II.
The first American Revolution of 1776 inaugurated the epoch of wars for national liberation as a form of history. Following on its heels was the Haitian Revolution and Bolivar. The wars of national liberation predate the doctrine of proletarian revolution and as a form of history transformation would run another two hundred years closing out - as a history changing current, with the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution and unification in 1976. Slavery in America distorted everything the war of national liberation claimed as its goal. The historic polarity between national liberation movements and imperialism was the basis for groups - nations, oppressed peoples, the oppressed gender, becoming aware of themselves, their conditions and fighting it out. This historic polarity as a form of history, was a driver of the transition from society anchored in the agrarian revolution to a new kind of society anchored in the industrial revolution. The color factor was an insurmountable obstacle to the unity of the fighting section of our working class. This is no longer the case. In the formation of capital the form of history was driven by New World conquest and enslaving the African. New World colonization and African slavery gave impetus to navigation, science and industry. An enormous world wide ideological superstructure arose to justify and protect colonization of the world’s colored peoples. In America this ideology of destruction and enslavement arose on the basis of genocide of the American Indian and later the plantation system of slavery. Not all at one time but white supremacy arose and acquired a seemingly life of it‘s own. African Americans tended to be looked upon and treated at best as if they were on the periphery of our country’s history. Their being marginalized throughout most of our history reinforces this view. Nevertheless, any serious inquiry into our history will show that the control, manipulation and exploitation of the African American was at the heart of every major and most minor decisions of the state prior to the Civil War, and a good many of them after. The control of the African American has been the political means by which the entire working class has been controlled and prevented from reforming the system, more in their favor. Each reform of the system strengthened the hand of capital. Fortunately, history - as evolution and development of the productive forces of a society, steps into the social process in such a way as to unravel and shatter previously existing forms of the social contract and a given historic form of control of the working class. It is always appropriative to mention the catalyst for change in society. In the past century the invention and deployment of the tractor and mechanization of agriculture, had far reaching social consequences for America. Not all at one time but inexorably. Mechanization freed eleven million sharecroppers from the land and cast them as a mobile labor forces seeking employment wherever it could be found. Society change has a logic. When something fundamental to an existing economic relations and specific way labor is organized changes, everything dependent upon that, which was fundamental must in turn change. Not all at one time but a change wave is unleashed that must run its course. In the process of the change wave revolutionaries fight for change to benefit the proletarian masses the most. The tractor changed the organization of agricultural production and brought down the sharecropper system as one of the primary mode of the social organization of labor in the South. Millions of people were “kicked out of” a social position called sharecropping. Of these eleven million sharecroppers - a distinct class formation in America, the majority were white, with five million being black. The lesson for revolutionaries is the dynamics of the destruction of a class and/or form of class. The form of a class changes under the impact of the technological advance. Qualitative changes in the productive forces creates qualitative changes in the form of class and property. The industrial revolution is a case in point. The serfs became manufacturing workers and with the advance of the industrial revolution industrial workers on the scale of history. Bourgeois property cast this industrial workers as a wage worker or proletariat. Technology creates the content versus the “property form” of class called industrial, as surely as the advance of technology created a class of software workers. The content of a class can undergo change, in front of and without changing the property form that cast a particular form of worker proletariat. Freeing five million black people from the land, in the context of an economic upswing, called into question segregation. Were two factories to be built one black and one white? Were two water foundations and two bathrooms to be built in every factory to enforce segregation as a system? What of two parking lots, separate lunch rooms and two seniority list for job advancement to be implemented in the unionized North? Were blacks to be shut out of production during the post WW II economic boom? Like Jacob at the battle of Jericho, the wall of segregation came tumbling down, but it required decades of intense social conflict pitting workers against worker. Exactly who fought whom? Worker against worker within every layer of the working class. Now add the color factor. This is the how of the competition for jobs. The why is wage labor resting exclusively on the basis of the competition of the workers for wages. Someone has to hire you rather than the other guy or girl. Capitalist competition keep us at each others throat. Now place the civil rights movement in the context of completion of the political mandates of the Second American Revolution. Now, lets try to place the Second American Revolution on a continuum of revolution that is the First American Revolution inaugurating the national liberation movement. One can draw any conclusion they please but let us at least establish a line of continuity. Somewhere in this narrative we are going to get to Black History only to discover we speak of American history and the melting pot. This is going to get ugly. Feeling are going to be hurt. The rise and fall of the so-called "black leader," as he intertwine with and expresses the rise and fall of the industrial working class is the 2010 narrative. _______________________________________________ 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
