and overthrew the Reconstruction bourgeois democratic governments. Then the fascist â not racist, substituted a reign of terror as the state form of rule of capital. These fascist were the American Kulaks. 
 
A political force, constructed and funded by finance capital, which overthrows a legal bourgeois democratic government and substitutes as a state form the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic elements of finance capital is called fascist.  Such political states communist call fascism. 
 
That is what happened and a theory of race never entered the picture. 
 
Comrade Charles, I wish we were in a position to have the working class vote on our presentations. I believe I would win the popular votes by a land
 
Such are the fundamental keys to defeat the growing fascist movement in America and the world. 
 
 
Melvin P.