Posted on June 23, 2015, this is the first in a series of four posts written in the aftermath of a killing of nine persons by a lone white shooter at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.


     As we reflect upon recent tragic events in the United States, let us recall our history, for we can understand the present only if we understand the historical developments that created present dynamics. In examining the history of race relations in the United States, we learn an important lesson: when conflicts are not truly resolved, they re-express themselves.

     European conquest of vast regions of America, Asia and Africa from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries was driven by a quest for raw materials and markets.  The imposition of colonial structures on the conquered nations and peoples created a vast peripheral region in a capitalist world-economy, a periphery that functioned to provide cheap raw materials on a foundation of forced labor.  The exportation of raw materials from the periphery would provide the foundation for the agricultural and industrial modernization of the core.  

     One particular manifestation of this global system of forced labor, which nearly everywhere was extremely harsh, was African slave labor in the Americas.  African slaves were forcibly transported to America and forced to work, under threat of death and brutal physical punishment, in the plantations of the Caribbean, Brazil, and the US South, where they produced sugar, cotton, and coffee.  

     As slavery and slave societies evolved, there emerged variations.  Among the English-speaking colonizers in America, in contrast to the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies, there was much less of a tendency to mix and reproduce with slaves.  And when the English did mix, they automatically categorized mixed-race offspring as part of the black population.  So in the English slave societies, like the US South, there was a much clearer demarcation between blacks and whites than was occurring in the evolution of the Latin Caribbean, where there were three racial categories (whites, blacks, and mulattoes) and blurred lines among them.

     Everywhere slaves rebelled and escaped, creating a fear of blacks among whites, who must have felt subconsciously that black violence against them would be just retribution.  Blacks, including freed and escaped slaves, also were active and leading participants in the abolitionist movement.  The dynamics of black political participation varied in each nation, in accordance with particular conditions, including variations in the relation between the struggle for black rights and the struggles for national liberation and the rights of women.

      In the case of the United States, abolitionism and women’s rights emerged as causes championed by progressive sectors in the 1850s.  With the defeat of the Southern planter class in the Civil War, the stage was set for a political alliance between the Northern industrial elite and Radical Republicanism in the reconstruction of the South on the basis of the political and civil rights of the freedmen.  However, full citizenship for the emancipated slaves required not only the protection of political and civil rights but also the distribution of land.  A proposal for the distribution of forty acres of land to emancipated slaves was before the Congress, but it was not approved.  If it had been enacted in the late 1860s, a time when family farming was still economically viable, it would have made possible the emergence of a black agricultural middle class.  Instead, a tenant farming system emerged, in which the freedman were superexploited by the planter class, now reconstituted as a landlord-merchant class that both owned land and controlled local trade.  W.E.B. DuBois called it “economic slavery.”  

     Once the Northern industrial elite secured control of the federal government, it abandoned the Reconstruction project, leaving southern blacks to the fate of the forces marshalled by the landlord-merchant class.  The result was the emergence of Jim Crow, a political-economic-cultural system characterized by: legally sanctioned racial segregation, the systemic denial of the political and civil rights of blacks, the economic slavery of tenant farming, and unofficially sanctioned violence against blacks for purposes of social control.  Jim Crow ruled the South from 1876 to 1965, and it was responsible for the diffusion of racist assumptions and sentiments among whites and a profound cultural separation between whites and blacks.

     During World War I, blacks migrated from the South to the urban North in significant numbers, pushed by the decline of the system of cotton tenant farming in the South and pulled by job opportunities created by the war.  In the North, the rights to vote and hold public office were protected, but key civil rights were not.  Housing was restricted to a designated section of the city; and there was not equal employment opportunity, so that a clear racial hierarchy and segregation in employment emerged.  The “black ghetto,” although overcrowded and poorer than white society, had its virtues: it was a vibrant multi-class society that housed musicians and writers, and a thriving urban black culture emerged.
  
     The movement for the protection of African-American rights emerged in the urban North in the post-World War I era, for urban life provided possibilities for communication and organization.  During the 1920s, expanding black membership led to black leadership of the NAACP, which originally had been established in 1908 by white liberals who were horrified by lynching.  W.E.B DuBois became editor of Crisis, the NAACP review, thus becoming an important African-American public intellectual.  Influenced by world-wide debate concerning the disposition of the German colonies in Africa, the NAACP during the 1920s had a global and Pan-Africanist perspective.  Similarly, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had a wide following, also had a Pan-Africanist view.  During the 1930s, with the decline of the Africa debate in the international arena and with the increasing electoral presence of blacks in key Electoral College states of the North, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund shifted attention to legal and constitutional challenges to the segregated system of education in the South.  These efforts, led by Thurgood Marshall, who later became a US Supreme Court justice, culminated in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which struck down segregation in schools as a violation of the Constitution.

       During this period of 1917 to 1954, the urbanization of blacks in the South established conditions for the development of movement organizations in southern cities.  Black urbanization strengthened black churches, colleges, and protest organizations in black southern society.  A dynamic interrelation emerged, with black colleges educating an independent class of pastors influenced by tendencies of liberation theology, who provided moral legitimation and strategic support for protest and movement activities.  

     Since its origins in the post-World War I era, the African-American movement had formulated a comprehensive vision of democracy as including not only civil and political rights but also social and economic rights, such as adequate housing, nutrition, education, and standard of living.  And it included the concept that the African colonies were entitled by right to independence.  But national and international dynamics of the 1950s favored a strategy that focused on the denial of political and civil rights in the South, utilizing non-violent mass action.  Thus the African-American movement came to be known as the “Civil Rights Movement,” and often there was the mistaken impression that it began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56.

     The heroic African-American journey from Montgomery to Selma during the period 1955 to 1965 is well known to the people of the United States, black and white.  It was the time of the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.  It was a time of courage, self-sacrifice, heroism, and eloquent oratory.  It culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which marked the definitive end of the Jim Crow system of the South and blatant forms of discrimination in US society.  

     But there were other components to the story that are less known, and our ignorance of them is central to our problems today.  The process of attaining political and civil rights was full of conflicts and contradictions that led to a distrust of white progressives among young black activists.  Black youth active in the protests naively had believed that mass action exposing the undemocratic and brutal character of the Jim Crow system would quickly bring the “good” white liberals from the North to the support of the movement.   But it was not so.  Many white liberals equivocated in their support of the civil rights movement, and the federal government was reluctant to intervene to protect civil rights workers from violence.  The federal government did not decisively act until 1964 and 1965, when the momentum of the movement had created a national and international climate of opinion that made such action unavoidable.

      Disappointed with white allies, black activists turned inward, vowing to develop separate black organizations.  It was not the first time in the history of the African-American movement that the conduct of white progressives had stimulated separatist tendencies, and the dynamic would deepen in the period 1966 to 1972.

     Nevertheless, in spite of the equivocation and violence that attended the process, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented important gains, won by the heroism of the African-American movement.  However, at this historic movement, the difference in the perspectives of whites and blacks became even clearer.  To most whites, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement meant that the struggle was completed, that blacks had attained what they wanted.  But for the African-American movement, it was a partial victory.  From the beginning, the African-American movement had sought the protection of social and economic as well as civil and political rights.  So from the perspective of the movement, the historic moment now required a decisive step forward in pursuit of social and economic rights.  And the movement found that, more than equivocation, most white allies completely disappeared.

      In response to this profound disappointment, the movement beginning in 1966 divided into two directions, and both encountered difficulties.  The first direction was the turn to black power, which was symbolized by the assassinated Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, and which was announced dramatically by Stokely Carmichael at a rally on June 16, 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi.  Black power advocated black control of the institutions of black society, and it called for the development of an alternative black-led political party, black economic enterprises supported by the black community, and separate black cultural institutions (see “Black community control” 5/10/2015).

      The black power movement was greeted with a systemic police repression that involved the concerted action of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, a phenomenon rarely discussed in the US popular discourse.  By 1972, many African-American leaders had been killed or placed in prison, or they had left the country.  Only leaders who took the moderate path of seeking power through electoral politics within the Democratic Party survived the repression.

     The political project of black power, and its intellectual variant, Black Nationalism, offered a profound analysis of US society from a global perspective.  It discerned the role of European colonial domination in creating the modern world and global inequalities, and it interpreted white-black relations in the United States as a particular national manifestation of a global relation between the colonizer and the colonized.  It advocated the alliance of blacks in the United States with the African and Third World movements and governments of national liberation.  It equivocated with respect to alliance with white progressives in the United States.

     Whites needed to learn from the teachings of Black Nationalism, for they revealed the colonial foundation of the modern world-system, which was obscured by popular discourse and by the bureaucratic character of higher education.  But most whites did not encounter Black Nationalism and take seriously its insights.  A few did, such as the young white activists who formed an anti-imperialist tendency within the student/anti-war movement, including the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society.  However, white society by and large, including white progressives, did not come to understand Black Nationalist insights.

     The second direction in the movement was spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Although Black Nationalism had pervasive influence in the African-American movement from 1966 to 1972, King proposed a different strategy, namely, that of alliance with the white, Latino, and indigenous poor on a basis of common economic interests.  His efforts culminated in the SCLC Poor Peoples’ Campaign of 1969.  However, the strategy of a multi-ethnic alliance among the poor confronted the same problem that had stimulated the turn to black power, namely, the lack of support by whites for a democratic restructuring of US society.  The charismatic leadership of King represented the most potent unifying force for overcoming this obstacle.  But his assassination brought to an end hope for a popular movement that united blacks and whites in a coalition that sought the protection of social and economic rights and that advocated a foreign policy of cooperation with the nations and movements of the Third World.

    The prevailing view in the United States today is that the “Civil Right Movement” attained the protection of the political and civil rights of all citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity.  But this superficial view is challenged by a more comprehensive study of the development of the African-American movement, in which we can come to understand that that the movement was unable to attain two important historic demands: the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens; and a foreign policy of cooperation with the peoples of the world in the construction of a just and more democratic world-system.  With its goals only partially attained, the movement came to an end, forced into silence by police repression, white rejection, exhaustion, and the possibility of a moderate alternative in the form of electoral politics.

     Thus, for the second time in the history of the American republic, the nation cast aside the hopes and aspirations of black society.  White rejection of fundamental historic goals of the African-American movement was to have profound consequences for the development of race relations in the United States from 1972 to the present, as we will explore in subsequent posts.


Bibliography

McKelvey, Charles.  1994.  The African-American Movement:  From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition. Bayside, New York: General Hall.

Key words: Emanuel AME Church, race, race relations, racial violence, racial divide, racial division, racism, symbolic racism, affirmative action, poverty, lower class, Civil Rights Act, Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King, Black Nationalism, the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson, popular coalition

Posted June 24, 2015

      A democratic society protects not only political and civil but also social and economic rights, including the rights to housing, nutrition, education, health care, and cultural formation.  At a global level, a democratic world-system would respect the right of all nations to sovereignty, and it would provide support to the formerly colonized nations in their quest to attain the protection of the most important of human rights, the right to development.  These rights have been confirmed in important international documents, including declarations of the United Nations.  Having been affirmed by the representatives the nations and peoples of the earth, commitment to the protection of these rights is fundamental to what can be called universal human values.

     A society based on universal human values has been the historic demand of the African-American movement.  But this demand has been neither acknowledged nor addressed by white society or public discourse in the United States.  

      We have seen that in the aftermath of the civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965, the African-American movement sought to move forward to the protection of social and economic rights and to the advocacy of a foreign policy based on cooperation with the formerly colonized peoples of the Third World.  But the nation turned to repression of the black movement, which had entered its black power and Black Nationalist stage (see “The unresolved issue of race in the USA” 6/23/2015).

     The inadequate protection of the social and economic rights of African-American in 1965 was a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.  The civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965 signaled a national political will to end discrimination, but they did not address the poverty and inequality that were consequence of decades of discrimination.  

     What could have been done in the late 1960s to overcome the legacy of racial discrimination and address the protection of the social and economic rights of blacks?   In the first place, it was necessary to acknowledge and understand that critical decades had been lost.  In the South, the failure to protect the political and civil rights of the emancipated slaves and to distribute land to the freedmen meant that a black agricultural middle class could not emerge during the period 1867 to 1965.  In the North, the failure to provide equal employment opportunity in the expanding industrial economy in the period 1865 to 1964 meant that relatively good-paying jobs for persons with low levels of education were being taken by white immigrants from Europe rather than black migrants from the US South.  In the late 1960s, the US industrial expansion was coming to an end, and the nation was entering several decades of relative economic decline; and the world-economy itself was entering a period of sustained systemic crisis.

     The changing national and international economy of the late 1960s meant that the path of upward mobility that had been possible for the white European immigrants during the period 1865 to 1965 was not open to poor whites, blacks, Latinos, or indigenous people after 1965.  From that time forward, there would be few relatively good-paying jobs for youth with low levels of education.  Young people would have to attain higher levels of education in order to access employment opportunities in a “post-industrial” economy.  

    But such a model of upward mobility through educational attainment had not been the pattern of upward mobility for the white ethnic groups in the United States.  The white ethnic groups were formed by a great migratory wave during the period 1865 to 1925, coming from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe.  They were escaping conditions of displacement from land and impoverishment, and they were pulled by the industrial expansion of the United States, which was creating conditions of labor shortage.  As we observe the upward mobility of the white ethnics in the United States, we find that the pattern was not upward mobility through educational attainment, but upward mobility through relatively high-wage employment for the poorly educated.  The children of the European immigrants persistently had low levels of educational attainment, but through the formation of labor unions, they became a relatively well-paid labor force, in spite of low levels of education.  The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants, sons and daughters of poorly educated but relatively well-paid workers, performed much better in school, and many entered the middle class.  Thus, the white ethnic pattern of upward mobility involved improvement in the standard of living first, and improvement in educational attainment later.  This was possible because it occurred in the context of an expanding industrial economy.

     But African Americans, Latinos, and indigenous people were excluded from this prevailing pattern of upward mobility of 1865-1965.  In the late 1960s, black, Latino and indigenous poor would have had to accomplish upward mobility through educational attainment first, which had not been the historic pattern of upward mobility in the United States.  

      It was a challenge without precedent, and effective steps would have to involve measures without precedent.  A pre-condition was the national political will to attack the problem, and this was not present.  As a result of the influence of the African-American movement on public discourse and the advocacy of progressive sectors, a “War on Poverty” was proposed by the Johnson Administration.  But it was poorly conceived and inadequately funded.

     The necessary reflection and mobilization of political resources required taking seriously the two different proposals of the African-American movement.  As we have seen (“The unresolved issue of race in the USA” 6/23/2015), the prevailing tendency in the movement from 1966 to 1972 was Black Nationalism.  It proposed black control of black institutions, including the development of community control of schools, so that the local community would be free to adopt necessary measures to respond to the particular challenges that the public schools in poor urban sections confronted.  As we have seen, an experiment of this kind was developed in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of New York City, but it was brought to an and, principally as a result of the opposition of the New York City teachers’ union (see “Black community control” 5/5/2015).  What was needed was full national political support for projects of this kind, with freedom for teachers and administrators to be innovative, and with full necessary funding.

     The Poor People’s Campaign of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed in a different direction.  King’s vision of a coalition of black, white, Latino and indigenous poor was based on the premise that the national government can and should adopt policies and create programs that respond to the economic and social needs of the people.  It can, for example, construct housing and improve the transportation infrastructure, with the double purpose of improving housing and transportation for those in need as well as providing good-paying jobs for persons with low levels of education; and it can develop educational programs that are designed to respond to the particular needs of lower-class children.  

      But neither the direction of black power nor that of Dr. King was engaged by the nation in the late 1960s.  The African-American movement was brought to an end, silenced by the killing, incarceration, and exile of its leaders.  African-American dreams and hopes were again deferred.

       In the aftermath of the failure of the nation to address the protection of social and economic rights in the late 1960s, and in conjunction with structural changes in the US economy, there emerged by the 1980s what the African-American sociologist William J. Wilson described as socially isolated black lower class neighborhoods.  They emerged in the historic black sections of cities, and they came into being in part as a result of the outmigration of the black middle and working classes.  According to Wilson, black lower class neighborhoods were characterized by social isolation and separation from the mainstream of the US occupational system, and they had high levels of poverty, welfare dependency, youth joblessness, male joblessness, street crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and female-headed families (Wilson 1987).  

     By the 1980s, the nation and the world-system had turned to neoliberalism, characterized by the reduction of the role of the state and the dismantling of social programs designed to protect the interests and needs of the popular classes.  The national and global war against the poor had begun.  The African-American movement agenda for the protection of social and economic rights and for a democratic world-system had been discarded into the dustbin of history.
   
     The failure of the nation to address the issue of race and the legacy of racial discrimination is a dimension of a larger failure of the nation to engage the demands of the popular movements, a phenomenon in part rooted in the limitations of the movements themselves, a theme which we will address in subsequent posts.


Bibliography

McKelvey, Charles.  1994.  The African-American Movement:  From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition. Bayside, New York: General Hall.

Wilson, William J.  1987.  The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.  

Key words: Emanuel AME Church, race, race relations, racial violence, racial divide, racial division, racism, symbolic racism, affirmative action, poverty, lower class, Civil Rights Act, Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King, Black Nationalism, the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson, popular coalition

Posted June 26, 2015

     There is no doubt that racism continues to exist in the United States.  It is a new and more subtle form of racism that is adapted to the political realities of the post-Civil Rights Movement era.  In contrast to pre-1965 racism, which believed that blacks are biologically inferior, the new racism prefers a cultural explanation, maintaining that economic inequality between blacks and whites is rooted in cultural differences.  The new racism is more flexible, recognizing the high intelligence of some blacks, but believing that blacks in general are less intelligent and less motivated, particularly in the lower class, where black cultural influences are pervasive.  In addition, the new racism expresses itself in the form of viewpoints that ostensibly have nothing to do with race.  The attitudes of many whites toward the role of government in addressing social inequalities and toward crime can be reflections of a belief in the inferiority of black culture (Bobo et al. 1997; Bobo and Smith 1998; Bonilla-Silva 2001, 2003; Edsell y Edsell 1991).

     Going beyond what has been written by scholars on the new form of racism, I would submit that a subtle form of racism is at the root of the dismissal of the critique and proposals of the African-American movement (see “The unresolved issue of race in the USA” 6/20/2015).  There is prevalent in white society not only a pejorative view of black culture but also a dismissal of the forms of thought that emerge from the black experience.  This dismissal prevents an encounter with black thought, which would lead to awareness that African-Americans have formulated a more advanced understanding of structures of domination and the meaning of democracy.  As a result, the fundamental epistemological insight that wisdom comes from below is beyond the horizon of white society, undermining the possibility that whites could learn from blacks as the nation and the world confront various crises. 

    If racism is alive in a new form, then it is logical to think that discrimination against blacks and other minorities continues to exist, in spite of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  And it follows that commitment to democracy requires adoption of a program that takes “affirmative action” to nullify the effects of the new and more subtle form of racism.  This gave rise to what William J. Wilson described as a shift in government policy after 1970 from a focus on individual equality of opportunity to an emphasis on ensuring that minorities are adequately represented in certain positions in government, employment and education (1987:114).

      In spite of the existence of racism in a new form and in spite of evident need for affirmative action, I believe that the emphasis on racism and affirmative action has been a serious strategic error of progressives in the United States since 1965.  My view is no doubt shaped by my experiences.  The grandchild of immigrants from Ireland and Italy, my fundamental social perspective was shaped by Black Nationalism in the early 1970s, specifically at the Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies in Chicago.  Beginning in the 1990s, I began a period of study and living in socialist Cuba, where I have encountered the Cuban perspective, which is a synthesis of Third World national liberation and Marxism-Leninism.  In Cuba, I also have had the opportunity for observation of revolutionary processes unfolding today in Latin America and the Third World, which have been extensively observed by Cuban journalists and intellectuals.  From this vantage point, discussion of racism and affirmative action seems limited, and not politically effective.

     As William J. Wilson observed in 1987, affirmative action is limited in what in accomplishes.  It benefits middle class blacks, but it does not provide support for lower class blacks, who have greater need for support.  Wilson contends that “the race-specific policies emanating from the civil rights revolution, although beneficial to more advantaged blacks (i.e., those with higher income, greater education and training, and more prestigious occupations), do little for those who are truly disadvantaged” (1987:110).  Moreover, Wilson maintains that it is difficult to marshal and maintain political support for programs that target particular groups, whether they be minorities, women, or persons with low-income.  Observing the different kinds of programs that exist in Western European societies, he maintains that universal programs, which benefit virtually everyone, have much stronger political constituency (1987:118).

     We must keep in mind that proposals in defense of popular needs do not occur in a political and ideological vacuum.  They occur in a context in which an elite class seeks to maintain its power and privileges, and it is prepared to exploit any divisions that emerge among the popular classes, including generating distortions and ideologies with respect to programs that target specific groups.  And since 1968, the US elite has been threatened by crises: a relative US decline in production and commerce as well as the sustained structural crisis of the world-system.  In response to its increasingly uncertain position, the US elite has become more and more aggressive in its ideological manipulation of the popular classes and sectors.  Rather than supporting affirmative action as a limited and necessary reform measure, the powers that be have attacked affirmative action as “reverse discrimination,” generating opposition in white society.  In the context of these political and ideological dynamics, affirmative action has negative political consequences.

      Taking a cue from the movements that are unfolding in Latin America today, it seems to me that programs that benefit specific targeted groups can have political viability only if they are part of a larger project for social change, which includes a program for the political education of the people with respect to a number of national and global issues.  Such a comprehensive political project has not been developed by progressive forces in the United States, as I will discuss in the next post.

References

Bobo, Lawrence, James R. Kleugel, and Ryan A. Smith.  1997.  “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Anti-Black Ideology” in Steven A, Tuch and Jack K. Martin, Eds., Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change.  Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publisher.

Bobo, Lawrence D. and Ryan A. Smith.  1998.  “From Jim Crow Racism to Laissez-Faire Racism: The Transformation of Racial Attitudes” in Wendy F. Katkin, Ned Landsman, and Andrea Tyree, Eds., Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America (Pp. 182-220).  Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo.  2001.  White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era.  Boulder: Lynne Reinner Publishers.

__________.  2003.  Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States.  Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Edsell, T. and M. Edsell.  1991.  “When the Official Subject is Presidential Politics, Taxes, Welfare, Crime, Rights, or Values . . . the Real Subject is Race,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1991), Pp. 53-86.

Wilson, William J.  1987.  The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Key words: Emanuel AME Church, race, race relations, racial violence, racial divide, racial division, racism, symbolic racism, affirmative action, poverty, lower class, Civil Rights Act, Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King, Black Nationalism, the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson, popular coalition

Posted June 27, 2015

​     Dr. King pointed us in the right direction.  In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began work on the Poor People’s Campaign, a protest in Washington to focus on economic justice for the poor.  The campaign was formed by the poor of various ethnic groups: blacks, whites, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans.  The strategy was to focus on the protection of social and economic rights for all, regardless of ethnicity.  In this strategy, King was seeking alliance on the basis of common economic interest, giving secondary consideration to the type of alliance that King has sought to form in the early 1960s, which often involved whites in powerful places, and which King called a “coalition of conscience.” 

     Following King’s assassination on April 3, 1968, the campaign proceeded. It established Resurrection City, a temporary community on the grounds of the Washington monument, and the young SCLC minister Jesse Jackson was named its mayor.  However, following the closing of Resurrection City, the “Poor People´s Campaign” lost force.    
     In 1979, with the taking of hostages at the US embassy in Iran, the national mood took a decisive turn to the Right, beginning what Jesse Jackson described as a “long, dark night of reaction.”  Jackson responded to the national turn to the Right in his presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988.  Resurrecting and expanding King’s concept of a multi-ethnic coalition among the poor, Jackson sought to attain the protection of social and economic rights through the formation of a “Rainbow Coalition” of workers, farmers, students, small business people, women, blacks, Latinos, and indigenous people.  In foreign affairs, influenced by King and Black Nationalist critiques of the world-system, Jackson proposed a policy of North-South cooperation.  

     However, the Rainbow Coalition was not developed as an alternative mass organization, functioning as nation-wide educational and political organization.  I was a Jackson delegate at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, where plans were formulated for the development of the Rainbow Coalition as a mass popular organization.  In my home state of South Carolina, we held several meetings for the purposing of establishing the Rainbow Coalition at the state and county level.  However, we were not able to do it.  During his visit to Presbyterian College to give a public lecture, I talked briefly with Rev. Jackson about the problem, and he appeared unable to help.  In the end, the Rainbow Coalition was not developed as a nationwide mass organization.

      We need to retake and develop further the King-Jackson idea of a popular coalition.  Above all, we must understand that the coalition would seek to take power.  King had not yet arrived to understand that it is a question of the people taking power.  At the time when his life was cut short, he continued to be oriented to the bringing of popular pressure on those in power, rather than the taking of power by the people.  Jackson, on the other hand, understood that it is a question of taking power.  But he did not fully grasp that the popular taking of power involves more than a delegate of the people occupying the White House, even if the president brought to office by popular movement is committed to the people and is capable of invoking popular mobilizations in defense of presidential proposals.  The popular taking of power requires the development of an alternative political party that also has significant representation in the Congress and that is continually working on the political education of the people.

      A reconstituted and more advanced popular coalition that seeks power would stand on the shoulders of giants.  Popular movements have emerged throughout the history of the republic, formed by artisans, farmers, workers, women, blacks, Mexican-Americans, students, ecologists and immigrants.  However, these historic popular movements have been characterized by divisions and errors, which have prevented the emergence of a popular coalition capable of taking power.

     Of the various popular movements, the African-American movement has been the most advanced, advocating the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens and the development of a foreign policy based on respect for the sovereignty of the nations of the Third World (see “The unresolved issue of race in the USA” 6/23/2015).  In the period 1966 to 1972, the movement evolved to a Black Nationalist stage, during which it formulated a penetrating and insightful analysis of the world-system, demonstrating the colonial foundations of the system.  However, black power and Black Nationalism had negative consequences with respect to the development of a popular revolutionary movement in the United States.  If a revolution is to take power in the name of the people, it must have the united support of the people, who have overcome divisions that have been cultivated by the forces of domination and reaction, such as racial divisions.  Black power had the consequence of deepening the political and cultural differences between blacks and whites, and undermining the possibility for united political action.  

      The workers’ movement in the United States developed in conjunction with the industrial expansion of the United States of 1865 to 1965.  Emerging in the context of a culture that excluded blacks, it never was able to overcome the racial divide.  To some extent constrained by red-baiting, the workers’ movement evolved to trade union consciousness and to a labor aristocracy in the hegemonic core nation of the capitalist world-economy.  Its conservative orientation distanced it not only from the black movement but also the student/anti-war movement of the late 1960s.

     The US student movement reached its height from 1965 to 1970.  As a result of compulsory conscription in the armed forces and the failure of the US imperialist war in Vietnam, the student movement became an anti-war movement.  It was sympathetic to the black power movement, and it formulated anti-imperialist critiques of US foreign policy.  Moreover, reacting to the irrelevant curricular design of the bureaucratized university, it demanded greater student voice in university affairs, expecting that this would lead to a curriculum that was more oriented to education for social justice.  However, student leaders had few older and more experienced role models, due to a generation gap that alienated students of the 1960s from both the anti-communism and the conventional Marxism of their elders.  The result was that the student movement was characterized by superficiality in analysis, infantile and insensitive strategies, and idealist expectations concerning the effects of protest.  When the draft ended and the Vietnam War wound down, the student movement rapidly dissipated.

      The women’s movement exploded on the social scene in the period 1968 to 1970.  It was characterized by penetrating historical analysis of the history of patriarchy since the agricultural revolution and by a critique of legal and cultural forms of gender domination, discrimination, and exclusion.  But in the United States, it was conflictive, sometimes insensitive to other forms of domination rooted in colonialism and labor exploitation.  It thus contributed to divisions among the people in the critical period of 1968 to 1972.  Ultimately, the women’s movement would have more impact on prevailing cultural norms and values than the other popular movements.  Women have arrived to positions of power in political and economic institutions of the nation and the world.  But women who have arrived to positions of authority do not bring with them a feminist or popular perspective; they contribute to the reproduction of existing power relations.

     In 1970, the ecology movement emerged as an important voice on the social landscape.  It tended to be oriented to environmental issues, leaving aside questions of colonialism and labor.  Like the women’s movement, it expressed itself in a form that contributed to divisions among the people.  It ultimately would have great impact on popular consciousness in the nation and the world, but it has been unable to change sufficiently the ecologically destructive policies of governments, in spite of the evident danger that environmental degradation poses to the survival of humanity.

      In the development of a reconstituted popular coalition that seeks political power, the historical errors and limitations of the various popular movements would have to be overcome.  As I observe revolutionary popular movements in Latin America, I see that they have been able to overcome division and to develop a comprehensive and integrated popular movement that has taken power in several nations and has transformed the political reality of the region.  This has been accomplished in spite of the opposition of national and international elites, and in spite of the fact that in 1995 such gains seemed impossible.

      Observing what has occurred in Latin America, it seems to me possible to accomplish a similar ideological and political transformation in the United States.   It is necessary to do so, and this necessity is a factor that establishes the possibility.  Moreover, a number of conditions favor the development of a renewed popular movement that seeks to take power.  These conditions include a widespread perception among our people that those in power are not committed to defending the needs of the people.  This perception is rooted in the conduct of the elite, which for the past thirty-five years has supported the profits of corporations over the needs of people and nature.  Those who are informed about global dynamics should be able to de-legitimate the elite and facilitate the bringing to power of a popular project with an alternative vision for humanity.

       It is often said that third political parties do not work in the United States.  But this is not entirely true.  In two previous important historic movements in the history of the nation, alternative political parties were successfully formed.  The first was in the earliest years of the republic, when so-called democratic and republic societies were formed, leading to the formation of the Democratic-Republican Party that elected Thomas Jefferson and that displaced the Whig Party that had been dominated by the elite.  And in the 1850s, the Republican Party was formed with an abolitionist platform and elected Abraham Lincoln.  It is true that a number of third parties in the twentieth century did not have success.  But the lesson that should be drawn is that third parties do not work, if they have a theoretical analysis and a platform that limit their potential constituency.  But a third party formed by a popular coalition that addresses the challenges that humanity confronts in an informed and unambiguous way, and that is dedicated to the political education of the people, would be able to transform political and ideological conditions.

     As we have seen (“On racism and affirmative action” 6/26/2015), many whites are racist in subtle and even blatant ways.  Let us attempt to move beyond racism by offering to the people an alternative that promises protection of their social and economic rights.  Let the people see that we have committed our lives and our honor to the fulfillment of this promise.  

     The peoples of the world are in movement.  They seek an alternative world-system based on universal human values.  They look with hope to the people of the United States, who, they remember, brought an end to the imperialist war in Vietnam.  The peoples of the world will overwhelmingly and enthusiastically come to the aid and support of a revolutionary popular movement in the United States.

Key words: Emanuel AME Church, race, race relations, racial violence, racial divide, racial division, racism, symbolic racism, affirmative action, poverty, lower class, Civil Rights Act, Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King, Black Nationalism, the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson, popular coalition

     In the context of the multifaceted crisis of the world-system and the imposition of the neoliberal project by the global powers, the peoples of the Third World have developed an international movement for a just, democratic and sustainable world-system.  In the previous ten posts, I have reflected on the implications of this global movement for the popular movements in the United States.  I have maintained that the transition to a just and democratic system on a global scale will require a transition from a capitalist world-economy to a socialist world-system, and that the characteristics of such a socialist world-system can be envisioned on the basis of observation of nations in which socialist movements have triumphed.  Twelve characteristics can be identified, including structures of popular democracy or people’s power, a strong state that acts decisively in the economy in order to protect the social and economic rights of the people, respect for the sovereignty and full independence of all nations, equality between men and women, and ecological sustainability.  I have further observed that socialist movements have come to power through the formation of alternative political parties that explicitly seek to take power, that emit manifestos and platforms, and that are led by charismatic leaders.

     I have maintained that, when we observe the discourse of the Latin American Left with respect to issues that have the potential of dividing the people, we can discern a contrast between the US Left and the Latin American Left, such that the alienation of the discourse of the US Left from the people can be seen.  I believe that we need a reconstruction of the discourse of the Left in the United States with respect to such issues as race, ethnicity, gender, gay rights, the environment, patriotism, and spirituality.

      In concluding this series of posts on the need for popular coalition in the United States, I would like to make five observations.

      (1) Comprehensive national plan.  We need a comprehensive national plan to propose to our people; we need to stop jumping from issue to issue.  In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Left protested the Vietnam War and supported the civil rights and black power movements; it called for women’s liberation, women’s reproductive rights, gay and lesbian rights, and the protection of the environment; and it supported the United Farm Workers grape boycott.  In the 1980s, the Left advocated nuclear disarmament, protested US policies in Central America, and called for the end of apartheid in South Africa, while continuing to give support to black and gender equality.  In the aftermath of the imposition of neoliberal project, the Left protested structural adjustment programs.  After September 11, the Left protested wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.  During its evolution, the Left gave increasing emphasis to gay and lesbian rights, and in recent years it has turned to the issues of gun control and the protection of the rights of immigrants, in response to unfolding national events.  To some extent, support for the Cuban Five, the closing of the prison in Guantanamo, and the end of the blockade against Cuba was included in this mix.  All of these issues are interrelated, and we must formulate an integral plan to propose to the people, a plan that is rooted in an understanding of the historical development of national and global dynamics.

     (2) Reframing of issues.  We must learn to affirm the full rights of blacks, Latinos and women in a way that does not alienate us from significant numbers of whites or men.  We must call for the protection of the rights of gays in a form that is sensitive to the conservative values of many of our people.  We must formulate a comprehensive project that projects an image of protecting all of our people, not merely blacks, minorities or women; and that affirms the fundamental rights of all persons, regardless of sexual orientation, without appearing to endorse controversial lifestyles.  We must formulate a discourse that is patriotic; not a patriotism that calls to war, but one that demands fidelity to the democratic values on which the nation was founded, taking into account the evolution of our understanding of those values on the basis of popular movements in the United States and the world.  And we must formulate a discourse that is spiritual; not a spirituality that is narrowly religious, but one that is faithful to the universal human values that humanity has affirmed.

     We need a discourse that is less conflictive in tone.  In Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, leaders of the “new” social movements representing women, indigenous groups and ecologists did not attack known leaders of the movement for their insensitivity to these issues in the past.  Rather, they made clear their full appreciation for the struggles and gains of the popular movement to that point, and that their hope was to bring the movement to a more advanced stage by incorporating other issues.  They sought to redeem the social movement, to help bring it to the fulfillment of its historic destiny.  This kind of discourse, with the support of known and respected popular leaders of the earlier period, was the key to bringing the movement to a comprehensive project that integrated various issues: the defense of the sovereignty of the nation against imperialist intentions; the protection of the social and economic rights of all, regardless of gender or ethnicity; the full participation of women in the construction of a just society; the affirmation of the political and cultural rights of indigenous nations and peoples; and the need for the development of forms of production that are ecologically sustainable. 

     (3)  Connecting to our people.  We need a comprehensive national project that formulates specific proposals that connect to the needs of our people.  I do not yet know what these concrete issues are.  I do know that the charismatic leaders of important revolutions (Lenin, Ho and Fidel) possessed an exceptional capacity to put forth concrete proposals that struck a responsive chord among the people.  Perhaps such concrete proposals in the United States might include: abolition of student debt; affordable higher education; free health care; a housing construction program that, in addition to providing for housing needs, also would provide employment for persons with low levels of formal education; and local community control of law enforcement and of schools, as a dimension of a national urban development project.

     (4) A manifesto.  We need to formulate an interpretation of history that understands the present crises in historical and global context.  We must affirm that human history has meaning, and that we can discern its meaning from the signs of the times.  The manifesto should affirm not only the need for the protection of the political, civil, social and economic rights of all of our citizens; it also should envision a just and democratic foreign policy, seeking to participate with other nations in the development of a just, democratic and sustainable world-system, thus leaving behind imperialist policies.

     (5)  The taking of power.  We need to move beyond protest and to formulate a plan for the taking of power.  Our goal should not be to “speak truth to power” but to take power in the name of the people and to exercise it morally, in accordance with universal human values. “Power to the people” is a call that is as old as the nation itself.  To this end, we must create an alternative political party, which functions above all as a structure for uniting the efforts of many people in popular political education and in the organization of the people, with the intention of ultimately using the electoral process to take control of the presidency and the Congress in twenty years.

     It will be said that third parties do not work in the United States.  In this regard, I offer two observations.  (1)  Many of the third parties have had serious limitations.  They were not necessarily connected to the concrete needs of the people, nor did they necessarily have a valid historical and global reading.  Any Eurocentric formulation, for example, would be doomed, because it would be discerned as such by blacks, who historically have been the most important actors in movements for progressive social change in the United States.  (2)  We are in a new historical situation, in which the world-system is in a multi-faceted systemic crisis, and the global elite has demonstrated its incapacity to respond constructively to the crisis.  As a result, in Latin America, the two-party system of alternating representation of competing sectors within the elite has collapsed, and new parties are coming to power.  Even parties of the Right are new parties.  The people have lost faith in the traditional political parties.  

     The emergence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the presidential primaries is a sign of this.  But Sanders is not the answer, even though he calls himself socialist.  What is needed is a party that educates and that has the support of the people and captures the presidency and the Congress, not merely a “socialist” who gets elected president in the context of the two-party system, in which the traditional parties would continue to control the Congress. Even an alternative party with control of the presidency and the Congress would have only partial power.  The President would have to struggle to attain effective control of the government bureaucracy and the military, and the Congress and the President would have to struggle with corporate control of the economy and the media.  In these struggles, the active and mobilized support of the people for the agenda of the new party would be of decisive importance.

      As for Trump, CNN news analysts are saying that many people are his fans, because he is challenging the establishment, and he says anything he wants.  But what is needed is not a candidate with the audacity to say anything, but a candidate and a party with the audacity to challenge the establishment on the basis of universal human values; a candidate and a party that connect not to the rebellious instincts (or the fears) of the people but to the hopes of the people.

      I invite the reader to review my previous ten posts on these issues: “A just, democratic & sustainable world-system” 1/12/2016; “The twelve practices of socialism” 1/14/2016; “Popular democratic socialist revolution” 1/15/2016; “Lessons of socialism for the USA” 1/18/2016; “Race and Revolution” 1/19/2016; “Gender and revolution” 1/21/2016; “Gay rights and revolution” 1/22/2016; “Race, the university and revolution” 1/25/2016; “Ecology in an integral form” 1/27/2016; “Patriotism” 1/28/2016; “On spirituality and heroism” 1/30/2016.  Scroll down to find the posts; they are in reverse chronological order.  Also see: “Presidential primaries in USA” 8/25/2015.