>We have a larger middle class, many more millionaires and a few billionaires, however, the overall condition of our people is worse. We have more entrepreneurs, more college graduates, more persons holding political office, more Black mayors, city councilors, aldermen, state representatives, city managers, more corporate executives, yet the masses have not been empowered or improved. The masses of our people are on a Death March into the oven of social deterioration, broken homes, broken marriages, broken minds, broken spirit, evolving from a string of broken promises by government and leadership that has failed to help our people turn around the misery and wretchedness of our condition. < http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_1970.shtml Comment The gathering of an assortment of African American leaders calling for the formation of a Millions More Movement, May 2, 2005, was broadcast on C-SPAN - 2. I watched this broadcast and listened very close to all the presentations. Minister Louis Farrakkan - loyal student of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad (THEM) to Whom all Praises are due, stands head and shoulders above all the so-called leaders in American society today. He has carved out an exalted individual position in American history - whether one likes it or not, and remains a man of profound spiritual dimensions and political strivings. I cried during his presentation and clear articulation of the lot of the American slaves and their descendants and the plight of the African American masses as proletarian. His brief story of his own evolution as a child and leader in the Nation of Islam and amongst the African American peoples and to a lesser degree, a segment of the world masses, condensed 500 years of history into a form the layperson could understand. The Honorable Minister Louis proved his capacity to bring today the better part of 2 million of the most oppressed citizens and proletarians in American society, in protest in our nations Capital/Capitol. Without question this mass of almost 2 million are in urgent need of spiritual renewal, political enlightenment, knowledge of self and class consciousness. Not necessarily in that order. The call of the Millions More Movement sounded the battle cry of unity of all oppressed and exploited in American society without regard to nationality, color, gender or religious doctrine . . . and it was Minister Louis that was the foremost speaker that issued and stated the call in unmistakable terms. A theme of this televised broadcast was the political division between "Black Leaders" and "Leading Blacks." For instance, the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. is a "Black Leader" while Colin Powell is a "Leading Black." Within the communist current and "Marxist Intellectual Movement" in America we have always understood this historical division to be a peculiar feature of American history - its distinctive and inescapable sociological feature, defining proletarian social revolution in the imperial heart of the bourgeois world order. The evolution of a modern understanding of African American Liberation and Social Revolution has not come easy. Marxism and the African American National Factor has never faired well in America, except in the eyes of the various progressive currents amongst the oppressing people. The National Factor is not an issue of self-determination of peoples or nations, but a question of the direct overthrow of the dominating framework of capital, (profit making and profit lusting) foreign and domestic. At any rate, self determination for the African American peoples, everywhere they exists in the continental United States means their immediate isolation - Balkanization, and fascist containment. (Self determination indeed! Tell this to the masses in Detroit fighting for water rights and against the ravages of capital, who long ago won so-called self determination on the basis of their physical mass.) This is not stated to diminish the outstanding contributions of generations of communist militants and progressive, but a simple acknowledgment of the twists and turn of our history and peculiar formation of our working class from European immigrants lacking a concrete understanding of American history. The communist workers and Marxists of my generation - the Post 1965 Watts Rebellion and 1967 Detroit Rebellion, and generations proletarians, some tracing their class history and configuration in the North back to 1790 when the market crashed and set the stage for the freeing of 30,000 black slaves, evolved a different sense of the social process. Our vision and political path forward has been repeatedly confirmed in real life and the furnace of unrelenting struggle against the chauvinists of all stripes and state reaction buttressed in history by the oppressing peoples. What the proletarian social movement has faced is the peculiar phenomenon of the Black Leader. What in the past was called "the Negro Question" and then the "Negro National Colonial Question" and finally African American Liberation and Social Revolution, had to be properly articulated and clarified by the African American communists in the industrial sector of the North, because their historical social position gave them a view - vision, of the sweep of an entire process. This vision took root in Detroit because of its role as the industrial center of America and its decay. "The Peculiar Phenomenon of the Black Leader" is not a spontaneous outgrowth of slavery; the rape and plunder of Africa and the construction of the world industrial artifact - the modern bourgeois world order. Nor is the peculiar phenomena related to the primitive accumulation of capital on a world scale, except in the most abstract sense of New World Slavery providing the infrastructure relations of production on which arose the industrial system and in turn the modern banking system. "The Peculiar Phenomenon of the Black Leader" is bound up with and has its genesis in the defeat of Reconstruction and with it the striving for Jefferson democracy or what the liberal intelligencia correctly calls the democratization of the Old South. On this matter we have never accepted compromise on the level or Marxist theory or as practical communist politics. One is of course referring to the creation of the world's first fascist movement and fascist government during the rising curve of industrial development. The Honorable Minister Louis is a historical figure in the flesh; a manifestation of 90 years of Jim Crow and its dismantling as the black masses passed through all the phases of industrial development. That is why he has issued the call to organize all the oppressed and exploited in American society without regard to color, gender or religion, on the basis of the most exploited and oppressed segments of the African American people. I have never found anything offensive about His/Them peculiar theological interpretation of Islam, with it clarion call for restoration of the "Original Black Man" and condemnation of our enslavers, rapers, murderers and eternal tormentors. Then, again I am not anticlerical. At any rate it must be an act of "the Most High" that has allowed Marxism to be liberated from the hands of the oppressing peoples, stripped of its early heritage and shaped into a modern weapon of the proletarian assault on behalf of the worlds suffering billions. At any rate Minister Louis led the formation of what appears to be a new form of protest in America called "the Million." Anyhting and everything progressive to happen in our country is going to evolve on the basis of equality as it is visualized and made real by the most exploited and oppressed segment of the proletariat, which for reasons of our history is African American and female. Here is the mass movement of the most poverty stricken. Melvin P.
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