“Voter Registration Here” the banner read, under which two people, seated at a long table covered with registration forms and folded brochures, smiled at all those on their way into the grocery store. Did you register to vote? .Did you register to vote? Some people stopped and others went on. When I finished chaining my bike and passed the table and the volunteers, I did not hear the question.

She is already a voter, they might be thinking. Of course, she is already a voter, and, as a voter, she is a Democrat, of course! She is ready to cast her vote against Gov. Scott Walker. She is eager to pull the lever, again, for Barrack Obama! Of course! (Although I never voted for Walker or Obama).

What Black is not ready to vote again, do his or her civic duty, except those either in prison or those who served time and are not eligible to vote against Walker and for Obama. What Black person does not remember or has not been taught to recall Pettus Bridge, dogs, water hoses, 1964, and finally, happy Blacks lining up at the polls throughout the South. So, of course, she is registered to vote.

When I left the store, I paused in front of the voter registration table. Are you registered to vote? Maybe she’s not, huh?

No, responding as cheerfully as possible. I don’t vote.

I walk toward the library and reach for the door.

That’s why we are in the condition we are in today, the woman said.

What else is there if we do not vote?

Before December 8, 1941, when the U.S. declared war against fascism, Langston Hughes, working as a reporter for the New Masses, joined the Abraham Brigade in Spain to fight fascism. This was 1936 and Hughes was not alone.

Activists such as James Yates and Alonzo Watson, (the first Black volunteer killed in action, February 25, 1937), did not hesitate to determine a course of action. They did not confer with “leaders” or the White House, and when Mussolini in 1935 invaded Ethiopia, Blacks in the Diaspora, able and willing, boarded a ship to fight fascism.

These Black volunteers decided on their own to directly fight fascism, as they were doing so at home, abroad, not, as the Abraham Lincoln Bridge (ALB) website would have readers believe, as “idealistic,” childish dreamers or adventurers, but as informed citizens in touch with the reality at home, a reality of oppression much akin to a Hitler or Mussolini brand of fascism.

These activists, thinkers, poets, writers, everyday Black citizens, were informed, the ABL website suggests by their embrace of “radical ideologies” and “new militancy” which particularly intensified after World War I.

The ABL website was thoughtful enough to mention the American pastime activity of lynching and the fear mongering that surrounded the Scottsboro case. But, all in all, these were the “radical” Blacks.

These so-called “radical” Black Americans could and did read and they were conversant with an international community of activists and organizers. They could read and they did, and they could interpret for themselves the meaning of Hitler’s unabashed references to the Black Diaspora, and particularly to Blacks in the U.S. struggling against oppression and repressive political, social, and legal tactics to eliminate their participation in a so-called democracy. They could interpret Hitler’s praise for the U.S. brand of white supremacy and the practice of lynching not only as the nation-states sanctioning of racism but also as the modernization of legalized thievery. What is the outcome but outright extermination of unwanted populations?

Then, those volunteers and “Negroes” and the “colored races, in general,” did not share with their white counterparts an illusion about freedom in the U.S. J.A. Rogers, a journalist, responded to comments by speakers who declared that Americans would not abide by fascism within their borders “as the American people were temperamentally opposed to it” (Defying). Paraphrasing Rogers, Gilmore writes, “…the best argument that Fascism could succeed here was the fact that it was already here.” Rogers: “‘Not only is Fascism in America now but Mussolini and Hitler copied it from us. What else are jim crow laws but Fascist laws?’”

A review of Hitler’s “legal restrictions” of the Jews ran under the heading, “The Nazis and Dixie” (Defying). What was so “idealistic” or “militant” among Black Americans who understood the connections between “foreign” and “domestic” policies? As Gilmore notes, the U.S. government extended Jim Crow militarily by occupying other nations while the Ku Klux Klan extended white supremacy ideologically by converting ordinary citizens. In turn, Black Americans introduced Karl Marx to Dixie (to paraphrase Gilmore) and to the Black struggle in the U.S. because the fascism of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler, particularly after the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy, “demonstrated the nature and method of capitalistic imperialism.”

Blacks, who survived combat or observed and reported on the war in Spain, contributed to a people’s international narrative (as opposed to State narrative) recounting images of devastation abroad and images of the brutality of racism within the U.S. By 1939, heated debates among white Americans representing the State as to whether or not to enter the war garnered a response from Black Americans who argued that they were already at war, as Gilmore notes, already in the struggle against fascism and capitalistic imperialism. Blacks determined to intensify that struggle, Gilmore agrees, by attacking Jim Crow with “renewed vigor” (Defying).

“Liberals, socialists, and communists” formed the Southern Popular Front (Defying). What was “radical” about wanting an end to oppression? About refusing to fight in a war with colonists against fascists? What was “radical” about ending imperialism?

Marxist theory provided a way for Blacks and the working class to struggle against injustice, and Communists, adherents of Marxist theory, had been strong supporters of the Black struggle. But Black Americans did not know what Rosa Luxemburg discovered a few years before: the revisionists and betrayers of Marxist theory were no less authoritarian and oppressive as their imperialist counterparts.

And certainly, no less deceptive: When the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) was signed in 1939 between Stalin and Hitler, Black communists, non-communist supports, and socialists awakened to their worse nightmare. Gilmore writes, “The politics of patriotism and citizenry became more complicated.”

Socialist or socialist-leaning Blacks activists and Black communist, supporters of the Russian Revolution were forced to confront the reality of a workers’ movement under siege in Russia, European imperialist’s ventures in Africa, and racism in the U.S. Within U.S. borders, the government, too now, shouted against fascism - but over there - elsewhere! It was fascism by December 8, 1941 - not imperialism! It was fascism and Communism - “isms,” “antidemocratic” isms (Defying), dictators, Stalin and Hitler, overseeing evil isms.

Socialist or socialist-leaning Blacks activists and Black communist, supporters of the Russian Revolution were against the war not because they were supporters of Stalin and the Soviet Union. As Gilmore writes, “Black Americans wanted little to do with a Soviet Union allied with Hitler” (Defying). “The comparison of Jim Crow and Fascism had been the most powerful single weapon in the Southern Left’s arsenal,” writes Gilmore. But Black conviction waned under pressure. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Black activists who remained in the struggle against fascism at home and abroad and who opposed the war were perceived as “radicals” –“subversives.” [2] Paul Robeson, Louise Thompson, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, members the American League for Peace and Democracy (APM) opposed the war and campaigned for U.S. isolationism (Defying). “The Peace Mobilization used civil rights as an antiwar tool: ‘Democracy begins at home…All of us…must band together…to fight for the real Democracy that is our American heritage’” (Defying). Others such as W.E.B. Dubois, however, sought to “win advantages” for Blacks and colonized people aboard (Defying) once Blacks donned U.S. military uniforms. In the end, only Richard Wright, June 1941, spoke out and cried - [T]his is not my people’s war! But by then, “most black American did not agree with him” (Defying). Even Robeson, Thompson, and Hughes, in support of the communists, came to support the war.

Few Black socialist activists analyzed how the centralization of power in a communist state averted a socialist movement of the working class. It was on to war and the self-repression of dissent.

Citizens sang and marched to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy in the U.S., and the Black leadership became patriots, urging, in tune, the conformity of the Black community. We offer our share of Black soldiers; accept our blood on the battlefield! When Black soldiers returned home from the U.S. Empire’s battlefields - in their uniforms and despite their sacrifices - the lynchers’ rope still designated them the enemy and the visible and invisible signs of an apartheid and its accompanying police apparatus still subjected them to the whims of an imperialist state.

Where are we today?

How many Buffalo Soldiers served Empire in its determination to wipe out the Indigenous people?

And today, after bowing and capitulating to the State’s narrative of “democracy,” how much longer can Black Americans insist the collective holds the high moral ground when Barrack Obama impoverishes, furthers the militarization of the police, spies on citizens, tortures, imprisons, deports, and kills better than previous State leadership under the control of corporate rule? It is not just the devastation of life and Earth but the marketing and selling of the technological tools to end life on Earth.

Before December 8, 1941, when Marxist theorist and activist Rosa Luxemburg fought the good war against capitalistic imperialism, she warned: no compromise! What is the secret? Organization! It comes down to organization, Luxemburg warned. Agitation, protest, is sustained by organizing their tactics and strategies to bring about revolutionary change (“Organizational Question of Russian Social Democracy”). [3]

In her critique of the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg writes of the challenge facing the working class movement and warns of the resulting totalitarian state that usurps the momentum and struggle of the people to bring about an end to oppression and the staggering discrepancy between those who rip power from the people and the people themselves.

In Germany under Bismarck, she writes, the Anti-Socialist Law intended “only to place the working class beyond the bounds of the constitution,” and the government did this, Luxemburg continues, “in a highly developed bourgeois society where class antagonisms had been laid bare and fully exposed in parlimentarism” (“Organizational”). Whereas in Russian, she writes, “social democracy must be created in the absence of the direct political domination of the bourgeoisie.”

Luxemburg continues:

In Russia, she argues, we have the development of centralism, and she points to Comrade Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in which he warns against “ultracentralism” of the Blanquist but nonetheless, defends a form of centralism that leads to the Central Committee, which has, as Luxemburg explains, “the right to organize all the local committees of the party and thus also to determine the membership of every individual Russian local organization…to provide them with a ready-made local statue, to dissolve and reconstitute them by fiat and hence also to exert indirect influence on the composition of the highest party organ, the congress.” Thus, “the Central Committee emerges as the real active nucleus of the party; all the remaining organizations are merely its executive instruments.”

Organization with a socialist perspective is “radically different,” Luxemburg argues, in that it “operates within the dialectical contradiction that here it is only in the struggle itself that the proletarian army is itself recruited and only in the struggle that it becomes conscious of the purpose of the struggle.”

Luxemburg continues:

Luxemburg warns: “[s]ocial democracy is not linked to the organization of the working class; it is the working class’s own movement.”

And if Lenin’s intent is to “instill” discipline in the workers, she adds, it is already there. The workers are disciplined “not just by the factory but also by the barracks and by modern bureaucracy - in a word, by the active mechanism of the centralized bourgeois state.”

What is needed is “education” for a “new discipline,” one that is “voluntary self-discipline.” Only by “defying and uprooting” this discipline instilled in them by the capitalist state, Luxemburg explains, can the movement of workers avoid the road leading to a totalitarian state where the workers’ “spontaneous creative process of development” is sacrificed to the dictates of the leadership. Whether totalitarian or “democratic” government, citizens have been corralled fighting imperialist wars. In other words, Rosa Luxemburg warned against the legalization of repression, where protest, in a totalitarian or in a so-called “Democratic” State narrative, represents transgression, and workers, activists, and thinkers who dissent become the Emmanuel Goldstein of Orwell’s 1984, subject to derogation and marginalization.

Years before, in her essay, “The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy,” [4] Luxemburg, in prison for opposing World War I, (and she was considered “radical” within the SPD) provides a narrative of the reality of war.

Capitalist rule, she writes, is caught in a trap, and “cannot ban the spirit it has invoked.” The disillusion that is the experience of the soldiers and the citizens also serves as the springboard for its re-awakening. Luxemburg describes the scene in Germany, of the disappearance of “the first mad delirium.” “Gone are the patriotic street demonstrations, the chase after suspicious looking automobiles, the false telegrams, the cholera-poisoned wells.” Gone are the lies and wild rumors of suspicious suspects, enemies.

Oh, yes, she continues, “business is flourishing upon the ruins.”

And in this orgy a world tragedy has occurred, Luxemburg writes: “the capitulation of the Social Democracy.” But however “unspeakable” the suffering or the “countess mistakes,” the workers’ struggle is not lost and neither is socialism. “Self-criticism, cruel, unsparing criticism that goes to the root of the evil is life… [and socialism] is lost only if the international proletariat is unable to measure the depths of the catastrophe and refuses to understand the lesson that it teaches.”

Luxemburg:

Luxemburg recalls Friedrich Engels: “capitalist society faces a dilemma, either an advance to socialism or a reversion to barbarism.” Reversion to barbarism targets the enemy within and becomes visible in the “the police theory of bourgeois patriotism and military rule.” Luxemburg asks:

War is used to combat the “enemy within” as well as the enemy without. Did not Marx observe that wars, Luxemburg writes, are conducted for the “mutual butchery of the proletariat’”?

It is not an accident that pogroms such as COINTELPRO, the War on Drugs, Secure Communities, and drug disparity laws have targeted Black, Brown, and Red communities just as it is not an accident that U.S. wars of aggression target people of color and non-Christians. It is not an accident that capitalistic imperialism amasses militarized-assault campaigns against the poor and the working class here and abroad.

But no one state creates imperialism, as Luxemburg writes. Imperialism, she explains, “is a product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and form which no nation can hold aloof at will. From this point of view only is it possible to understand correctly the question of ‘national defense’ in the present war.”

Luxemburg continues:

Critical of the German Left’s interpretation of socialism, Luxemburg insists that their understanding of the workings of imperialism and their subsequent betrayal of the working classes’ struggle was in fact a betrayal of socialism. The Left did not put forth a “wrong” policy - it simply had “no policy whatsoever,” Luxemburg argues. Convictions were thrown to the wind in exchange for the acquisition of power.

But the working class will have the last word. Successful popular movements, Luxemburg writes, depends “on the very time and circumstances of their inception.” and is decided “by a number of economic, political and psychological factors.”

“Political slogans” from the established party claiming to be a party of the people, Luxemburg argues, are also suspect. We see today that the “two-party” system is but one party with two faces under corporate rule. The Democratic Party, “of the people,” as it claims, is “a leadership in a great historical crisis,” where the “technical leadership” provides the political slogan. Give us your fives and tens and then vote! In turn, “Change You Can Believe In” is answered by the people in struggle, shouting in unison, “We are the 99%!” We make the change!

Instead of “national defense” leading to more “national wars,” “fratricidal wars,” Luxemburg exclaims that the proletariat “of all lands” will come to recognize “that she or he shares “one and the same interests.” The struggle here for affordable and decent housing, for affordable and meaningful education, for health care for all, the struggle for Palestinian rights and homeland, the struggle for clean water, food uncontaminated by corporate pesticides or uncorrupted by their seeds, for an end to totalitarian and to the aggression of so-called “democratic” nations of the willing becomes The Struggle against imperialism - and for humanity and the survival of Mother Earth.

What else is there if we do not vote?

Our time is now!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.