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NEWS & LETTERS, NOVEMBER 2003New 40th anniversary edition: American Civilization on Trial, Black Masses as VanguardExcerpts from the new edition This new fifth edition of AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL contains the following new features: l) New 2003 Preface from the National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees 2) Three Added Writings from Charles Denby, author of INDIGNANT HEART: A BLACK WORKER'S JOURNAL: * Black Masses Always Fought Militarism * 25 Years of editing 'NEWS & LETTERS' * On AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL 3) "To the People of the United States," Letter of Karl Marx of September 1865 on the outcome of the U.S. Civil War * * * FROM THE PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION by the National Editorial Board This fifth expanded edition of AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL: BLACK MASSES AS VANGUARD appears on the 40th anniversary of the historic August 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what became his world-famous “I Have a Dream” speech. That year marked the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation; yet Black America, he said, was “still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination, still living on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” Forty years later, the June 2003 rebellion against police abuse that broke out in Benton Harbor, Mich. proves how little has been changed since King’s description of Black America and exposes the permanence of the racism deeply embedded in U.S. capitalism. Black youth today continue to be warehoused in prisons at a rate far exceeding their percentage of the population, and their unemployment rate, always twice that of white America, is rising at a faster pace than whites. The scenes of Benton Harbor in flames recalled Cincinnati in 2000, and Los Angeles in 1992. The fact that this explosion occurred in a city of 12,000 reflects the depth of anger in African-American communities across the U.S... AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL shows that the contradictions in the movements for freedom cannot be overcome without working out a unity of the movement from practice and the movement from theory as the foundation for an overall philosophy that can form the foundation of a new human social order. In short, ever since the 1960s it has become clear that even the greatest actions need the direction from a total philosophy of freedom. When the struggle has reached such a multidimensional intensity that it encompasses all the forces for revolution from the Black dimension to women to youth to rank and file labor, what is needed is to concretize such a philosophy for our age.... Raya Dunayevskaya had intended to issue in 1963 a statement on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It became AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL when the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 made it clear that what had to be raised--against the threat of a nuclear war that could annihilate all of humanity--was the call for a totally new society. The task was to find the social forces that represented that kind of revolution. The work she authored was signed by the National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees and its organizational stamp was made clear in its final section, which was called “What We Stand For--and Who We Are.” This edition will make clear her authorship for the first time. --THE NATIONAL EDITORIAL BOARD * * * FROM DUNAYEVSKAYA'S "A 1980s View of the Two-Way Road Between the U.S. and Africa:" What AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL reveals is both Marx's deep American roots and his Promethean vision. Take the succinct way in which Marx pinpointed the situation in the Civil War at its darkest moment, as the war dragged on and the Southern generals were winning so decisively as to produce a defeatist attitude in the North. Marx looked at the forces of revolution: "A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves...a war of this kind must be conducted along revolutionary lines" (Letter from Marx to Engels, Aug. 7, 1862).... In his last decade [1872-83] Marx discovered still newer paths to revolution...his projection of the possibility of a revolution coming first in technologically underdeveloped lands achieved a new meaning for our age with the emergence of a whole new Third World, as well as new mass struggles and the birth of new revolutionary forces as reason. The Black dimension in the U.S. as well as in Africa showed that we had, indeed, reached a totally new movement from practice to theory that was itself a new form of theory. It was this new movement from practice those new voices from below--which we heard, recorded, and dialectically developed. Those voices demanded that a new movement from theory be rooted in that movement from practice and become developed to the point of philosophy--a philosophy of world revolution.... FROM PART I: From the First Through the Second American Revolution Nothing since [the Abolitionist movement] has superceded this merger of the white intellectual with the Negro masses with the same intense devotion to principle, the same intimacy of relations of white and Black, the same unflinching propaganda in face of mob persecution--and even death--the same greatness of character which never bent during three long decades of struggle until the irrepressible conflict occurred, and even then did not give up the fight but sought to transform it--and succeeded--from a war of mere supremacy of Northern industry over Southern cotton culture to one of emancipation of slaves. The movement renounced all traditional politics, considering all political parties of the day as "corrupt." They were inter-racial and in a slave society preached and practiced Negro equality. They were distinguished as well for inspiring, aligning with and fighting for equality of women in an age when women had neither the right to the ballot nor to property nor to divorce. They were internationalist, covering Europe with their message, and bringing back to this country the message of the Irish Freedom Fighters. They sought no rewards of any kind, fighting for the pure idea, though that meant facing the hostility of the national government, the state, the local police, and the best citizens who became the most unruly mobs. They were beaten, mobbed and stoned.... FROM PART 3: Imperialism and Racism It is no historic secret that the later the bourgeois revolution against feudalism or slavery takes place, the less complete it is, due to the height of class opposition between capital and labor. The lateness in the abolition of slavery in the U.S. accounts for the tenacious economic survivals of slavery which still exist in the U.S. Nevertheless, as the strength of Populism and the solidarity of Black and white that it forged showed, the economic survival of slavery couldn't have persisted, much less dominated the life of the Negroes North as well as South, IF they hadn't been reinforced by the "new" Northern capital. It was not the "psychology of Jim Crowism" that did the reinforcing. The "psychology of Jim Crowism" is itself the result, not the cause, of monopoly capital extending its tentacles into the Caribbean and the Pacific as it became transformed into imperialism, with the Spanish-American War.... FROM PART 6: The Negro as Touchstone of History The most exciting chapter in human affairs since World War II was written by the African Revolutions. The first All-African People's Conference, in 1958 when Ghana was the only independent state, disclosed not just Pan-Africanism but the making of a Negro International. Tiny Guinea's "No!" to France won her freedom and thereby reaffirmed that the greatest force for remaking the world remains the human being. In less than a decade no fewer than 22 African nations won their independence. The banner under which this freedom from colonialism has been achieved--Pan-Africanism--is not a purely African phenomenon. It has had a multiple birth and development in which the American contribution is important. Where standard history texts, in their vulgar materialistic way, still dwell in detail on the long-dead triangular trade of rum, molasses and slaves--between Africa, the West Indies and the U.S.--it is the ever-live triangular development of internationalism, masses in action and ideas which is the dominant force today.... FROM PART 7: Facing the Challenge, 1941-63 The truth is old radicals are forever blind to the positive, the subjective new dimensions of any spontaneous struggle. Each struggle is fought out in separateness, and remains isolated. While the way to hell may be paved with Little Rocks, the way to a new society must have totally new foundations not alone in action but in thought.... The very people who played down the East European revolts, from Stalin's death, in 1953, through the Hungarian Revolution, in 1956, also played down the Negro struggles from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1956, through the Freedom Rides, in 1961, to the current struggles in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. We, on the other hand, do not divide the underlying philosophy from participation in all these struggles. Above all, we hold fast to the one-worldedness and the new Humanist thinking of all oppressed from the East German worker to the West Virginia miner; from the Hungarian revolutionary to the Montgomery Bus Boycotter; as well as from the North Carolina Sit-Inner to the African Freedom Fighter. The elements of the new society, submerged the world over by the might of capital, are emerging in all sorts of unexpected and unrelated places. What is missing is the unity of these movements from practice with the movement from theory into an overall philosophy that can form the foundation of a totally new social order. |
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