Re: [A-List] Re: Labor Nobility/4

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

Labor Nobility 4

Lee Roberts

The use of the terms labor aristocracy, bribery and privilege and even concepts such as "white skin privilege," "second class citizenship," and "racist oppression" suggest a material relationship in American society involving people interaction and a pecking order. The intellectual movement associated with the name of Marx has had its hands full unraveling American history and the emergence of what has been called the Negro Question. Each generation of Marxist have articulated the Negro Question differently because each generation more than less coincided with a different quantitative development and expansion of the industrial system. 

Real factors worked against a comprehensive understanding and presentation of the question. Theoretical Marxism rightfully and heroically, took root in "European soil" where the National Question and later the National and Colonial question evolved different. There is no "Negro Question" in any other part of the world except in the United States of North America. Then of course the only place on earth the so-called Negro people evolved was in the former slave holding South. Part of the problem is that the word Negro means black in Spanish, but to the Negro people themselves what is meant is the peculiar and specific people they are. No one refers to the Nigerian as Negro and he is most certainly black. There are no Negroes on continental Africa but there are people who are black. Thus, the usage of the term African American people represents the past generation attempt to more accurately describe the plight of the descendants of Southern slavery who constituted - in total, the slave class. 

The weakness in the term African America is that it implies a people that emigrated from Africa and became fused with the American experience in a manner of the Irish American or Italian America. This is not the case. We are confronted with a unique and peculiar development that is specifically American, although discrimination and second class citizenship is the feature of world imperialism. This world feature is witnessed in the relationship between the very white English and Irish and the very "yellow" Japanese and Korean's and also Japan and China. The rape of Nanking (old spelling) is very real for the majority of humanity that happen to have as its largest section - China. 

The National Question and later, the National and Colonial Question in America is complex and has many sides. 

The National Question proper has to be understood in the framework and context of history development. The genesis of the National Question in American history and formation is crystallized in the revolution of 1776, which ushered in a whole epoch of national liberation. An epoch is not an era and indicates a lengthy period of time defined on the basis of the mode of production. 1776 inaugurated a social process in the world that went on for another two hundred years and reached its zenith - peak, with the tidal wave of national liberation uprisings between the late 1940s through the 1970s. 

The 1776 revolution was a new thing in history. To this day its documents inspire a vast segment of the world's citizens. The French bourgeoisie and the British bourgeoisie had a revolution to free themselves from feudal political restrictions and landed property relations. The U.S. was different. The United States or rather what was to become the United States was a colony. This meant it was owned by England and its purpose was to ship goods, recourses and the loot back to the mother country. For the first time a revolution for national liberation was bound up with the revolution against feudalism: the American bourgeoisie wanted freedom from the restraints of feudal England. 

The Negro people as such did not exist as a people in 1776, nor did the Anglo-American people exist as a distinct people at that time.  

The problem on the level of Marxist theory is that very few Marxist understand the difference between a historically evolved people and a nation.  There are other Marxist concepts in dealing with the National and National Colonial Question such as "National Group," "National Minority," and "Advanced National Group," with the latter concept originating in Africa - specifically the Ethiopian Revolution, and the Marxist who emerged there in the 1970s.        

The African American people are not a nation, have never been a nation and will never evolve into a nation. A nation and a people embody the same characteristics except that a nation shares a common territory. Here is the rub. Most Marxist understands the words "common territory" on the basis of bourgeois sociology. 

A common territory does not mean a "common land mass" such as the continental United States. Common territory is not "land mass" as an abstraction but means an economic unit that rivets a people and peoples into a more than less cohesive mass as the result of common productive activity. 

During the era of the rise of capitalism as a world system and the emergence of industrial production relations, the common productive activity that creates a national market - a distinct national framework of production and commerce is the act of creating modern nations with all its social consequences as class stratification and methods of rule. A nation is not a state or multi-national state, but this is a separate - although related, question. 

It is fairly obvious that the Civil War in America - by definition, meant that a union of various peoples existed that fought for economic and political control of continental America. The Civil War expressed the political fact that different national groups (in formation) formed different state authorities and sought to dominate one another by militarily defeating the other. The question of the state is related - interactive with the emergence of nations, but different. It is important however because a system of bribery and privilege requires force. 

There is a sharp line of demarcation between the former slave holding colony in the South, which is composed of all the people who live there and the African American people who live everywhere in the United States. It is true that the Negro People - African Americans, as a people evolved first as a class and then a distinct people within the crucible of slavery, and this process was markedly different from how the Anglo American people - North and South, evolved as a people. 

Without question, the Anglo-American people of the North have maintained a historic privilege over the Anglo-American people of the South as a region and especially those in the core of the plantation belt. For that matter the Anglo-American people of the North have a historical privilege over the Anglo-American people of Canada. The English enjoy measurable material privilege over the Irish and color has nothing to do with this.  In the instance of Canada and Ireland it is obvious that the privilege position of the Anglo American nation and the English is the result of financial imperialism or the imperial relationship, which is safeguarded and back up by military force. 

If privilege exists between nations and people then there exists a labor aristocracy. This is so because someone - a strata of political leaders, have to be at the top of the pecking order. This labor aristocracy exists in its genesis amongst the imperial peoples and even constitutes a narrow stratum amongst the oppressed peoples. 

Let us deal briefly with the National Question proper as it evolved on American soil and the African American National Colonial Question as it evolved historically and presents itself today.