Column: Black World
July 1999
Felix Martin, American revolutionary
by Lou Turner
On June 20, Peter Hudis, the Co-National Organizer of News and Letters
Committees, and I had the honor of speaking at the grave site of Felix
Martin, the labor editor of NEWS & LETTERS, at the family cemetery of his
childhood home in Hell For Certain, Ky. He passed away in April after
battling chronic heart illness, and after a life filled with working class
struggles in which he fought side-by-side with Black, white and Latino
workers at the South Gate, California General Motors plant that he worked
in for 20 years.
I had worked closely with Felix Martin in Southern California in the 1970s
and early '80s, often at his kitchen table, on an autoworkers' newsletter
we called the "Blue Sheet" and on his articles for this newspaper. Felix
Martin was an extraordinary working class fighter from the hills of
Kentucky who knew not only how to "speak truth to power," but how to speak
to the white working class about the truth of its powerlessness against
capital.
This is what he wrote in the October 1975 issue of NEWS & LETTERS in an
article titled "Anti-busing racism aims to divide workers on shop floor":
"I was visiting Louisville, Ky. during the beginning of the school term
when the busing demonstrations were taking place. I felt sad when I saw
what many members of the white working class were doing. The Ford Motor
Company assembly and truck plants were closed down because many workers
went to the demonstrations against busing for integrated schools.
"How have so many workers been poisoned so that their class militancy can
be used in such a way? One answer I found in a church I visited in
Jeffersonville, just outside of Louisville. The first thing I noticed was
that the church was filled to 'standing room only' with white working class
families. The sermon was about 'rights' that the government has supposedly
taken from the people-prayers in school, neighborhood schools. In listening
and watching the people, you could almost see the white sheets over their
heads. It was almost like being at a KKK meeting.
"A second answer is President Ford's Administration and local governments
which are creating this turmoil to turn white, Black, poor and working
people of all races into political enemies. Ford with his anti-busing
statements and the school board in Boston are the demagogues that keep
exploiting the situation....
"Why is the government spending all this effort to divide the working
class? It goes back to the point of production. As long as they can keep
white and Black apart, workers will not unite against what is happening in
production."
Felix Martin knew, profoundly, that the powerlessness of the white working
class stemmed from the Achilles' heel of American civilization-its racism.
He also knew that it was what capitalism uses in its class warfare at the
point of production. And in the mid and late 1970s, this profoundly class
AND RACE conscious white worker saw that the racist politics surrounding
the anti-busing campaign were unseparated from the historic restructuring
of capitalist productive forces and the deep 1974-75 economic crisis then
underway.
He was exceptionally conscious of another division within the working class
that kept it powerless. In a November 1995 taped discussion with Felix
Martin for the work-in-progress I've been engaged in, called "The
Marxist-Humanist Statement on the Black Dimension," he recalled the 1974
UAW convention which belatedly recognized the fight led by Genora Johnson
and the Women's Emergency Brigade in helping bring about the UAW in the
1930s sit-down strikes:
"Back then they always brought up the "Battle of the Overpass" and sit-down
strike. The only reason the workers inside the plant could "sit down"-and
they had to be fed-was because of the women who fed them and fought the
police outside the plant at the same time. It was easy to "sit," but
gettin' up there and gettin' the hell beat out of you, that's where the
battle was goin' on.
But they're always trying to show that the battle was goin' on the other
way with the men, while trying to cut the women out. And I always saw that
there must be a reason they don't want the man and the woman together in
this battle."
Walking the Kentucky hills and hollows in which this great working class
militant and thinker grew up, and talking to the people who knew and
struggled with him to eke out a hard life in Appalachia, put me in touch
with the organic radicalism of the American working class character, which
seems on the verge of being eclipsed by the ever deepening crisis of
capitalist America today.
But, I thought, how profound a moment in the development of that organic
radicalism of the American working class it must be to find its mind and
aspirations expressed in a philosophy of revolution like Marxist-Humanism,
and in turn contribute to the development of that philosophy. Like Charles
Denby, the editor of NEWS & LETTERS until his death in 1983, who also came
out of the rural South, the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism was instrumental
in developing Felix Martin's class consciousness to the point where "action
supersedes the subjectivity of purpose," that is, where the "unity of
theory and practice becomes the form of life out of which emerge totally
new dimensions."*
The life of a militant Black worker like Charles Denby and that of a
militant white worker like Felix Martin disclose such "totally new
dimensions" of the American working class that we even get a glimpse of the
future. In our 1995 conversation, Felix Martin told me that one of the
first things he started doing once he got over his 90 days probation in the
plant was to write up grievances on foremen for working in violation of the
contract. "When you write up foremen for working," he told me, "it was the
way we got people hired in the plant. A foreman's job was a foreman's job,
and you didn't do somebody's job classification. If there's too much work,
they got to give work to someone else out on the street. That was a
continuous battle."
In 1970, GM was hit by a national strike which saw workers and students
unite at Felix Martin's South Gate plant. Here too his revolutionary
humanism, extending beyond the shopfloor, comes out when describing what he
told students at a campus meeting with autoworkers:
"After I talked about automation, I told them how this system worked where
teaching and education are so against workers who have to make a living.
They teach the scientist to make machines to replace human beings, not to
make it better for humanity, but to destroy humanity."
Perhaps the most fitting epitaph to this original American working class
philosopher was what he said in a dialogue with Charles Denby in the March
1983 issue of NEWS & LETTERS on the occasion of the Marx centenary:
"When I first "met Marx" I saw that he recognized workers as being in their
moving and doing. That was the greatest thing to me, because in this
society no one ever sees workers as anything. Here was Marx talking about
the workers having their own movement, their own self-development, and it
was done so that you could see your own thinking and doing. It was not Marx
telling me what to do, but recognizing what I was doing."
Felix Martin leaves this legacy to the worldwide working class struggle. He
understood what it would take for the American working class to lose its
chains; and he never stopped striving for a world based on new human
relations.
*This is quoted from Raya Dunayevskaya's 1974 presentation to the Hegel
Society of America, "Hegel's Absolute as New Beginning," in ART AND LOGIC
IN HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY," ed. Warren Steinkraus and Kenneth Schmitz, 1980. [back]
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