>> Actually, Max Schactman WAS one of those out of touch New York intellectuals? I was referring to! The fact that the SWP had him in charge of their "Negro Question" work proves my point! The SWP was the source of Trotsky's half baked and incorrect information on the "Negro Question" in America - and they were a lily White organization with almost no contact with Black Americans (despite the fact that they were headquartered in a city - New York - with a huge African American population) - and damned little contact with New York workers in general - even White New York workers.<< Comment Lots of fire and passion in this post. Today, American society is going through a profound economic and demographic shift where it is possible to reconstitute the communist movement on a new basis. This means sublating much of what has passed as a Marxist assessment of the American working class and the historical communist moment. The older I become the more forgiving of human frailty. However, nothing shall be forgotten. We have faced insurmountable historical problems. That our working class was formed from waves of European immigrants meant that a form of Marxism was transferred to American couched in the native national struggles and concepts of the immigrants. Until well into the 1920's our industrial proletariat was formed primarily from the importation of German, Irish, Italian and Slavic workers. It is only natural that the struggle of these workers should be couched in the framework of the struggle within their native lands, with communist ideology and outlook put forth in their language presses transplanted to America. Communist papers in native languages of Europe, in an English and Spanish speaking country. What a contradiction. There is no "Negro Question" in German or Poland, so it is somewhat natural that these immigrants - many of them revolutionaries and Marxists, would disregard this burning question shaping all of American history. It is a fact that the Comintern had to basically write out the Leninist approach to the National Factor - as it applied to Blacks, for American communists and then forced this position on them. This singular act created an unbreakable bond of loyalty for three generations of black communist/Marxist to the Comintern, Lenin, and Stalin and virtually treating the Leninist approach to the National Factor as the Holy Grail. It is a testimony to the American "can do spirit," that thousands of American communists - in the old CPUSA, rose to the challenge. All of American history operated against the slave and their descendants. The mechanization of agriculture - qualitative changes in the material power of productive forces, was the best thing to happen in America since the Emancipation Proclamation. This meant liquidation of the sharecropper as a class and the pushing of millions of black into the industrial cities of the North. After Montgomery Alabama December 4, 1955, the wall of segregation was cracked and in the course of the next 25 years America achieved legal desegregation and the overthrow of Jim Crow. The entry of blacks into the industrial proletariat; the growth of the black middle class and the expansion of black into the intelligentsia, meant a reordering of intellectual thought across the board. A League of Revolutionary Black Workers, with black Marxists of varying degrees of maturity (more immature than mature) is a contradiction in terms. This should have never happened, yet it had to happen as material manifestation of the world communist movement splitting wide over on the basis of the national factor world wide. An old configuration of history was overthrown. After the rise and fall of the LRBW, no revolutionary Marxist group could be formed in America without blacks, browns. Native Americans and women at its core. The hard cold fact is that every progressive movement and revolutionary organization has face its death on the rock of the "Negro Question." The demographic shift means history will be written different and we will not fail to discharge our historical responsibility. . Just as I thought, I would never live long enough to see the election of a black president it is now very clear that the rewriting of American history must take place in all earnest stating now. There are those who attach no singifcance whatsoever to America electing a black man as President. For such people there is no National Factor, only events that blacks bought upon themselves. This is all right because the demographic shift cannot be halted. Reading the latest round of championing for the discredited science of eugenics and Marxists tacitly supporting the historical eugenics movement indicates the utter bankruptcy of an old generation of Marxist. The historic eugenics movement has been well documents as a movement advocating the extermination of the surplus population created by capital with a particularly nasty focus on blacks and browns in America,. This stark reality makes no different to a tiny racist core of Marxists who insists that what is at stake is their individual right to abort their children and use modern methods of genetic manipulation. Comrade, we will right/write - in unity with the majority of Marxist of all colors in America, a new history to read that bourgeois degenerates founded the Eugenics Movement and all of its supporters fall on the wrong side of history. We will show to every generation how a tiny section of American Marxist writes in support of the phony science of Eugenics. In terms of your previous article on Trotsky’s Letter, he is consistent with much of the American communist of that era. He forget nothing and merely stated his view on American society. Thank God this literature is preserved for every generation to read as verification of history. Let us march on Til victory is won. Proletarian Unite. WL (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm)
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