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This
is a war on all of us, and the struggle against war
is really a struggle for a better life for the millions
of folks who are in need here in this country. The fight
against the war is really to fight for your own interests,
not the false interests of the defense industries, or
the corporate media, or the White House.
-Mumia
Abu Jamal, “The War against us All!”
Revolutions
are not ‘made’ and great movements of the people are
not produced according to technical recipes that repose
in the pockets of the party leaders.
-Rosa
Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet”
“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?
The
wholesome aversion for the Negroes and the colored races
in general, including the Jews, the existence of popular
justice [lynching]…are an assurance that the sound elements
of the United States will one day awaken as they have
awakened in Germany. (Hitler, qtd. in Defying Dixie)
[1]
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:
For
the social democratic movement even organization,
as distinct from the earlier utopian experiments of
socialism, is viewed not as an artificial product of
propaganda but as a historical product of class struggle,
to which social democracy merely brings political consciousness.
(“Organizational”)
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:
From
this it follows that social democratic centralization
cannot be based either on blind obedience or on the
mechanical submission of the party’s militants to their
central authority and further, that an impenetrable
wall can never be erected between the nucleus of the
class conscious proletariat that is already organized
into tightly knit party cadres and those in the surrounding
stratum who have already been caught up in the class
struggle and are in the process of developing class
consciousness.
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.
War
brought to you by the big corporate masters who run
the show.
This
isn’t just a war on Iraqis or Afghanis or even Arabs
or Muslims. It is ultimately a war on us all. That’s
because the billions and billions of dollars that are
being spent on this war - the cost of tanks, rocketry,
bullets, and yes, even salaries for the 125,000-plus
troops - is money that will never be spent on education,
on health care, on the reconstruction of crumbling public
housing, or to train and place the millions of workers
who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years
alone. (Mumia Abu Jamal, “The War against us All!” March
30, 2005)
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.
The
show is over. The curtain has fallen on trains filled
with reservists, as they pull out amid the joyous cries
of enthusiastic maidens. We no longer see their laughing
faces, smiling cheerily from the train windows upon
a war-mad population. Quietly they trot through the
streets, with their sacks upon their shoulders. And
the public, with fretful face, goes about its daily
task.
Into
the disillusioned atmosphere of pale daylight there
rings a different chorus; the hoarse croak of the hawks
and hyenas of the battlefield…And the cannon fodder
that was loaded upon the trains in August and September
is rotting on the battlefields of Belgium and the Vosges,
while the profits are springing, like weeds, from the
fields of the dead.
Oh,
yes, she continues, “business is flourishing upon the
ruins.”
Shamed,
dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth,
thus capitalist society stands. Now as we usually see
it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of
order, of philosophy, of ethics - but as a roaring beast,
as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating
culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous
nakedness.
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:
The
theoretical works of Marx gave to the working class
of the whole world a compass by which to fix its tactics
from hour to hour, in its journey toward the one unchanging
goal.
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:
Has
not the history of modern capitalist society shown that
in the eyes of capitalist society, foreign invasion
is by no means the unmitigated terror as it is generally
painted; that on the contrary, it is a measure to which
the bourgeoisie has frequently and gladly resorted as
an effective weapon against the enemy within?
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’”?
In
capitalist history, invasion and class struggle are
not opposites, as the official legend would have us
believe, but one is the means and the expression of
the other. Just as invasion is the true and tried weapon
in the hands of capital against the class struggle,
so on the other hand the fearless pursuit of the class
struggle has always proven the most effective prevention
of foreign invasions.
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:
Today
the nation is but a cloak that covers imperialistic
desires, a battle cry for imperialistic rivalries, the
last ideological measure with which the masses can be
persuaded to play the role of cannon fodder in imperialistic
wars.
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.
The
capitalist state of society is doubtless a historic
necessity, but so also is the result of the working
class against it. Capital is a historic necessity, but
in the same measure is its grave digger, the socialist
proletariat…
Our
necessity receives its justification with the moment
when the capitalist class ceases to be the bearer of
historic progress, when it becomes a hindrance, a danger,
to the future development of society.
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.
[2]
“Southern politicians capitalized on the antialien
hysteria to further their own down-home racist agendas…”
Germany
and the USSR
were totalitarian states and in both, “leaders told you
how to think about minorities.” The Nazis tried to eliminate
them while the Communist “despicably tried to elevate
them.” The U.S. South had its own traditions and states’
rights—and tacit comparisons of “Hitler, Stalin and Ulysses
S. Grant” (Gilmore, Defying Dixie).
[4]
Written between February and April 1915, The Rosa
Luxemburg Reader, editors Peter Hudis and Kevin B.
Anderson, 2004.
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May 10, 2012 - Issue 471 |
is
published every Thursday |
Est. April 5, 2002 |
Executive Editor:
David A. Love, JD |
Managing Editor:
Nancy Littlefield, MBA |
Publisher:
Peter Gamble |
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