Is it male supremacist to state that women have spent their life cycle fighting men? After all, women have had to fight men. First for some control of the check book, then say so over wages and for equality on the job. I agree that in this sixth phase of African American liberation and third phase of social revolution the conditions for a new level of unity across the color line exists. The color factor persists because inequality remains. Without question things have changed in our country with the collapse of Jim Crow. What may I ask was African Americans fighting for and who were they fighting in society, the factories and all areas of social life during the first five phase of the battle for quality? This phase - the sixth, of the African American liberation is tightly bound up with emancipation of the proletariat as a class. This was not true in previous phases of African American liberation. In the first phase the struggle was against slavery and in the North against isolation and terror of the white masses post 1790. The second phase was post Civil War or the period of Reconstruction. The third phase was the counter revolution and overthrow of Reconstruction governments. The fourth phase begins with mechanization of agriculture and runs through the post WW II period to the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Fair housing laws. The fifth phase begins with the election of Carl Stokes. This sixth phase begins as the 1990 Los Angels rebellion. Obama just may represent a new phase - the seventh, but I leave that to the historians to come. Crossing the color line and electing a black as president is the most profound indication of a shift in social awareness since the period opened by the 1965 Watts rebellion. The issue for me and voting for Obama, rather than supporting his administration, was not Obama as bourgeoisie, but cracks in historic all class white unity. My love affair with Obama ended with his last inaugural dance, which I wrote about and stated on line. The party generally ends with the last dance. White workers in the flesh fought to protect their historically evolved privileged social position. This does not mean every single white person in America or on earth. All class unity of whites has been the fundamental stumbling lock to the unity of the proletariat forever. What we are dealing with is not racism but privilege. This privilege is experienced as the color factor, or labor branded in the black. The color factor is articulated in the ideological sphere as racial concepts and race theory or the bourgeois doctrine of racism. The social struggle of the blacks in Detroit for instance, in the factories, from 1915 to roughly 1980 was not against an abstract institution of racism, but real people who supported and implemented terror and discrimination to maintain a privileged social position and deny blacks as a group employment. There is a material reason why Ford was the last of the auto companies to be organized and why the decisive battle took place at Ford Rouge, which housed 20,000 black workers. One may not be aware of the role and history of black communists under conditions of segregation during the period of fight for industrial unionism. One may not be aware of the intensity of the armed conflict in places like Cleveland Ohio and during the entire era of "Black Power." Some of our fights in and around Detroit involved armed conflict. One can of course type in Benton Harbor Michigan to understand how the class struggle expresses itself through and as the color factor. The working class fights itself as an expression of the wage labor form, which rest exclusively on competition for jobs. Marx statement that "labor in the white cannot emancipate itself when it is branded in the black," is a profound assessment of the color factor as American history. The color factor in American history is about the ideological manipulation and control of white people - the white sections of the proletariat, cementing all class unity against the "ideological other." The color factor is in fact one of the forms of the "class struggle." There is nothing "racist" about telling the truth. WL
_______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list Marxist-Leninist-List@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
