V. I want to try to be clear to avoid misunderstanding about what legal segregation actually meant.
For 50 years - between 1920 and 1970, Detroit had an extra legal curfew imposed on the black where they had to be off the streets at sun down or risk being jailed and shot. It was extra legal because no laws existed on the books but the “curfew law existed in fact” and was enforced by the police and understood by every level of local government. Exceptions were made for workers on the night shift and weekends when traveling to entertainment events. Literally, if you stood on the corner talking, the police would drive up, roll down the window and say, “give me that corner.” This was a warning to disperse or be “beat down.” An elaborate system of communications developed where you were informed the police were 2 blocks away and closing in fast, allowing one to take to the alley ways. Black power is what it was, as the demand for entry into the political system. In this sense the struggle of the blacks was no different than the struggle of the Irish, Italian or any other “national group“ that becomes large enough in a jurisdiction to take control of the “machine.” The color factor complicated the struggle of the blacks, meaning all the various groupings dominating the “city machine” had to be fought because their unity was based on the isolation and exclusion of the blacks. Black Power meant black political power or the politics of combating, inheriting and taking over the “city machine” in the North and the local political jurisdictions in the South enforcing fascist segregation. Thus, the path of the fight could only take place on the basis of the post legal Jim Crow segregated voting market, because white voters as a general rule could not and would not elect a black. The refusal of whites to elect blacks during this period cannot be causally spoken of as “just” racism without qualification. Beneath the color factor is “the city machine factor,“ or the system of spoils and payoffs in every American city. Jobs in the police force and all levels of governments and city services are at stake. Awarding contracts for city services involves more than the actual workers hired and require the system of lawyers, accountants and land speculators every time a new road is built or a new housing development is proposed. This system evolved before blacks entered the industrial class and is based on nationality or the immigrant status of waves of European immigrants. The Irish had to built up their mass in a jurisdiction as did the Italian and Polish to grab hold of the city machine. Pretty much the same with the blacks + the color factor. The demand for black police officers was an exceptionally brutal and violent struggle in Detroit and Cleveland. This was a period of desegregation that birthed the “Black Guardians” within police departments in the major cities. The Black Guardian were black police officers literally forced to fight the semi-fascist polices of their local police departments. More often than not, the Black Guardians played an exemplar role in protecting the social movement from fascist attacks by segments of the police department. This was certainly the case in Detroit. The point is that at a certain stage in the change process the structures of control become paralyzed and at odds with itself. An example of this I experienced was the case of protesting at Cooly High school in Detroit and not the one in Chicago named after the movie. In the process of the demonstration a police care literally ran into a mass of people injuring many. The police pull out their guns to shoot us. The Black Guardian on the scene pulled out their gun and aimed them at the heads of the other officers and told them if they fired one shot they would shoot them. This happened because our struggle was just. Then there was the tip off to many of us that the police were in the process of preparing to raid the Black Panther office and kill them. This tip off allowed people to go to the Panthers office along with the press to halt the attack. We are poised to experience a new form of the social movement and need to be mindful of how things happen. At the end of the day the majority of the people of our country are going to line up with the proletarian revolution because it is just. Control of the police force also involves management of crime and drugs and who gets paid. The city machine and police get paid through various sources, including crime. In Detroit the struggle within the union and on the factory floor was electoral and extra legal, frequently erupting in gun play. This struggle is often misunderstood. The struggle of the lowest paid unskilled is always sharp and violent as these workers press to control the internal union organization in opposition to the skilled trades. The color form of this struggle, extremely intense in Detroit, meant challenging the company and union and armed conflict within the building trade hiring halls. This aspect of the social conflict is a proletarian insurgency rather than racial conflict. The form of the conflict appear as the color factor because the blacks were the last hired and first fired. Within the police department a nasty struggle involving the police invading home and gathering of another group of police and shooting them. The press reported this as a mistaken raid on a suspected “drug den” when what actually happened was a regular night of “poker Friday.” Finally, the 1967 Rebellion over rode the ability of the local police power to control the street. Watts 1965 and then Detroit 1967 rendered the police organization and city machine irrelevant and obsolete. The development of what is today SWAT units trace its legacy to Watts 1965 and Detroit 1967. The battle for the streets was won. Nothing short of continuous military occupation can win the streets back to the bourgeois power. VI. With respect to the UAW - autoworkers union, their “progressive” label as being left wing is unwarranted. It is not that Walter Reuther and his crew pushed the union from its progressive rail. Rather, Reuther institutionalized the latent semi-fascist features inherent to a trade union movement evolving in a pure capitalist country, decades after the industrial bourgeoisie has established its hegemony. After the industrial bourgeoisie establishes hegemony this means the battle to reform the system in is favor has been won, and society is reorganized along a rail that must run its course. Unions are a mixed bag of things, some good and some bad. Union are more good than bad at the front of the curve of the social process. Unions are by definition exclusionary, compelled to service their members at the exclusion of non-members. This unavoidable feature of union is the result of the wage form of labor or capital. Capitalism is founded on converting everyone into a slave that has to sell their labor ability for wages to the owners of production. In turn you must compete in the market to sell your labor ability. When Marx writes that wage labor rest exclusively on the competition of wage earners for wages that is what he meant. An old America capitalist said the same thing by saying “I have enough money to pay one section of the working class to kill the other.” Unions function to dampen the competition of the laboring within their jurisdiction or the same trade. Without the selfless fight and activity by three generations of communists and militants, our union movement would have been horribly reactionary. In the struggle for the industrial form of unions the black workers were decisive in places like Ford Rouge. In a wider arena the color factor was also the central issue that prevented the breakout of the union movement in the 1930’s and 40’s. There was no way to advance and secure the unions without organizing the South. Organizing the South meant confronting the color factor head on and overcoming the historic split in the working class movement. The unions could not or would not take this step. One may choose either explanation because each explanation provides and becomes the environment for the other. I can state without any hesitation that the color question was not tackled in any fundamental way, until the blacks achieved a critical mass that allowed them to tackle the question themselves. There is a lesson in this. The destitute proletariat will tackle questions for itself when it learns it has no other recourse. In a country such as ours, there has never existed the “political space” for the evolution of an independent trade union movement or workers political parties. Nor did the political space exist for workers candidates as was the cause in developing bourgeois Europe. In Europe, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was bounded by the interactions of four primary classes - nobility and serf, capitalist and workers, and the need of the capitalist to rely upon the defeat of the feudal oligarchy, which in turn created the political space for the emergence of workers parties or social democracy. This was not the case in America. Although it did not happen all at one time, the evolutionary path of the trade union founded on the old industrial order, cast them as an appendage of the State department = semi-fascist. The alternative to tackling the color question and the colonial entrapment of the core plantation area of the South, a colony, was a condition under which the trade unions became something akin to a labor front and an appendage of the State Department. We do not want to confuse the color factor as it affected blacks throughout the totality of the multi-national state and the Southern Colonial Question - the Negro Nation, which is a geographic area corresponding to the old plantation system. Before 1965, revolutionaries and people of good will fought every step of the way against color discrimination, but the lack of understanding of the political rather than biological nature of the race question made the color factor an insurmountable barrier. This happened because the American people became convinced that they were dealing with a biological rather than a political question. This point desires emphasis because the great economic and political changes taking place today are having a profound effect on the politics of race and color. The idea and ideology that blacks exist at a lower evolutionary stage than whites and unity of whites is needed to ensure the stability and cohesion of society is increasingly untenable. An honest narrative of the American working class movement cannot avoid stating that the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organization of the 30’s and 1940 ’s) evolved as the unskilled organization of the white workers, bitterly opposing on complex levels, the entry of blacks into the ranks of the union and the labor force. Only when the Northern unions catastrophic defeat hung in the balance have blacks been able to wring out of the unions a molecule of justice. No where was this clearer than in the long history to unionize Ford. In this fight it was a narrow layer of communist, groups of black communists and people of good will that provided the critical balance in unionizing Ford. Black Power was the necessary and inevitable out come of Civil Rights and the revolutionary collapse of Jim Crow and with critical hindsight served as the exact same kind of “form“ as the old nationality organizations of a previous generations of unskilled workers, minus the “European” language press. Today, in the period of Obama, this new narrative can reach the light of day. With the destruction of legal segregation the infrastructure framework for the unity of classes constituting the black community was shattered as various classes and strata amongst the dark - the black and brown, took their place alongside of their counterparts. Specifically, this took shape as the dispersal of different classes of blacks outside the central cities of America. The Voting Rights Act in turn was meant for the South rather than the North, and had the irony of allowing more whites entry to voting, who were excluded from the electoral process, due to the poll tax and ridiculous obstacles to registration. The control of the black and their isolation has always been directed at controlling the whites. This shattering of the black community had its political repercussions within the political superstructure as the black politician found themselves in need of leaping to a broader political basis than the segregated voting market. This in turn demanded reforming the national political infrastructure historically blocking the black from “going national.” The election of Obama completes a gigantic historical loop that has brought a sector of the proletariat fact to face with the bourgeoisie, and not in just a partial manner. Obama was elected by the voting section of the working class. The American proletariat, viewed as a class, does not vote in its majority. WL. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
