A copy written story for the AP spoke of a 40th anniversary march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge - yesterday, in memory of the Selma Alabama Voting Rights March. The crowd was estimated at 10,000.
Among the marchers was Harry Belafonte, (who demonstrated there 40 years ago, the Rev. (Big) Jesse Jackson, Sr., Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and daughter of President Lyndon Johnson, MS. Lynda Johnson Robb. Her dad signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law. Forty years ago the police beat folks down and arrested many for demanding the right to vote in America. Two weeks later, after the initial march, Dr. King led a 50 mile march from Selma to Montegory under the protection of a federal court order. Montgoery is the state Capitol and this march is stated to have been the impetus behind the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act overturned legal obstacles to African Americans voting like literacy tests, set in place by the Southern fascists and their Northern backers, after the defeat of Reconstruction. What actually kept blacks from voting was the blade, boot and the bullet - the 3 "B" of fascists terror and violence. Next week there is to be a re enactment of the five day march and celebration, which President Clinton took part in back in 2000. Today about 74 percent of voting-age African AMericans in the state are registered as active voters against 77 percent of white voters against 19.3 percent of eligible African Americans and 70 percent whites in 1965. Voting Rights and the entire Civil Rights Movement was the last major reform movement in the American Union. Reform movement do not merely add rights or subtract rights from the social contract between classes. Rather a reform movement realign the political relations between classes without changing the property relations. The economic impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement - (not the unyielding fight of the blacks which has raged since 1865 in the South and 1790 in the North), was the mechanization of agriculture and the release of 11 million people from agricultural relations, driving a massive movement of peoples into the Southern cities and the North. Of these 11 million souls roughly five million were black. The social relations were changed - reformed, between classes and peoples and the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader leaped forward, entering its last stage of development. The old landlord planter class went the way of all flesh along with the sharecroppers as a class. The sharecropper went to heaven (most of them) and the landlord went to hell (basically all of them). Surely, there could be no economic justification for segregated bathrooms and segregated factories, production and consumption patterns. Nor was there any economic or political impulse to transfer the segregated/fascists social relations of historic Southern agriculture to throughout the industrial infrastructure. It was in the direct interest of Wall Street imperialism to utilize this Southern labor force during and after the post Second Imperial World War era. During this era the communists did not try and alter this historical current but to the best of their ability, carried out the revolutionary struggle for reform and at many occasions attempted to imbue the masses with a political understanding of classes and class interest. The result of the African American Peoples Movement at this juncture (1950s - 1960s), of our history was an awakening of first the black student movement and then a general student movement and the spread of revolutionary Marxists idea. Some provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, (use of federal examiners and Justice Department approval of election law changes) will expired in 2007 and in as much as their are no plantations to go back to, it will probably be very hot for many in the cities and jails of America. Yet, no force on earth can stop the social revolution and the need for a Third Edition of the American Revolution. From National Independence - 1776 to ending slavery and the growth of the industrial system - 1865, to post industrial society and a political and economic system with laws to protect and care for the working people at the expense of private property interest. It is not simply a question of people coming first but rather an ending to the system of wage slavery and private profit. Qualitative changes in the way we produce - computers and advanced robotics, means that society has to be reorganized around the new means of production in a way not that very different from the Ford system of production in the 1920. The issue is on whose behave is society to be reorganized - the capitalists or working masses? 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
