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NEWS & LETTERS, OCTOBER 2003Special FeatureDialectics of Black Freedom Struggles: Race, Philosophy and the Needed American RevolutionPreface | Table of Contents | Excerpts | How to order Excerpts From CHAPTER 1, Permanent War or "Revolution in Permanence"? It is not just the rulers who try to render invisible the revolutionary Black dimension, through the politics either of silence or of cooptation. Even many who oppose the U.S. drive for single world domination through incessant military intervention overseas fail to recognize the vanguard role of African Americans. It isn't alone a matter of the difficulties the anti-war movement has faced in bringing large numbers of African Americans out to its rallies and demonstrations. It's a question of making a CATEGORY out of what has emerged from crucial turning points in U.S. history and building on that category as a way to take on the realities facing us in today's retrogressive political climate. The anti-war movement will not be able to adequately oppose the U.S. drive for permanent war unless it connects with the voices, struggles and reason of the Black dimension... For centuries African Americans have organized and revolted against the legacy of the contradictions of American "democracy" and its perversion of the notion of freedom. In doing so, what has been revealed is not only a deep divide of Black masses from the police and the state, but also from the Black political representatives who try to speak for them. The challenge is to meet this movement by articulating how its independence is a manifestation of the irrepressible idea of freedom--a manifestation of the concept of absolute negativity that can become a universal pole of attraction.... Cincinnati's Black revolt of 2001 was as deep an expression of the opposition to global capital and its restructuring and structural adjustments as that which emerged in the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999. We cannot just repeat the old anti-imperialist slogans, as many post-Marx Marxists do, as if there isn't anything new to rethink in light of the present reality of globalization. Neither is the answer some new form of the old narrow nationalist tendencies in the Black movement which retreat from challenging capitalism... From CHAPTER 2 • The Struggle for Civil Rights and the Limits of Political Emancipation Three centuries of history have shown African Americans that racism and exploitation can't be eliminated politically. The practice of politics has often been a barrier to Black freedom even as it offered a limited kind of freedom. Marx said that to conceive of transcendence in purely political terms may end in the reestablishment of society as an abstraction against the individual and that this would only reestablish alienation in another form... Though it seemed at first to hold much promise, Stokely Carmichael's "Black Power" ultimately failed to pose a challenge to the American capitalist system. Carmichael defined it originally, with the help of Charles V. Hamilton, this way: before a group can enter a pluralistic society, it must close ranks in order to gain bargaining strength--the same way other white ethnic groups did to exert political power by bloc voting. In effect, this approach channeled the Black Power movement into reformist politics, arguing that Black people had to strengthen themselves economically and politically by separating themselves from whites but by remaining within the capitalist system. In essence this was a retreat. It proposed not to change the white-controlled capitalist world outside but make the Black world inside "stronger" economically and politically by promoting the Booker T. Washington's ideal of self-help and self-advancement through Black capitalism. This is the same strategy that Farrakhan's Nation of Islam has long advocated. Marxist-Humanists, however, argued that Carmichael's Black Power position was a "reverse of history" in that Black labor had already integrated the labor unions and saved the CIO by forming Negro caucuses for the upgrading of Black workers and for the ending of lily white departments. They did this against the opposition of the union bureaucracy. Black labor played the pivotal role in advancing the labor movement as well as the goal of freedom and democracy. To argue that it needed to retreat to gain strength seemed a backward move... Far from dividing the Black community as the Black nationalists claimed, Black feminist activists and theorists have raised profound human questions about the meaning of liberation for all Black people. Just as the Black Power movement gave birth to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Women's Liberation Movement created the conditions for a Black women's literary renaissance. Such writers as Audre Lorde, June Jordon, Ntozake Shange, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison raised profound questions about man/woman and woman/woman relationships within the Black community. Whereas the Black Arts Movement issued a challenge to the white racist world outside, Black women writers from the 1970s onwards focused on the contradictions internal to the Black community, such as sexism, homophobia, domestic violence and incest... From CHAPTER 3 • Dialectics and Economics: The New Challenges Posed by Globalized Capital The Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 briefly ignited a new stage of urban revolt on a national level, expressing a deep consciousness about the limits of U.S. society. The revolt challenged revolutionaries to recognize and develop this emerging consciousness into a new organization of thought. Without such an organization of thought, even revolts as deep as the Los Angeles rebellion risk expending themselves in what Hegel called “first negation”--that is, focusing on what they are against without projecting a socialist humanist vision of what kind of new society they are for. Without such an organization of thought, social movements can be diverted into the confines of old political tendencies and ideas... Black masses today continue to be engaged in both a struggle against capitalism and an internal struggle against their own Black middle class, which is ideologically and economically integrated into the crevices of capitalism. This internal struggle is crucial because, while Black masses in practice do challenge and show that the bourgeois theory of the state is a mere mask that hides the class rule of capitalism, the Black leader will follow capitalism and say it’s only through the bourgeois state that African Americans can be emancipated. Thus the inherent absolute negativity of the Black movement from practice is set back. The ongoing struggles of African Americans shows that the dialectic of the Black dimension spontaneously resists such retrogression. The integrality of absolute negativity with the self-activity of Black masses has continuously come to life... From CHAPTER 4 • Prisoners Speak for Themselves: People of Color and the Prison Industrial Complex The exponential growth in the prison population has given rise to a new kind of literature, a kind of American samizdat. Prison writers like Khalfani Khaldun, Kevin Glover, D.A. Sheldon, Todd Morrison and many others have educated themselves while behind bars and turned their intelligence towards understanding the anti-human system of imprisonment as a first step to the revolutionary change that will do away with it... From prisoners: "Globalization also ensures that the U.S. prison industrial complex is not an encapsulated environment, for it involves much more than a police-state infrastructure of law enforcement. In the U.S. it has become a means to globalize trade at the expense of prisoners, their families, workers within the country, and workers in other lands"... "Much of what I know I've learned in prison--to read and write, to think and feel. What I understand about society and life in general I've learned while incarcerated. Most of it is theoretical, since I've had little chance to put my ideas into practice. I grew up incarcerated. From the inside I've learned about human existence outside of myself. Once the world was me; I had no other understanding aside from that... "When I act, I include every person, regardless of race, sex, belief, sexual orientation or financial stature. I consider myself and many others with me political prisoners, because it was politics that put us here. Laws written by politicians have created an "open season" on anyone not in the mainstream of prefabricated social norms... "We're all in the jail of the mind-it seems we have to break out of that jail before we can get out of this one"... CHAPTER 5 • The Self-Determination of the Idea in the African-American Struggle for Freedom The limits encountered by efforts at political emancipation do not prove the futility of the struggles by Black masses for freedom; nor does it prove what Derrick Bell has called "the permanence of racism." Rather, it points to the difference between political and human emancipation. The distinction between the two was integral to Karl Marx's entire new continent of thought and of revolution... Today there is a tendency on the part of many leftists to dismiss all forms of nationalism, as if all struggles for national liberation are inherently reactionary. The situation was very different several decades ago, when the tendency was toward uncritical support of all forms of national liberation. In contrast, Lenin's writings on "the national question" put forth a position that was not uncritical of national movements, yet he was the first major political theorist, Marxist or non-Marxist, to grasp the importance of anti-imperialist national movements for the politics of the 20th century... Much current scholarship seems content merely to point out that the Communists after 1928 were involved with Black America and vice versa, especially when it comes to culture, without attending to the important philosophical and political differences within the Left. Instead, everything is reduced to a question of strategy, so the reversals of the Communist Party regarding the Black dimension are seen as pragmatic decisions, rather than as evidence of opportunism and class betrayal. Robin D.G. Kelley goes so far as to say that there were no important Black critiques of Stalin’s crimes, potentially, he argues, because Stalin’s crimes weren’t known until 1956, when Khrushchev made them public. This not only ignores the important critiques of Stalinism by the likes of Claude McKay and C.L.R. James, but it totally ignores the important efforts of the anti-Stalinist left to create an alternative liberatory socialism inside the U.S... In MARXISM AND FREEDOM Dunayevskaya did groundbreaking work to show that the Black struggle, far from being external to Marx's philosophy, was intrinsic to it, pointing especially to how Marx's attentiveness to Black struggles inside the U.S. led him to reorganize his greatest theoretic work, CAPITAL. Her view was a leap in American Marxism. As we've seen, post-Marx Marxists tended to view the U.S. struggle as less militant than the European--primarily because they relegated the Black dimension to a subordinate position and often saw it as a diversion from the class struggle altogether. Marx, Dunayevskaya argued, saw it in the opposite way... What informed Frantz Fanon's whole life was a commitment to the absolute independence of the deepest subjects of revolution, especially the Black dimension, as a path to a new reciprocity between all peoples--a "new humanism." Political leaders of the dominant party were especially a target of his wrath: he called "the single party...the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous and cynical"... Our problem today is not that a new objective development of capitalism has made the vanguard character of the Black struggle to the whole American development an outmoded idea. Our task instead is to bring to the fore the underlying philosophy that made such a profound recollection of the role of Black masses in the development of the Idea of Freedom. The parallelism between Black and labor struggles is not an insurmountable barrier. As Dunayevskaya wrote, "Only when these two great movements coalesce do we reach decisive turning points in U.S. development." This speaks to the need to bridge the gap between anti-capital globalists and those fighting the criminal (in)justice system today. What is needed to bridge that gap is the unifying philosophy of a new Humanism specifically Marxist-Humanism... As Dunayevskaya wrote in a retrospective/perspective of Marxist-Humanism in 1983, "What is totally new is that we place philosophy of revolution and not just committee form as ground for organization. In a word, we do not stop, as Rosa Luxemburg did, with full appreciation of the genius of the masses in action. Rather, we deepen that with such a philosophic penetration of that action of the masses that we call their attitude not just force but Reason, and Reason means the totality and new unification with the movement from theory.” |
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