Re: [A-List] democracy/abortion and the National Question

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>Women banging women or men getting hit in the back pocket - on "the down 
low," >ain't the question man. 

Really? Why then did Engels write, "Thus when monogamous marriage first 
makes its appearance in history, it is not as the reconciliation of man 
and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. 
Quite the contrary. Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the 
subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between 
the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period."

Clearly, with the abolition of private property there should be more 
freedom for women. Then why did Stalin impose a ban on abortion in 1936 
after the October revolution of 1917 had legalized it?


Comment

As stated the issue is not homosexuality nor abortions but the national 
colonial question, the 1928 and 1930 Comintern documents; why these documents had 
to be imposed on the American communists and why they are resisted to this very 
day. How the national factor has operated and evolved in American history is 
peculiar. There exists what appears to be a pathological hatred for Stalin - 
amongst the petty bourgeois left, dominating by the oppressing peoples that 
have obscured this question in the last period. 

In the last instance the polarity that called itself the socialist/communist 
movement - as opposed to the "left," can be understood as ideological and 
political groupings unified on the basis of the rejection of American history. 
Most of these groupings, in one way or another evolved out of the CPUSA. The 
Comintern document is very advanced for the period of history in which it was 
written because it grasped the economic and political logic of America being a 
southern country in its origin. 

Nevertheless, the communist workers articulation of the National Colonial 
differs from that of the Comintern in respects to the evolution of the African 
American people. The formation of the African American people is unique and 
occurs outside the historical curve described by Lenin and Stalin. There evolution 
began within the framework of slavery, first as a class of slaves and later a 
historically distinct people. Sharecropping and the convict lease system 
became new forms of slavery. The near total isolation of the blacks through 
segregation laws and Southern custom was necessary for this level of exploitation. 
The era of segregation, lasting some 95 years, isolated the mass of African 
Americans to a greater degree than did slavery. This isolation and oppression 
based on color was the condition for the final stages of their development as a 
people. 

Previous comments about the Black Panther Party and the League of 
Revolutionary Black Workers merits attention but the groundwork must be laid to 
understand what we are dealing with. 

The formation and consolidation of the African American people was not based 
on common land or religion. Common land does not mean simply geographic area 
but is an economic description of the bond of town and country that tied a 
people together during another era. There is no internal dynamic to hold the 
African American people together. The force that formed the African American people 
has always been the legal and extra legal pressure of the whites. 

Given this reality there could only be two tactics in the fight. One was to 
separate into a political unity and, as a group, seek equality with white 
America. Their physical dispersal throughout the country blocks - prevented, this 
as a practical nationwide political logic. The other tactic was to fight for 
integration through desegregation and equality.  The natural and consistent 
drive of the African American has been to become equal members of American 
society. There has been and remain bitter struggle over tactics, but there has never 
been serious struggle over goals. 

The internal class logic within the African American people is in the last 
instance the reason for the shifting and break-up of the various groups within 
them - as opposed to political debate.  

>This is not really true. Except for the Panthers, most groups had no 
experience with police terror including the League of Revolutionary Black 
Workers. If you were careful enough to avoid ultraleft adventurism, it was 
possible to grow into the hundreds if not thousands. These groups all 
disappeared because they created an impossible political environment where 
every difference was turned into a split question. And split they did. <

The Panthers had a bad time because they were penetrated by the police and 
intelligence outfits, but so were we. Our organizational unity prevented mass 
disruption because one had to have and carry out specific assignments. Our 
policy is to put the police and intelligence guys to work, because any of them can 
join any group and rise to leadership buy paying dues, reading books and 
carrying out assignments. Good people got hurt. Most of us got lucky in Detroit but 
not all. There was several assassination attempts where we felt the wrong 
person ended up stopping the bullet. Sad. 

What actually happened with the split of the League of Revolutionary Black 
Workers was the formation of two groups. One group became DARE - Detroit 
Alliance for a Rational Economy, and the other became the Communist League. The LRBW 
had a group of communist workers. 

In other words it was a spilt based on class logic. Roughly, eighty percent 
of the workers, college and high school students became the Communist League 
through merger with the California Communist League, which was formed in the 
aftermath of the 1965-Watts Rebellion and was later expanded on the basis of the 
Chicano Moratorium.  This core group would later become the Communist Labor 
Party. In Detroit the Communist League would later merged with the Motor City 
Labor League and become the Communist Labor Party in that area. 

The point of course is that the core groupings were generated on the basis of 
the 1965 and 1967 Rebellions. The spilt in the old LRBW was between the petty 
bourgeois left and the workers. DARE immediately became an electoral 
apparatus.  

The two questions faced after the split in the LRBW was the same two 
questions that American history presents all "socialist groups."  Anarcho- syndicalism 
and the "Negro Question."  At the time the Negro National Colonial Question 
was published it was outdated, but remains the most accurate document produced 
at the height of the era of rebellions. Our study and mastering the theory 
grid of Marxism was revealing. 

Our self dissolution was necessary beause being organized as Marxists is a 
dead end. One has to be organized as communists workers, fighting along the 
political fault line with an eye always on that section of the working class in 
motion - with the least ties to the state and compelled by its political logic 
to run into the state. In this sense Leninism has been dead a very long time in 
America.  

It became obvious that what blocked the path of one side of the polarity that 
evolved out of the CPUSA was anarcho- syndicalism and chauvinism, whose 
ideological unity was cemented as a pathological hatred of Stalin and Sovietism. 
The other side of the polarity was blocked by anarcho- syndicalism and 
chauvinism, whose ideological unity was cemented as populism. To this very day the 
political content of the CPUSA is the "anti-monopoly" coalition. 

Chauvinism is not "racism."  Chauvinism is the denial by the revolutionaries 
of the North that America was a Southern country in its origins and political 
structures up to the Civil War. Lenin called such a denial of history Great 
National Chauvinism. The Comintern document is fundamentally correct to pose the 
solution as one of state structure, up to and including political separation 
on the basis of establishing state unity of the black belt area. 

For the theorist of race, who are basically Chauvinists, but do not know it, 
what the Comintern document says to them is black people everywhere in America 
are a nation and should separate, or the black people in the black belt are a 
nation and are going to kick all the white people out. The Comintern 
documents goes through great pain to distinguish the North from the South. The fact of 
the matter is that the black and white people of the black belt area have 
more in common with each other than the white people of the black belt and the 
white people of the North - Detroit. 

Here is where pathological hate leads one down the wrong path. I understand 
why a person would call the concept of "national character" dubious and why 
this ideology evolved in our history. The question has never really been Stalin 
but this is the ideological form of something else. The real question is 
elementary American history. 

A more interesting issue is the evolution of national character at this 
juncture of American history. The pathological hatred of Stalin blocks the 
political path of the workers in the American Union and prevents the so-called left 
from even attempting to understand the national and colonial question.  The 
anarcho- syndicalism is not just "trade unionism" pure and simply or the line of 
approach that the key to social revolution reside in the best paid industrial 
workers, but also a form of white chauvinism once one examines the national 
factor expressed in the poorest section of the working class - North and South. 

One has to consider the political logic produced by ideological doctrine. The 
pathological hatred of Stalin in America is located amongst primarily the 
Anglo-American intellectuals of the North and their counterpart in the upper 
echelon of the Black intellectual elite. Stalin and the Comintern is not what 
ruined American communism and Marxism. What ruined us is the logic of our history, 
the mechanics of the formation of the laboring class in the South, the 
formation of the working class in the North, the historic material bribery taken to 
the Anglo-American people and the ideological expression of this called 
chauvinism and white chauvinism. 

What is not understood in our history is how the white masses of the South 
were maneuvered out of the struggle and shaped into a base of reaction. 
Pathological hate for Stalin and the Comintern is how - in our history, people are 
maneuvered out of the struggle and steered away from the political fault line or 
the only historically available line of march opened to us. The key to the 
revolutionary advance was never the best paid industrial workers or unionism. We 
understood this not from "superior thinking" but because we were the best paid 
industrial workers. The old LRBW was not a big "shop club" but a league of 
revolutionaries, drawing people from every social struggle. 

This ideological current is rooted in the period of Reconstruction and its 
aftermath - American Populism. The deeper question is how three generations of 
communists and socialists got duped. Our historical curve of development was 
such that placed us outside this political logic. 

America was a Southern country in its origins and political structures up to 
the Civil War: here is the national colonial question. The national character 
of the African American people is dissolving on the basis of the national 
minority workers of the North and the increased political and chemical mixture 
between the African American and Anglo American workers at the bottom of the 
working class. 

Here is the simple beauty of Marxism and the National Question. In America 
the groups on the "left" that scream the loudest about democracy tend to be the 
greatest chauvinist. Chauvinism is not "racism."  The ones that analyze the 
world movement: have the answers for the oppressed peoples and end up finding 
the failure in Stalin, tend to be the biggest white chauvinists and lack a basic 
understanding of our own history. White chauvinism is not racism.  

And I am supposed to have a beef with Stalin over abortion? That is for the 
Soviet - Russian, proletariat to deal with. I did not know that "Stalin impose 
a ban on abortion in 1936." Silly me, I thought the Soviet government did 
such. 

Here is something to consider: if the old "left" was anarcho-syndicalist, 
what was that "thing" called the "new left" that arose as its counterpart? What 
was the "Young Communist Movement," that arose as the counterpart to the old 
CPUSA/Trotskyite conflict? Today it is obvious that these were petty bourgeois 
counter culture movements amongst the Anglo-American people that died without a 
trace. In the deeper meaning, these collectives dissolved as the social 
struggle shifted and struggles to find its new forms.   

It is not a question of intense debate, especially in today's world where the 
debate is externalized onto the Internet. 

We remain and have finally shaped the doctrine of the revolutionary path 
forward, in a manner that a child of ten can understand. The political target was 
always the CPUSA but the pathological haters of Stalin insist on intercepting 
the political bullet. Not one has a Trotskyite ideology or political tradition 
by accident. Yes, Mr. Trotsky was a smart man. His political evolution led 
him outside the Soviet power. 

One can only prove their political clarity on the basis of their own history, 
not ideological proclamations about the Soviet power. 

Melvin P.