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African American History Month is once again upon us. There are incredible historical depiction of the history of the African American playing/paying on all major television channels and excellent historical events on the cable channels as well as PBS. The scope and debt of these television specials are something that could not happen during the days of my youth.
Why is this? What is different and distinct to this era of history that in fact make it an era distinct from the 1970s and even 1980s? Why is the African American National Factor not governed by the old political proposition that it is the task of the industrial proletariat to liberate the oppressed people?
The industrial proletariat has not liberated itself, much less the lesser economically developed peoples and those suffering from second class citizenship, anywhere on earth. Why is this? What is the nature of the peculiar bond between capital and the active working class engaging production?
One particular docudrama on PBS concerning slavery - "Slavery and the Making of America" highlighted the huge contributions of David T. Walker and Maria Stewart. "Walkers Appeal" remains the definitive abolitionists document in American history and establishes American blacks as the nucleus and inspiration of the abolitionists movement in America. Walker's Appeal crystallized a political polarity in American politics, that galvanized the abolitionist movement.
The assessment of Walker's Appeal does not conform to old historical concepts of American history . . . conceptions that has long ago penetrated and remain active in the Marxist movement to this very day.
HBO aired a program called the Slave Narrative, which gave voice to those born in slavery, with testimony recorded in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. It has taken well over half a century for this material to enter the public domain and late is better than "never." Why now?
The TRUE channel aired a program on the plight of the freemen/women in New York, the founding of the Freedom Journal March 30, 1827, and material running back to 1624. This particular program gives a crisp description of the environment of the foundation of the African American Church; the fascist like shift of the majority of white churches as the Civil War drew near and the historic basis of the split within the church in America. A split that remains to this very day. This presentation indirectly and directly sketches the development of Jim Crow origins in the North and makes it much easier to draw closure to a forty year battle over describing the real proletarian movement in the American Union.
"The real proletarian movement in the American Union," means the lowest and most poverty stricken segments of peoples within the bourgeois property relations.
Marxism in the American Union has never faired well on the Negro Question - African American National Factor, until this method - approach as a materialist conception of history, was seized by a segment of African American communists who bent American Marxism to illuminate the salient features of American history. This bending of Marxism is itself a historical product expressing changes in the mode of production and peculiar and distinctive features of American history.
The turning point in the modern Marxist presentation of the Negro Question or rather the African American National Factor is Nelson Perry's "Negro National Colonial Question" - 1972, and the second revised edition of the same, 1975. The 1975 edition carries an article titled "Negro History Week 1975 - Socialism: The Only Road," which thirty years later establishes Mr. Perry work as definitive. To understand the depth and breath of Perry's presentation one can simply compared all the literature within the American Marxist Movement on the Negro Question between the years 1970 and 1976.
Today, Perry's monumental 1972 book is somewhat obsolete in respect to the peculiar class fragmentation of American society in February 2005 and this transition era of post industrial society. What is not obsolete is his theoretical framework which has stood the test of time.
"The Negro National Colonial Question," second revised edition 1975, remains a permanent monument and testimony to the brilliance of Marxism and the National Question and the absolute maturing of the African American intellectual elite and their Marxist detachment on the basis of the historic rupture between the black bourgeoisie and the black workers.
The period of this rupture spans from the 1965 Watts Rebellion to the 1968 Voting Rights Act and its subsequent political reformation completed in the mid 1970s or 1976 when the black workers themselves were the focal point of the Vote Communist Campaign in Detroit. (From the standpoint of the South the political juncture coincide but began in the Birmingham Alabama rebellion of 1963 through the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Now Party to the 1968 Voting Rights Act).
The evolution of Marxism and the Negro Question is an integral part of the evolution of American history and world history as industrial bourgeois social relations. The genesis of what is called the Marxist presentation of the Negro Question resides in the October Revolution and the emergence of political Leninism. This Leninists presentation was very different from the American socialists and pre-Bolshevik communist conception of the African American National Factor.
The textual basis of the concept "Marxism and the National Question" is Joseph Stalin's book that came to be called "Marxism and the National Question." To understand the clarity and brilliance of this work one must compare it to all the Marxist literature on the national question in the period in which it was written.
It was left to the Communist International document of 1928 and their iron demand for conformity that altered the political orientation of American communists towards the Negro. The Comintern altered the political orientation of American communists and imbued them with an urgency concerning the plight of the African American people.
No matter what ones particular assessment of the Comintern (Third Communist International), the indisputable fact of our history is that the Leninist distinction between oppressor and oppressed people and not simply oppressed and exploited classes was the stated policy of the Comintern forced on the world communist movement and the American communists.
This was a good thing.
The African American people have never waited for any particular political grouping to come to their aid in order to fight and resist the onslaught of the oppressing peoples, imperial intrusion and violence inflicted upon them from within the working class and not simply the violence of the capitalist class as an abstraction.
African American history and resistance and self organization is much older than "Marxism and the National Question."
David T. Walkers "Walkers Appeal," written after and as a result of the economic crisis of 1790 is a good starting point, although it can be properly argued that the Negro Question, as an issue of a historically evolved people, did not exist as such before the Civil War.
The African American people - as a historically evolved people, did not exist as such before the Civil War. What existed was more than less a class of slaves and groups of free blacks still bearing sharp distinctions based on various ethnic groups and tribes disperse as part of the great African dispersal. The "peopleness" implied in the term African American people, had not yet emerged and the slave class resembled a caste. Walkers Appeal captures this moment in time.
Before the freeing of roughly 30,000 slaves in the North - 1790, one cannot properly speak of the African American people, who had not yet emerged as a historically evolved people. Marxism and the National Question and Stalin's subsequent works on this subject outlines two distinct junctures in the evolution of the National Question: the first period is the formation of peoples into nations and national movements and its economic basis is the transition from agriculture relations - landed property, to industrial bourgeois relations. The second curve is the formation of nations and people under the impact of financial-industrial imperialism and its contradictory motion to disperse the lesser economically developed people and drive them into the imperial centers at the bottom of the social ladder. The formation and crystallization of the African American people as a people occurs in the latter period.
For reasons that still defy common sense, it has to be stated that all black people are not African American and the peopleness of the African American people would later mature in the furnace of Jim Crow segregation in the post Civil War years. No one dare describe the African American as a tribe or separate nationality, especially because in the American Union the word nationality implies citizenship status and/or nation of origin. The Italian American or Irish American's nation of origin are Italy and Ireland.
Africa is not a nation but a continent of various nations, advanced national groups, minor and not so minor tribes and combinations of the aforementioned.
Yet the African American people are a historically evolved people according to every Anglo American writer in the history of America, except a segment of the Marxist movement. The African American people as a people are not Anglo European or Anglo American in the historical and continental sense and meaning of these terms. Thus to speak of the Negro Question as such, dating back to colonial and "pre-colonial" 1776, as does the black Trinidadian intellectual - CLR James, is a misunderstanding of basic American history, unless one is specific concerning their meaning.
Here is how Mr. Perry defined the African American people in 1972 in a published document on the Negro National Colonial Question:
"The word Negro is used in different contexts and means difference concepts depending on history and place. Shortly after the discovery of the Americas, the Portuguese and Spanish, probing down the coast of Africa, became involved in the already developed slave trade in Africa. At that time the word Negro meant only "black," the literal translation from the Spanish. Centuries later, as slavery became a major industry in the United States of North America, the word Negro began to have a different meaning. The slaves in the USNA were drawn from a variety of people in Africa. Injected into and among the African slaves were a number of Indian peoples and, of course, tens of thousands of slaves of partial African and partial Anglo European descent. The slavers lash soon did away with any distinction between the descendant of the Congo and the light-skinned illegitimate son of the driver man. Based on the specific conditions of slavery in the USNA, there arose the Negro people - a historically evolved people, socially and culturally developed from the framework of slavery.
By the end of the 19th century, the word Negro again begin to change its meaning. Owing to the specific of the rise of USNA imperialism and the history of the Black Belt of the South, there arose a nation, oppressed by USNA imperialism, whose social root and base was the aforementioned Negro people. The term Negro developed to include a national meaning. The confusion around the term arises because nations are not extensions of tribes and are not based on color, etc., but on history. Now when referring to the nation, we use the term Negro and mean national and not color. In the same manner, when one speaks of the French we do not differentiate between the members of the French nation who are Basque, Lombardi or Goth, or the basic root of the nation - the Frankish people. We can only ask the reader to be a dialectician and differentiate when we write Negro as a historically evolved people who were slaves, or on the other hand, when we say Negro meaning national, referring to all the people residing in the historically evolved community of territory called the Negro Nation. In the sense of national, Negroes are both the "black" majority and "white" minority."
(Negro National Colonial Question page 1, 1975 edition under the section definitions.) The above definition has stood the test of time. From time to time the question is asked if Marxists have defined the African American people as a nation. The answer is yes and in our history it was William Z. Foster, one time Chairman of the CPUSA who imported the concept of the Negro people as a "nation within a nation within Marxism." The communists of which I was a part did not define the African American people as a nation but rather a historically evolved people within a multinational state system.
Some of the confusion concerning Marxism and the National Question resides in the initial documents of the Comintern published in 1928 and 1930.
Here is how the Black Belt Nation was defined in Perry's book: "Negro Nation: The Negro Nation is that historically evolved stable community of Negro people, along with the historically developed Anglo American minority, who live in the Black Belt and the economically dependent area of the Southern USNA. This nation, which evolved from the specifics of slavery, is a historically evolved stable community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.
The nation is refereed to as the Negro Nation because the base of that nation is the Negro people who evolved as a people prior to the evolution of the Negro Nation." (IBID page 12)
This would seem fairly clear. The African American people are not a nation, have never been a nation and will never be a nation, from the standpoint of this particular Marxist approach to the African American National Factor.
To drive home the point Perry writes in his "African American Liberation and Social Revolution in the United States," - 1992,
"The near total isolation of the blacks through segregation laws and Southern custom was necessary for that exploitation to take place. The era of segregation, lasting some 95 years, isolated the mass of African Americans to a greater degree than did slavery. This isolation and oppression based on color was the condition for the final stages of their development as a people.
The formation of the African American people is unique. Their consolidation was not based on common land or religion. There is no internal dynamic to hold them together. The force that formed the African Americans into a people has always been the legal and extra-legal pressure of the whites."
In explaining the nation in the South, Perry further writes:
"THE BLACK BELT NATION
The African Americans as a people and the Black Belt of the South as a colonial nation are distinct but interconnected, historically evolved entities.
In order to clearly understand any historical question it is necessary to go to the beginning of the problem, examine the context that created it, and trace the stages of its development up to the present.
The American nation was basically Southern at its inception. Its core area was Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. The New England states were shipping and manufacturing appendages of the slave plantation system of the South.
By the late 1840s, the political leaders of the South viewed the population and industrial growth of the North with apprehension. They realized that the shift from manufacturing to industry was creating a new nation in the North. This new nation was being formed as waves of European immigration created an industrial proletariat in what a few years before had been the north western frontier. A new relationship was being formed as the industrial cities produced agricultural machinery and in turn were fed by the Anglo-American family farmers. The Northern churches were shifting from a position that slavery was God's will to a position that allowing slavery to exist was a sin. This position was expressed by Lincoln saying he believed that the Civil War was God punishing the South for having slavery and the North for allowing it.
The Southern leaders began the preparation for the irrepressible conflict. They knew the mass of whites who did not own slaves would not fight simply to preserve slavery. The leaders realized they must create a separate, Southern nation based on slavery, but with social and cultural institutions that benefited all whites. Then all whites could be compelled to defend them.
Nations are not built. They evolve as the historical _expression_ of a community of people, culture, economics and land. The evolving culture of the African American slaves had already made the South Southern. It was clearly culturally distinct from the North. The main problem was to create an economic infrastructure to tie the area together. They set about creating economic intercourse between the towns and the countryside. This demanded that more land be set aside for the production of food rather than export crops. It demanded that factories be built and railroads created to carry their production. It meant that the South had to become economically independent. Above all, it would demand more slave labor as well as free white labor for industrial development." http://www.lrna.org/texts/AAQ.html
Here is the proposition resisted by the Marxists, socialists, communists and progressives North of the Mason Dixon line or what is generally called "the Yankees" South of the Mason Dixon line:
(The South) "realized that the shift from manufacturing to industry was creating a new nation in the North. This new nation was being formed as waves of European immigration created an industrial proletariat in what a few years before had been the north western frontier. A new relationship was being formed as the industrial cities produced agricultural machinery and in turn were fed by the Anglo-American family farmers."
Here is the national colonial question as it has been called by generations of Marxists and particularly those identified with political Leninism.
The accidental form of the historical process - progression, like God . . . tends to move in mysterious ways and my Yankee brethren still become puzzled over the feelings of colonial entrapment by many deep Southerners - especially the whites, still smarting from a horrific defeat. Yet it cannot be denied that the firing on Fort Sumpter and South Carolina's session from the Union was a secessionist movement or in the language of the Leninists, a national movement.
It is of course distasteful that this national movement for independence was utterly reactionary based on its economic and social relations of slavery, but what else would one call a movement of eleven states to leave from the American Union? In fact they left the Union and by force of arms were compelled back into the Union and then things really got ugly for the former slaves.
The new nation that developed was in the North and its working class was formed from successive waves of European immigrants. In the era of Empire and globalization, this basic lesson of American history is being put forth for all to see. What is interesting is that this history viewpoint is being championed on the basis of the African American National Factor and a section of the African American intellectual elite.
Pardon, if I call this increasing vocalization of the demand for self determination for African Americans everywhere within the US multinational state - not "self determination of the Black Belt," balkanization.
Peery's writings would seems fairly clear, although a segment of the African American intelligencia has always defined American Blacks as a nation, going back to the writings of Martin Delaney. This is fine in as much as we are really speaking of Marxism and the National Question and the Marxist approach to the history of the Negro Question. In the same manner one would not argue how the various Indian peoples and Indian nations define themselves.
The tradition within the Marxist movement has always been to justify oneself on a given body of theoretical writings and in this sense one speaks of the African American National Factor as an aspect of the National and Colonial Question. A very important aspect, but an aspect of the National Factor. The African American National Factor apparently becomes more confusing when one considers the question of the social revolution of the proletariat.
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