>>Lil Joe comment: Actually, there is no Black bourgeoisie because there is no Black nation: Blacks in the US are either capitalists, professionals, working class or and chronically unemployed, and in these economic categories the Black capitalists no different from White capitalists, Black workers the same class with common class interests with White workers. Therefore, understanding that politically organizations of classes represent class interests, it is evident that Jesse Jackson, Sharpton and Mfume are Democrats qua Democrats, representing the class faction of capitalists represented by the Democratic Party.<<
Comment There of course is no white nation within the state that is the multi-national state of the American Union. The issue should be looked at outside the politics and ideology of race. Is there an African American bourgeoisie or a class of African American capitalist or a distinct group of African Americans regarded as capitalist in relationship to our bourgeois property relations? Is there a bourgeoisie in America? The question of class interest has never been abstract in the American Union and as an abstraction African Americans and Anglo Americans - as well as Mexicans, Chicano, Indian, Asian, various African National, Irish, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Alaskan, Chinese, and all proletarians within our multinational state system, have the same class interest. This tells us next to nothing about our history as it is playing itself out today and in yesteryear. Huge sections of the working class in our country have always moved in different direction and often in opposing directions. Not simply the working class proper but also other sections of the laboring masses, like the sharecroppers of the past. In our history the Anglo American sharecropper behaved as an Anglo American and the African American sharecropper behaved as an African American in asserting their class positions. Who can deny that a considerable amount of energy was expended by the African American workers as a mass fighting their Anglo American counterparts? To tell the truth of the matter the Anglo American workers within the worker class do not have the same class interest because they are stratified. Who on earth have women proletarians been fighting for the past 400 years if not men proletarians - in the flesh? The point is that the working class can never be united based on "class interest" as an abstraction. If history is any indication of the logic of social motion or the political struggle what actually happens is that a politically active section of the working class is drawn into engagement with their counterparts within capital they are organically bond with, as in the case of the past industrial union movement. This political motion serves as a basis to galvanize and propagate class ideas amongst the workers and allows communist workers to fight to teach the working masses the important and need to take a class stand. In the case of the immediate past period the African American people as a people embracing all classes were in political motion to reformulate the social contract between the capitalist and workers and the working class itself. This political motion allowed communist to raise class ideas on the basic of the immediacy of the struggle for equality. It would of course be interesting to understand your particular meaning of the word bourgeoisie, which is used interchangeable with the modern capitalist class. I do believe that Don Barden is most certainly a real bourgeoisie and remember fairly clearly how he accumulated his capital as well as the fascistic former "owner" of BET who took the lion share of about $3 billion when it was sold. There is of course Claud Anderson who has emerged as the theoretical and political leader of a faction of this capitalist class. Anderson's 1994 book - Black Labor-White Wealth is their programmatic doctrine. The African American elite is not the African American capitalist class. The former recruited Al Sharpton and cleaned him up - got him out of his jumpt suits, and groomed him to run for President. If we do not understand our peculiar history we cannot win any one over to a class stance, a precondition providing the ideological basis for a Labor Party. Further, the equality struggle is and will remain the cutting edge of the emerging class struggle. How this social form of struggle is emerging is witnessed in not just the separation of the black workers and black capitalist from one another and the polarization within the African American elite, but also the sharpening struggle for Voting Rights which is a class demand of the workers. Voting Rights in the pre-1965 era and Voting Rights today cannot but display new qualitative features emerging in the social struggle. Actually, this same social process first emerged in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, when a vast segment of Southern whites were won over or reconciled themselves to the "justness" of the former slaves voting. The counterrevolution changed this. The point is that the evolution of the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader has exhausted itself or rather the economic and social basis of the black leader as a leader of African Americans has been eroded by history - changes in the social contract and reformulation of social relations between and within classes in American society. ********************************* >>>I therefore disagree with the authors conclusions, snip: "What this all means is that the American society is moving away from racism and moving toward classism which puts the future of the Black community in the hands of the Black Bourgeois. Until they make major changes in their attitude as a overall group, the African American community will continue down this road to destruction." Lil Joe: This is untrue, because the 'moving away from racism and to classism' means only that American workers are beginning to see beyond their socialized ideologies of 'race matters', to discussing class matters which unite all working class activists regardless of race, creed, color or national origin into a single class party, Labor Party. It is a good thing, not a bad thing to be attacked by the enemy, so by the attacks by Bill Cosby and Black Democrats, representing the thinking of their social base, it is not 'race self-hatred' but class hatred attacking those of us who are working class, as 'lower socioeconomic rungs of society'. This is good! This makes it easier for people like me to dismiss nationalistic and racialist.<< WL: I do not subscribe to the political concept that is ever good to be attacked by the enemy or its ideological expression: the poorer the better. Yet, it is a fact that increasing poverty, war and oppression is the social framework for the emergence of the class struggle. In my opinion the real question is not classism versus surrendering to the Black bourgeoisie and turning over the black community to them. The issue is the concept of the Black Community. Here dialectics and praxis is paramount in unraveling the social equation, although "the Marxists" are still hamstrung by theories of race. Actually "racism" has not lessened in America or rather white chauvinism has been superseded by a violent form of national chauvinism. What is called racism is really chauvinism and given our history the most violent form was white chauvinism, which evolved from white supremacy. The Black Community no longer exists as such in the American Union. The "Black Community" is a historical designation that refers to the period of segregation when all classes of blacks where housed in the same community - under the system of Jim Crow and after all the disenfranchisement measures were passed and consolidated around 1900. The history of this peculiar community of intermingling classes can be studied by anyone in thousands of books. I personally suggest "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" by C. Vann Woodward, because a generation of Communists were reared on this book. Yes, there are communities of African Americans but there is no danger of the Black bourgeoisie somehow magically taking control of a none existent black community or winning the political battle for the hearts of the most poverty stricken sector of the proletariat. What demands can the Black bourgeoisie raise or for that matter the African American elite that do not cut across all nationality lines? The Black bourgeoisie long ago began championing for more jails and a section of the African American elite - different from the black capitalist, has become increasingly worthless or rather, as worthless as their Anglo American counterparts, in regard to the proletariat. Marxism and the National Factor has never faired well in the American Union and outright racial concepts color the vision of "the Marxists." The African American people as a people are in fact a historically evolved people according to ever important Anglo American author in every sphere during the entire history of the American Union. Nations of course are not based on color but economic and sociological criteria. The African American people are not a nation, have never been a nation and will never be a nation. Nor can they be considered a minority throughout the debt and breath of the US State. Irish are a minority and obvious there are vastly more African Americans than Irish. Poles are a minority as are Nigerians, Jamaicans, Italians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Puerto Ricans and the list goes on. Race theory has blinded "the Marxists" to the obvious. White people is an ideological concept of white chauvinism which provided the brutal excuse for the murder, violence and terror imposed on the African American. White chauvinism is the historical form that the bribery and privilege took to the mixture called the Anglo American people in the US. This bribery and privilege is decaying in front of our eyes. Those claiming the method of Marx are compelled to unravel the social process so that our workers can understand their place in history. Communist workers have the responsibility to explain our history and what we have experienced. The Black community was created under the heavy hand of Jim Crow and this community no longer exist as it did in the past - began dissolution, 40 years ago. Proletarians and capitalist are not housed together in the American Union and this is also true of the areas inhabited by African Americans. It is not like any one of even the stature of Snoop Dog live in the proletarian slums. Further, the African Americans of the working class are stratified. There is no automatic or spontaneous kinship between the highest paid workers and the most poverty stricken. It is the most poverty stricken sector of the proletariat that carry the key to the social landscape in America because it has the least ties to the state and is more than less permanently gyrating outside the social contract and bond that has united workers and capitalists into an indissoluble unity during the epoch of the bourgeoisie. History would seem to confirm this description of the social process if one traced events of the past 150 years. Now the African American elite is in a very strange position unlike anything since the defeat of Reconstruction. Marxism-Thaxis = the standpoint of Marx and Engels + theory and practice of the social movement, where one finds themselves. Peace Waistline _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
