Martin Luther King
Because there was no revolution in the U.S. in the 1960s and, along with that, because the revolutionary struggle internationally ultimately suffered serious setbacks, the decades since have been a nightmare. The power of the ruling class had been shaken, but not overthrown; and they came back with a vengeance.
Major transformations went on in the international political and economic structure of imperialism during these past decades. Here we can only indicate, in basic terms, some of the main aspects of all this, which include:
- the strategic rivalry, up through the 1980s, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (which contained the real danger of nuclear war);
- the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the heightening globalization of capital that followed in its wake. Among other things, this accelerated the uprooting of hundreds of millions of peasants, who were driven into the cities of the Third World, as well as the imperialist countries, as sources of low-wage labor;
- the U.S.’s strategic decision to launch the “war on terror”—which is in fact a war to construct an unchallenged and unchallengeable empire, and which also draws on and unleashes the most backward and reactionary forces in this society as its base of support.
All these developments have been decisive in setting the context in which the ruling class of this country has moved to deal with the still unresolved role of Black people within U.S. society, in the aftermath of the great upsurge of the 1960s, which, as we have spoken to here, shook this system and its ruling class to their foundations but which was not able to bring about a fundamental change through an actual revolution.
As the ’60s ended, concessions had barely been given before, in every sphere, they began to be snatched away. The ruling class brought in Nixon as president, and he pursued dual tactics. On the one hand, he declared himself in favor of “Black power” and built up some Black businesses in an effort to pacify a section of the middle class. But his overwhelmingly principal edge was repression. The sharpest blade of this was brought down against the Black Panther Party: hundreds of its members—including key leaders—were framed up and imprisoned, and over 20 of its members—again, including key leaders like Fred Hampton and George Jackson—were assassinated. The Nixon regime also brutally repressed other rebellious sections of society—as seen in the murders of antiwar students at Kent State and the all-Black Jackson State in Mississippi.
Nixon also developed the “southern strategy” of the Republican Party, which nakedly appealed to the racism of unrepentant reactionary southern whites and gave these, and other reactionary forces, political legitimacy and initiative. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party made moves to bring a whole section of Black activists from the ’60s into the arena of bourgeois electoral politics. Both parties worked to develop “fronters”—“Black faces in high places” who purported to act as brokers between the masses and the powers, but in actual fact weighed down the people’s ability to resist through misleadership and lies.
The upheaval of the ’60s had once again powerfully presented a clear challenge to the ruling class to eliminate white supremacy and integrate Black people into society on an equal footing. Once again, this was NOT done. The promise of equality was once more betrayed—as it had been after the Civil War. And once again, two things were at work: the needs of capital, which continued to gain advantage from racist discrimination and ghetto-ization of millions of African-Americans; and the necessity of the capitalists to not disrupt—and in fact to reassert and reinforce with a vengeance—the social glue of white supremacy—the ways in which the lie of the “master class” were so integral to so many people’s understanding of “being American.” This was important for the ruling class, particularly going into a volatile period when the U.S. was both coming off defeat in Vietnam and facing potentially far greater challenges abroad.
Meanwhile, major changes were developing in the ways in which Black people were “inserted into” the economic relations of society. The search for the highest possible profit, along with the increasing ability to invest capital all over the globe, resulted in the disappearance of many industrial jobs in the inner cities of the U.S. Some were shifted to the suburbs—where capitalists moved their facilities, in part to keep African-Americans out of their work force, since they considered them too rebellious—and some overseas. Between 1967 and 1987, the four cities of Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Detroit together lost over one million factory jobs—and this trend has only accelerated in the decades since! At the same time, the radical transformations and plundering of the economies of the Third World drove new workers to the U.S. (and other imperialist countries)—with today an estimated 12 million of these workers in the U.S. lacking any legal papers, and hence living at the mercy of the capitalist ruling class.Black people had, ever since the 1950s, made up a disproportionate section of the reserve army of the unemployed, in and out of work, often having to hustle to get by; today this has expanded and intensified to a whole other level.
The “War on Drugs,” the Gutting of Welfare and the Buildup of Religion
In 1969, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s top assistant, wrote in his diary that “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” Thus was born the “war on drugs.”
Launched by Nixon, this “war on drugs” was taken to a whole other level by Reagan, who became president in 1980. It marked a strategic decision by the ruling class to maintain inner-city Black youth in desolate hyper-segregated neighborhoods which lacked jobs, and where education and health care resources had been severely cut. Even with the jobs that remained, discrimination was stepped up, as employers sought to avoid the “defiance” of Black youth who, in the words of Bob Avakian, were “not so pliant for capitalist exploitation.” Instead of providing better education and the promise of new opportunities for these youth, drugs would be allowed to flood the inner city (including with the connivance of the CIA), and many inner-city youth would be funneled into the drug trade—where they would then be vulnerable to constant harassment, arrest, imprisonment and social isolation. The rate of imprisonment exploded drastically to the point where shuttling between the hard hustle of the streets and the harder times in prison became the dominant mode of life in many oppressed inner-city communities—a lifetime of lockdowns. Beginning at that time and continuing and intensifying up through today, whenever jobs open up in a major city, people will line up for blocks to even get a chance to apply. But for most of the time—and, in some areas, for most of the people—there is little choice other than the illegal economy.
On that basis, the “code of the streets” took significantly deeper root: that is, the rules of survival borne of the shark-like competition of the illegal economy set terms for inner-city youth more broadly, with the resulting horrific “Black-on-Black” violence and violence between Black and Latino youth that the mainstream, bourgeois commentators deplore, or pretend to deplore. And the bourgeoisie launched an incredible campaign of demonization of Black youth in particular, right down to inventing a category of “feral super-predators” to justify the massive wave of criminalization.
|
Determination decides who makes it out of the ghetto—now there is a tired old cliché, at its worst, on every level. This is like looking at millions of people being put through a meatgrinder and instead of focusing on the fact that the great majority are chewed to pieces, concentrating instead on the few who slip through in one piece and then on top of it all, using this to say that “the meatgrinder works”! |
||
| Bob Avakian, “The City Game—And the City, No Game,” Revolutionary Worker, #201, April 15, 1983 |
During this same period, the bourgeoisie launched a truly vicious campaign of demonization and humiliation against Black women on welfare. No insult was out of bounds for these racist bullies. By 1996 the “liberal” Bill Clinton had signed a bill that denied welfare to millions of people, especially women, and thrust millions of women into the labor market working for the bare minimum, often in health care or the very low-paying retail trade, and forcing many into various hustles and desperate acts, including prostitution, in order to survive and feed their children. By any measure, this was a massive social change—one which has been extremely underreported and underestimated.
Even the section of African-American people who made it out of the ghetto and into better-paying jobs during these last few decades face a life fraught with uncertainty and danger. Discrimination in every arena—credit, health care, education, and so on—continues, as do the cases of better-off Black people either being killed by the police for “driving while Black” or brought continually into serious danger of meeting that fate.
Going along with all this—and very consciously built up as part of this reactionary counter-offensive by the ruling class—has been the revival of the Black church and religious feeling among Black people. The influence of religion had in fact greatly ebbed during the latter part of the ’60s, when people raised their heads to fight for revolution and, as part of doing so, struggled to rationally figure out how the world really worked and how to change it. But with the ebb of the revolutionary struggle at the end of that decade, feelings of disorientation and despair arose among many.
Religious forces raced to fill that void with all kinds of erroneous, objectively harmful, and in some cases outright reactionary and deadly ideas: blaming yourself for being oppressed by this system; seeing capitalism as the way out of a madness that was caused by capitalism; strengthening male domination over women; substituting Bible stories and mythology for the actual truths of science (including evolution) and generally pushing the idea that people can’t really understand the world, and therefore can’t really go about changing it radically, and so must “leave it to the lord.” Whether these ideas were being run by Creflo Dollar, T.D. Jakes, or Louis Farrakhan (whose militant posing conceals a profoundly conservative—and in many ways outright reactionary—brand of nationalism), they all seriously confused, misled and demoralized people.
| Why “Strong Families” Are Not the Answer People say: “The basic reason for the problems of Black people has been the breakdown of the Black family. That’s why these kids get into the gang life. We have to bring back the traditional family as the first step to solving these problems.” While there has been a tremendous breakdown of Black families in the last several decades, that too has stemmed from the workings of this system, which has cast many Black men to the margins of society, with nearly a million of them in prison as you read this. The economic basis for “stable, two-parent” families has been undercut. You could have every Black father actively involved in the care of every Black child, and the fact would still remain: this system has no future for millions and millions of these youth, with or without fathers present. If you really think that the “stable, two-parent” family will solve the problem, take a look back to the years of KKK terror, lynchings and Jim Crow segregation in the South. Back then the great majority of Black families were traditional two-parent families. But that did not and could not prevent the devastating effects of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation and oppression. But there is an even deeper problem with this non-explanation: it directs oppressed people towards an outlook that will strengthen the chains of oppression and lead away from liberation. The traditional family has its origins in the original division of society into oppressor and oppressed. You can get a clue to this by looking at the root word of “family,” which is from the Latin “familia”—which actually means the number of slaves owned by one master! “Restoring the man to the head of the family” covers over the reality of what that means for the woman—which is exactly being treated like a slave, whether a “favored” one or one who is beaten, abused, betrayed, molested, and raped within the “holy confines” of the family (which is all too often how it really goes down). When you get right down to it, this “rightful role of the man” bullshit is just the talk and mentality of a wannabe slave master. And all this other talk from the street of “ho’s and bitches”…all this hatred of gay people, with the talk of “faggots,” the persecution, and the actual beat-downs and even killings of anyone whose sexual feelings differ from “the norm”…all that stuff, too, is the same messed-up, destructive mentality. We don’t need this—and it will never lead to liberation and a better world!! While the communist revolution will immediately remove the obstacles that society has placed in the way of forming Black families, it will NOT do this on the basis of the traditional relations and ideas that dominate families in capitalist society, but on the basis of equality and mutual love and respect—and of looking outward toward transforming all of society, including unleashing the full participation of women in every sphere. Black men, and other men, don’t need to “get in” on their “right” to assert domination in the family over women and children—they need to rise up together with women in equality as part of emancipating all of humanity. And Black children don’t need “male role models”—they need an end to the crippling conditions that hem them in at every point. They need revolution, and they need revolutionary role models, women no less than men. They need to see men and women who model the mutual respect and equality that reflects the world we are fighting for: a whole new liberated world where girls grow up strong and without fear of being raped, degraded or abused, where no child is ever deemed “illegitimate,” and where men—like everyone else—find their worth in contributing to the betterment of all of humanity through the revolutionary transformation of all society rather than by getting in on even a little of the oppression of this nightmare world. |
Today, as they did in slavery times, the capitalist ruling class builds up the church as the MAIN institution in the Black community. Government money that once went to public education and community arts is now channeled through preachers who align themselves with the government and with the Christian fascist movement that has been built up by Bush. Nowhere is this sharper than in the prisons. The struggle of the ’60s spurred among prisoners a thirst for knowledge and truth, and they fought for and won the right to take college courses and have access to literature even though they were locked up; today that is increasingly suppressed and flushed away while reactionary fundamentalist “prison ministries” are given total access to the minds of the literally millions of Black youth whom the system shuttles through these hellholes, with large numbers at any given time serving long sentences in degrading prison conditions.
While many religious people and clergy oppose, and can be united in struggle against, the outrages and crimes of this system, and important aspects of the oppression of Black people and others, there must be struggle and debate over the real character of the problem and solution, and the worldview and method that is necessary to win complete emancipation, and the real role of religion in relation to all that. Religion—both in general and particularly in the more recent period—plays the role of turning people away from seeking a real understanding of the actual causes and dynamics of things, as they really are, and the possibility of changing things in this real world. Even when more “progressive” versions of religion may encourage people to resist oppression (or particular aspects of oppression), it still promotes the idea that, when all is said and done, people themselves cannot change things by consciously seeking out and coming to an understanding of what is the problem—what is the actual cause of people’s situation and where oppression actually comes from—and waging a determined struggle on the basis of that understanding, but instead they must ultimately put things “in the hands of god” and rely on this non-existent god to give them the courage and strength to persevere. And things are worse, on a whole other level, with the reactionary religious viewpoints that openly uphold this system and the key pillars of its oppressive relations.
***
“Post-racial”? Please. We had better, all of us, face very squarely what has really gone down these past few decades. The hope and optimism of the ’60s, founded on the real potential that can be seen when people rise up, fight back and begin to seek out a radical alternative to this monstrous system…this hope has turned to despair in the face of decades of betrayal and brutal repression meted out by these rulers, decades of needless suffering and unforgivable squandering of human potential. Today the situation is even more dangerous. To take one stark example: there is the distinct possibility, and there are already definite trends and developments toward, a whole new era of “neo-slavery,” where a predominantly Black prison population is put to work for pennies a day, either to turn profits for capitalists or bring down costs for the state. And there are those in the ruling class making “policy suggestions” with genocidal implications—people like the prominent Republican (and fundamentalist Christian fascist) Pat Robertson who has advocated executing not only people convicted of murder, but any people who commit crimes that “put a stain” on society.
There is, in other words, a question, and a prospect, of betrayal yet again—on an even more horrific scale!
