Marxism and the National Factor - June 2005 Juneteenth is June 19. Part 3
THE SOUTH In the South was a horribly reactionary secessionists (national) movement. Here is the National Question for all to see. The South seceding from the American Union; the desire and economic need of the North to bring the South back into the Union is why the Civil War took place. The South rightfully took the horrific beating as the Civil War and no political logic can justify support of this national movement under conditions of slavery and imperial reactions of the Slave Oligarchy. Today, it is increasingly difficult to deny the obvious fact of American history. Every time the communist workers raise the resolution of the "National Question" and African American Liberation - which are not the same, but closely intertwined, a choir on the left screams "the national question is a question of racial antagonism." Racial antagonism indeed! Racial antagonism There does not exists a "racial antagonism" recorded in American literature between Southern Whites and Northern Whites. "The Southern Question" or the "Southern National Colonial Question" or the issue of "Southern Labor" or "The Negro National Colonial Question" or the issue of "Self Determination for the Black Belt" or "The Black Belt Nation" is and has always been the paramount national question in our POST 1776 history and cannot be translated into the concept "Black National Question." In every section of the communist movement throughout the world, this circumstance that is American history as the formation of our state system or the American Union would without hesitation be called a "National Question-Factor of some sort" and be understood as existing within the parameters of the Leninist presentation called "Marxism and the National Question." The National Question is not a racial question. Instead the left and most of the communist movement have screamed "racism" and "the national question in America is a matter of color" or "the national question is an issue of race and racial antagonism" and has nothing to do with the North - South axis and the development of the industrial North as the new nation. What this has meant for the communist ideological movement in our history is a misunderstanding of the actual social forces at play. Who are the white peoples in America? First of all they are not really white and the black descendants of slaves in America are not really "black" but African American. The European immigrants evolved into the Anglo American people and are not Anglo-European or Anglo-Saxon, but rather American or Anglo-American. There are several groups of Anglo American people in the Western hemisphere with one large group indigenousness to the South as an economic, social and political unit; another in the North and yet another in Canada with a Canadian nationality. Nationality does not mean or is exchangeable with the concept color or race. This is so obvious as to border on the absurd. Yet, this is the truth that could not be won within theoretical Marxism. One can simply ask the Northern Anglo American people if in their brief history they are Southern and one will be met with a wall of laughter and contempt. Ask the Southern Anglo American of the historic plantation area - not to mention peculiar areas like Appalachia, if they are Yankees! "No . . . We are not like them," has been their heartfelt answer for one hundred years and more. The national question in American history is complex because America was founded as a modern bourgeois country inaugurating a 200 year wave of modern colonial revolts. This is only one side of the social picture, but extremely important in unraveling our history as the National Question. This national question in American history - post 1776, has always run on the South and North axis. The fact of the formation of our industrial classes in the North and Marxism taking root in the North, on the basis of successive waves of European immigrant mitigated against a clear understanding of American history. To this very day the North - South cultural and economic divide exists while the so-called black and white cultural and economic divide has diminished qualitatively once we compare the Northern Blacks with the Southern Blacks and the Northern Whites with the Southern whites from every and any standpoint one chooses. Segregation was the reason it appeared to those unfamiliar with the general theory approach of Marxism and the National Question and our intimate history, that the Southern Blacks and the Northern Blacks constituted a racial nation, with the Anglo American people North and South constituting a dominate nation. Once the barrier of segregation was burst the obvious facts of our history leaped to the front of everyone's vision. The Southern Question: This needs to be stated another way so there is no misunderstanding. America was a Southern country in it political, economic and social centers of gravity - up to the Civil War. In the beginning the American nation was basically Southern with its core areas being Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. The North grew as an appendage to the South servicing the slave system. The New England states were shipping and manufacturing appendages of the slave plantation system of the South. The economic center of gravity of the South as a region was not the South in general but the economic gravity of the plantation system, which is refereed to as the Black Belt and the slave trade. The Black Belt does not refer to the color of the slaves skin but the color of the soil and its fertile nature. The "Black Belt South" is an economic description of an area and its soil and not a comment on skin color. The "Black Belt Nation" does not mean that black people constitute a nation and this has been stated several hundred thousand times over the course of the pass 30 years. If the Blacks do not and did not constitute a nation and have never constituted a nation, then the political logic that says the migration of blacks from the South destroyed the Black Belt Nation is a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory premise of Marxism and the National Question. The economic logic of the evolving Black Belt Nation was its value producing system; the bourgeois planters as Slave Oligarchy and a working class as slaves, along with a large class of dirt farmers. Black Belt does not refer to the slaves skin color but the soil and its fertile nature. The Black Belt, an entire section of the country - larger than Czechoslovakia, more populous than Canada - became the first colony of Wall Street financial and industrial imperialism. Black Belt does not refer to the slaves skin color but the soil and its fertile nature. The forms of political control of the Black Belt colony were not invented in the heads of leaders, but flowed from the historic forms of the control of the slave class as the ideology of white supremacy and a fascists branch of Christian ideology that claimed the blacks were made slaves to make Christians of them. Black Belt does not refer to the slaves skin color but the soil and its fertile nature. White supremacy as our history made things appear as racial antagonism and as if there was a South African like settler regime dominating a nation of black skin people. The isolation of a very large compact mass of black people meant the isolation of the entire area. The "entire area" had and still has as its core, the old economic centers of gravity of the old plantation system, which was to be used as the economic basis of a distinct and politically separate Southern Nation. Black Belt does not refer to the slaves skin color but the soil and its fertile nature. Perhaps, if this is stated 20 million times over the next decade or two, the theorists of race will have to evolve another ideological rationale to oppose the brilliance of Marxism and the National Question. 1. The Plantation South succeeded from the Union and went to war to preserve themselves as a separate political unity, distinct from the North. 2. Since the Black Belt South was the main area of concentration of African Americans, and the first colony of Wall Street Imperialism - (not to be confused with the west ward imperial expansion of the Slave Oligarchy), this economic, political and sociological fact had a horribly destructive impact on our history. The white supremacy of the Slave Oligarchy - the ideological rationale for the enslavement of the African and their descendants, was sublated by a form of national chauvinism with white chauvinism as it destructive brutal edge. What had been the enslavement of a people and class of slaves became the enslavement of an evolving nation with the defeat of its military capacity and infrastructure capability. All classes with the exception of the shattered slave oligarchy and later a comprador bourgeoisie were oppressed and exploited by Wall Street imperial relations. 3. By 1875, the Southern elite understood that chattel slavery was gone forever and that their future lay in unity with the Northern financial oligarchy, who had given the vote franchise to the black to unseat the Southern reactionaries in State governments and with Federal seats. The Southern reactionaries claimed their rights to their seats in Congress and locally after their defeat on the battlefield. This claim was based on the Constitutional provisions declaring slaves 3/5 of a person for reasons of political representation. Actually the Slave Oligarchy should have been tried as war criminals. 4. After the base of the Southern Oligarchy political power was broken by granting the former slaves the vote, this shattered class became non slave holding land lord planters and slowly crept into the arms of Wall Street financial-industrial imperialism and demanded the right to subdue the South and bring it under their political hegemony. This unity was created between 1875 and 1890 in what everyone calls the rise of modern imperialism and the defeat of Reconstruction. 5. The main concentration of African Americans - blacks, was the plantation South or the area of the black rich soil where cotton and tobacco grew. The new unity between the shattered slave oligarchy and Wall Street Imperialism had a consequence for the African American people. They were no longer needed to subdue what had been a rebellious Southern ruling class with delusion of grander and separate national development. The South was brought back into the Union by the victorious North. The black masses were abandoned by the North and turned over to the tender mercies of their former masters and a wave of violence and terror was unleashed that overthrew the newly formed bourgeois democratic governments in the South. 6. The reactionary movements that overthrew the bourgeois democratic government of the South was the world's first fascist movement. The baton and quest for self determination was passed to the African American people became they were the bulk of the social force to resist and fight the imperial-fascists alignment that clapped down the Black Belt area. The Southern secessionists demanded "state rights" as their form of national self determination within the multinational USNA State. "Self determination for the Black Belt" or "Self Determination for Negroes in the Black Belt" became the proletarian - communist, answer to the fascist offensive. Since the overthrow of the legal bourgeois democratic Reconstruction governments (1880s/1890s), the form of state rule in the plantation South was fascism with a brutal form of white chauvinism as its ideological cutting edge. "Self determination for the Black Belt" or "Self Determination for Negroes in the Black Belt" as a political slogan advanced by a section of the communist movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s, could not but be an expression of the democratic aspirations of not just the African American people, but the democratically minded Anglo Americans also caught in the vice grip of Wall Street backed political fascism. Thus, the Comintern document of October 1928 is fundamentally correct in its politics, despite it misunderstanding of inner details of American history and the detailed logic of the formation of the African American as a people; a process that would complete its evolution for another 40 years. At any rate the Comintern documents on "the Negro Question in America" were infinitely higher than anything that had been produced by the American Communists during that period of history. With the defeat of Reconstruction and the triumph of the counterrevolution, there arose the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader as a spokesperson and champion of the rights of all blacks. Segregation - Jim Crow, within the USNA State made it appear that the Black leaders North and South embodied the same class factors, but an investigation of the facts will show this is not the case at all. White supremacy slowly began ideological formation with the conquest of the Western hemisphere, the expansion of the slave trade and picked up steam with the slaughter of the Indian and later the westward movement of democracy in the hands of the Slave Oligarchy. The white supremacy of the pre-Civil War era and the white chauvinism of the post Reconstruction ear appeared to be the same but expressed different class and national factors. The enslavement of a people as a class of slaves gave way to Wall Street financial and political domination of an evolving nation on the basis of the slaughter of the former slave and his descendants. During the Reconstruction era there were many Reconstruction leaders who were black, advancing the program of radical republicanism with its call for land distribution, public education and Populist programs against high finance and large landowners. These were not black demands although blacks were an intimate part of the social movement and equality before the law was the cutting edge of the social movement. After the defeat of Reconstruction, the overthrow of the democratic governments of the South and the fascists clampdown on the Black Belt Nation, there arose the Negro Peoples Movement as a terrorized people locked in the intractable battle against reaction. It is called the Negro Peoples Movement or the "Negro Bourgeois Democratic National Movement" in the political language of Leninism. The defeat of Reconstruction and emergence of the Negro Peoples Liberation Movement (the Negro Peoples Movement or the "Negro Bourgeois Democratic National Movement," all these concepts have the same meaning) as the battle against the system of Jim Crow, witness the birth of "the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader." This "Negro Movement" objectively expressed a political tendency against imperial exploitation and oppression and against the concrete form of class rule in the USNA State. On the ideological plane the white supremacy of the Slave Oligarchy as the historic south dominating the economic, social and political life of America, represents a distinct juncture in our history. A different political juncture is the post Civil War South exercising political control of the country as front men for Wall Street imperialism. This relationship was the political results of the defeat of Reconstruction. Hence, the white supremacy of the past - the Slave Oligarchy, was transmuted and sublated by white chauvinism of the Wall Street rulers. Here are the basic Marxists concepts that have governed our presentation of African American Liberation and Social Revolution in the United States. Such is the difference between African American Liberation as the National Factor and the scope of the National Question in American history. Today we are in a new era of history and the content or essence of the striving of the African American poverty stricken proletarian masses cannot be assessed based on old formula and theories of race. Melvin P. _______________________________________________ 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
