Black History (1972)

Book Review from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Red and Black, Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History, by Eugene D. Genovese, Allen Lane. The Penguin Press 5.00

This book is a compilation of some eighteen previously published essays by Professor Genovese and, like books of this nature, suffers a bit from disjointedness, even from an occasional contradiction. But it is not this in the book that really bothers us. It is, rather, the Genovese approach to the Marxian method of interpreting history. His opening chapter: On Being a Socialist and a Historian and his concluding essay: On Antonio Gramsci (head of the Communist Party in Italy in the early 1920s; arrested and imprisoned for the last eleven years of his life by Mussolini) should be read carefully as one sees, in starkness, the utter contempt or, at best, condescension of the self-appointed intellectual “Marxist” for the mental potentialities of ordinary working people. To Genovese, leadership—presumably of intellectuals — is certainly the most important factor in educating the working class to the urgencies of Socialism. He approves of Gramsci’s vision of the ideal party:

“A party justifies its historical existence when it develops three strata: (1) a rank-and-file of ordinary men whose participation is characterised by discipline and faith; (2) a leadership, which provides cohesion; and (3) cadres, which mediate morally, physically, and intellectually between the other two.”

Of these strata he stressed leadership:

“We speak of captains without an army, but in reality it is easier to form an army than to find captains. It is surely true that an already existing army will be destroyed if it lacks captains, whereas a group of captains, co-operative and in agreement on common ends, will not be slow in forming an army where none exists.”

But this is not Marxism nor was it really new with either Gramsci or Lenin. It is the sort of theory which Marx and Engels consistently fought against throughout their careers. As far back as 1848, in their Communist Manifesto, they made clear that: “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” (Our emphasis). The Marxian case rests, indeed, on the theory that the ideas of man (not merely of leaders) are basically determined by the mode of production and that it is the business of working for wages for an owning class (not the preachments or captaincies of great men) that will cause workers to organise for Socialism.

The foregoing should not discourage the student of Socialism from obtaining the book (if he can afford it). There is much of interest to be gotten from the essays on the blacks in America notwithstanding the incredible misunderstanding of the Marxian method. Genovese, for example, sees American blacks as embracing “genuine ingredients of a separate nationality, even as they form part of a general American nationality … (and that) it is no longer possible to believe that a class can be understood apart from its culture, or that most modern classes can be understood apart from their nationality.” But what, after all, is a nationality? In the final analysis it is a group split into people with rival and conflicting interests. Even in the case of American blacks, where the percentage of capitalists is undoubtedly smaller than usual, the struggle between and within the classes is apparent. Black bourgeois pit themselves against one another as well as against the white bourgeoisie, and against the black (or white) workers they hire. Black workers, on the other hand, must also compete among themselves—as well as with white workers—for jobs.

It should also be pointed out that Genovese does a creditable job in showing the limitations of the economic determinists both of the non-Marxist and professed Marxist varieties. Creditable, that is, to the extent that he does not go overboard himself in an opposite direction. Certainly historians such as Charles and Mary Beard (who were not professedly Marxist) could be categorised as economic determinists and yet their analysis of the factors motivating the South to secede in 1860 was not as “narrowly defined” as he would have it. For the tariff did play a major role in antagonising the cotton planters who had an enormous stake in trade with England, Genovese and even Marx to the contrary notwithstanding. And the Homestead Law was certainly not in the interests of a ruling class that was based largely on latifundia-type labour, a wasteful sort of labour which, together with a one-crop economy, burned up land quickly and helped generate competition between North and South for frontier areas. The spread of homesteading certainly did offer a threat to the South.

Part of the problem of Professor Genovese seems to be his obvious lack of understanding of the basics of a capitalist system. Even his attempt to label the southern slave economy bears this out although he does correctly show that it was certainly not feudal, as so many professed Marxists maintain. Unfortunately, despite his grasp of the form feudalism, he declares that economy to be as different from capitalism as it was from feudalism. In fact the ante-bellum South had a system of plantation capitalism. True, the relationships were not [wage-labour and capital] but, rather, chattel-slave labour and capital (although there were many wage-slaves too). Nevertheless, unlike the classical systems of slavery and of serfdom, production was organised for sale on the market with view to profit. The production of cotton, tobacco, and (following the government’s ban on slave-importation) slaves themselves, was not carried on primarily for the use of the ruling class. A backward and inefficient type of capitalism, yes. But nevertheless capitalism.

Harry Morrison

(World Socialist Party of the United States)

Blogger's Note:

Not sure what happened but this review was a bit garbled in places and there were no corrections in a later issue of the Socialist Standard. It happens.

World View: The Blind Lead the Blind (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 16 October, the largest single gathering of black people in history took place in Washington DC. Over 400,000 mainly black males had travelled the length and breadth of the United States to throng the Mall from the Washington Memorial to Capitol Hill at the bequest of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the black separatist organisation The Nation of Islam.

The event had been widely publicised as the “Million Man March" and billed as a "Holy Day of Atonement, Reconciliation and Restoration”. In brief, African-American males—for women, Latinos and Asians had not been invited—were being called upon to apologise to their wives (68 percent of whom are single parents) for the errors of their ways, to reconcile themselves to the "fact" that black males alone are responsible for the drugs and crime that plagues their communities, and to renew their covenant with God and one another.

In his two-and-a-half-hour long speech to the crowd. Farrakhan urged those present to recognise "wrongs done" and to “make amends", to apologise for offending "against the creator", to take "personal responsibility" for their “own circumstances" and to "go home and join some church, mosque or synagogue".

Nowhere did Farrakhan make the link between drug abuse, crime, poverty and capitalism. If anything, his plea for self-atonement and for black men to admit they are their own worst enemies only confounded elsewhere the arguments of white supremacists that black men are sub-human.

Furthermore, his speech suggested that the social ills he elaborated on afflicted only black people, when, in fact, poverty and its manifestations respect no colour in the US, as many white families can be found living a slum existence at the bottom of the social ladder.

Manning Marable, writing about the "Million Man March” for the Guardian, said as much when he pointed out that "the single most important reality of American society in the 90s is the polarisation of classes, the unprecedented rise in income and profits among a small minority of American households, and the expansion of social misery, falling incomes and inequality for the majority” (16 October).

Had Farrakhan made a similar observation, and revealed that between 1980 and 1992, for instance, the real average income for the lowest 25 percent of US families fell from $12,359 to $11.530, and that during the same period the real average income for the 25 percent at the top of the social ladder rose from $78,884 to $91,369, then he would have made a statement that might have convinced a wider audience.

Farrakhan, however, was not out to confront the capitalist system. His Nation of Islam organisation actually advocates a form of “petty capitalism”. What he did do was help re-emphasise some of the prejudices that have helped keep capitalism in the ascendancy. Farrakhan, for example, is a fervent opponent of gay and lesbian rights and condemns demands by black women’s groups for full equality, social empowerment and reproductive rights. A few days prior to his "Holy Day" he even told one TV interviewer that jews were “bloodsuckers" who had exploited blacks and that Judaism was a “gutter religion”.

The "real evil" he sees as "white supremacy”, and it is as a buffer to this that he founded the Nation of Islam, a 1.5 million strong organisation that preaches a gospel of separatism and racial pride. Its ideological essence argues Marable is “black nationalism, the rejection of white institutions and multiracial alliances".

While it is perhaps true that the black American underclass “represents . . . one of the most thoroughly atomised societies that has existed”, as Francis Fukuyama states in his recent work Trust The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, such an obscene grievance will never be challenged by inward-looking solutions such as self-atonement and the establishment of a “nation within a nation", "a domestic colony within the capitalist US" (to borrow Marable's words).

The task for black males in the US is no more to enlist in some black separatist group than it is for black women to "stay at home and pray with the children", as Farrakhan suggested.

Impoverished and oppressed

The fact of the matter is that there are as many impoverished and oppressed white Americans as their black counterparts. And there is more that unites the two as exploited workers, existing as a single class, with the same basic needs and desires, than can ever divide them along racial or cultural lines.

Furthermore, contrary to Farrakhan's ideas, it is a basic socialist principle that human behaviour is determined by the social system people are conditioned to live in. Crime and drug abuse is the individual's response to a life of alienation and inequality and will only disappear when the present social system is overthrown, not when black males join "churches, mosques and synagogues".

That black people are twice as likely as white people to be unemployed in the US, and three times as likely to be on welfare, says far less than Marable’s revelation that in 1993, the top one percent of all income earners in the US had a greater combined net wealth than the bottom 95 percent (New Statesman and Society, 27 October). The latter is indeed a greater indictment on the capitalist system than the former.

John Bissett

The Myths of Race (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few years ago, an American professor created three fictitious races, gave them names, habits and customs and asked people what they thought of them. A large proportion of those tested were hostile to the non-existent races, and thought that they should be restricted. This is typical of the confusion which surrounds the subject of Race; confusion inspired at the best by misunderstanding and at the worst by calculated malice. A man will be dispassionately scientific when he is talking about the differences between his dog and his neighbour’s, but he will be exactly the opposite when he is discussing the differences between his neighbour and himself, if the neighbour happens to have a coloured skin. The very word Race is distorted and , misused more than most others. It is, for example, common to hear talk about the White Race, the Aryan Race, the British Race—all of which are different, indeed contradictory, ways of using the word.

A first step in clearing this confusion is to realise that the word Race is useful only in so far as it is restricted to a concept in the science of biology. It cannot be used for a political, or sociological, or historical, concept—although this happens too often.

Biology is concerned with the study of life and its processes, their classification and reduction, to order. The basis of the system of classification was laid down in the eighteenth century by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus; from this basis an efficient system has been evolved. Millions of distinct species—some living, some extinct—have now been defined, and their relationships with other species identified. And the work is still going on.

This system of classification originally depended wholly upon physical characteristics — stature, type of hair, skin colour and so forth, The rise of other sciences—of genetics (the study of heredity) and biochemistry (the chemistry of living organisms) in the present century has provided other means, which may turn out to be more useful.

The basic unit of biological classification is the species—a unit, of plants or animals, which can interbreed and so can form a single, natural breeding population. All existing men and women belong to the species homo sapiens. But as we all know, human beings, just like any other species, are not all exactly alike. The physical differences between, say, a Senegalese Negro and a fair haired, blue eyed Swede are all too obvious; they are, moreover, differences which have been inherited and which can be passed on to another generation.

It is clear, then, that the human race can be divided, on the basis of physical characteristics, into subspecies—into races. A race, says one biologist, is “a group of related intermarrying individuals, a population which differs from other populations in the relative commonness of certain hereditary traits.” But when we try to elaborate on this we encounter some important questions which show up our original proposition in a rather more doubtful light.

We meet these questions immediately we try to divide people on the basis of their colour. Any large gathering of “white” people is bound to include a variety of skins, from chalky white (considered to be very undesirable!) to swarthy. Any large gathering of Negroes will include many whose skins are not black, but varying shades of brown, some of them actually lighter than many of those who are considered white ”. Many “white” people have physical traits—a heavy mouth, a flat nose, fuzzy hair—which are supposed to be the identifying marks of a Negro and many Negroes have physical traits which are supposed to be exclusive to “whites ”.

We can extend the questions even farther. Where do we fit in those people in South East Asia, such as the Malays, who appear to be the result of a cross between ”brown” and “yellow” ancestors? Then, outside the field of skin colour, how do we classify the white Europeans who show clear evidence of racial mixing—for example those who bear remnants of the periodical raids into Europe, centuries ago, by the Mongolian hordes? There are many more such questions which, although they do not deny that differences exist between people, expose the absurdity of laying down rigid lines upon which mankind can be divided.

It is not surprising, then, that the very scientists who have tried to classify man should produce such widely differing estimates of the number of races into which he can be divided. Linnaeus said that there were three; Morton thirty-two; Crawford sixty-two; Gliddon one hundred and fifty. It is also not surprising that the same difficulty has afflicted those whose interest in the matter is anything but scientific.

In the United States there has always been confusion over the legal definition of a Negro. In Maine in 1852 a person having one-sixteenth “African blood” was held not to be a Negro for the purposes of intermarriage. In 1910 in Louisiana a coloured person was defined as anyone who had “an appreciable amount of Negro blood.” (What is an “ appreciable amount”?) The Official Census in 1890 applied the term “Black” only to those who had three-quarters or more “black blood”. The 1920 Census tried to distinguish between “full blooded” Negroes (who were classed as “Black”) and those having a proportion of “white blood” (who were returned as “Mulattoes”). The 1930 Census instructed its enumerators to return as Negro those having one half or more “Negro blood”; by the Census of 1940 anyone of mixed white and Negro parentage was classed as Negro.

The definition of Negro varies from state to state. Some (Alabama and Arkansas) say that anyone having Negro ancestors, however remote, is coloured. Others define their non-white population according to the amount of “black blood” in them; of these states, Florida and Louisiana require one-sixteenth, Mississippi and Maryland one-eighth. Thus a person in Louisiana whose Negro ancestors ended with his great-great grandfather is classed as coloured. But he can legally change into a white man simply by moving across the border into Mississippi, which sets the limit at his great-grandfather.

Before the war the Nazis conveniently modified their ideas of racial purity so that their Italian and Japanese allies could be included in the Master Race. The South African government (whose official, legal definition says that a white person is anyone who is “generally accepted” as such) has for commercial reasons admitted the Japanese into the “White" ranks, although at present the Chinese are excluded. .

Whatever the race maniacs say, a “pure” race is almost an impossibility; it could only exist among a few small isolated groups who by virtue of their remoteness have been able to inbreed for generations. Man has spread all over the Earth during his life, and wherever he has gone he has interbred, swamping any “pure” races that may have existed. There is hardly a country—certainly there is no modern country— which is not now a racial melting pot. To talk, therefore, of Race as something which is rigidly definable is nonsense. To support such theories with a political policy of discrimination, suppression and extermination is pernicious.

But in face of all the facts the racists carry on; one of their most popular arguments today is that Negroes are mentally inferior to white people, and that the white race has been responsible for all the cultural achievements of the modern world. One of the happy hunting grounds of such theorists are the intelligence tests which have been carried out in the United States, and which usually show the Negro scoring lower than the white person.

Even if we accept the validity of I.Q. tests as a measure of mental capacity, it does not' follow from their results that the Negroes are inferior. To begin with, we must take account of the fact that nowhere in the United States are educational facilities and opportunities for Negroes equal to those for white children. In the South, where the mass of Negroes still live, the discrepancy is especially wide. Yet even without taking this into account, the fact is the tests have not demonstrated that skin colour has anything to do with intelligence.

One of the most important—and widely quoted—of these tests was one which was given to nearly two million United States Army recruits in 1917/18. Although the results put the Negro at the bottom of the IQ scale, they also showed Negroes from urban areas in the North on average scoring higher than white recruits from some states in the South. Of the other tests, those carried out by S. D. Porteus draw results from many areas of the world, including Hawaii, Australia and parts of Africa. Again, although the coloured people were generally lower, the results were uneven; some of the most primitive groups, for various reasons, actually surpassed other, more culturally advanced groups. In the Fifties, tests on Negro children who had moved from the South to New York City and to Philadelphia showed that their I.Q. went up with the length of time they had been away from the South.

In any case, all of these tests can only have a limited usefulness. Scientists have not been able to devise a means of testing innate mental capacities, and what tests they have devised have not even been able to separate innate from acquired capacities. Some tests, for example, have discovered that Africans who could not readily recognise diagrams and pictures when they were drawn on paper had no difficulty when the same shapes were cut out in the more familiar ivory or leather. Swazi natives were found to be unable to arrange coloured pegs into a simple pattern, although they frequently planted trees in that very same pattern.

The other popular argument — that coloured people are inferior because their cultural achievements do not match those of the white race — has gathered a certain amount of support from people who claim that North West Europe has alone been responsible for modern civilisation. But the history of the human race started a long time before Europe became civilised; while the people there were still primitive savages, coloured races in parts of what are now India and China had developed civilisations with a high standard of cultural achievement.

These civilisations rose and declined for the very same reasons as those which later allowed and encouraged developments in Europe. Civilisations depend for their life upon many influences — primarily economic, but also geographical, climatic, historical. Where such influences are favourable, settled life can take root and flourish. Where they are not favourable, it is a different story; there are many areas in the world which even the so-called Superior Races cannot tame and which remain deadly wildernesses.

Culture is not something innate, something which human beings are born with. It is something which they acquire, in reaction to their external conditions. These conditions affect people of all colours; some Negroes are undoubtedly culturally backward but then so are the Poor Whites in the American South, and so are the Hillbillies of Kentucky and Tennessee. Not all white countries are in the forefront of modern culture: some are distinctly backward and may soon be overtaken by some of the new African states. Culture is only one of the characteristics man has acquired during his lifetime; it can be acquired by all people, whatever their race or colour. It has nothing to do with man's innate capacities, which are probably not much different now from what they were eighty thousand years ago.

The racist argues against this. At its highest, his case confuses the innate characteristics of man with the acquired. At its lowest, his case is a mass of evasions and distortions, which in the end can only be asserted by oppression. The only way to avoid this morass of confusion is to subject the racist’s arguments to a searching examination. This is bound to show them up for the pernicious sham that they are, and to illuminate the fact that there is no reason, in biology or elsewhere, why men of all colours, shapes and sizes should not live in harmony and co-operation.

Voice From The Back: Informing the people (allegedly) (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Informing the people (allegedly)

[In New York City] a small trucking company known as Advertising in Motion has 15 vehicles with several big windows, each displaying a different advert every seven seconds. And now there is the night crawler, Technique Mirage, which to the cynical and busy New York is just one more piece of aggravation. It trundles around flashing adverts on the sides of buildings such as the Empire State or St Patrick’s Cathedral. Financial Mail on Sunday, 8 February.

Progress

According to the New York Times last November, after the Chrysler Corporation spent more than half a billion dollars to convert a car factory in Newark, Delaware, to produce big Dodge Durango sport utility vehicles, it held a party in September to open the new assembly line. Delaware’s political leaders stood with Chrysler’s chairman on a podium decorated with red and white bunting and waved victoriously to hundreds of cheering auto workers whose jobs had been saved. When the Durango went on sale this fall, dealers could not keep enough in stock. And Chrysler, which barely breaks even on ordinary passenger cars, began to pocket $8,000 in profit for every Durango sold. There is just one problem: The Dodge Durango has a much worse environmental record than the Dodge Intrepid, the full-sized sedan that the factory used to build. The Durango gasoline consumption and output of carbon dioxide, a principal cause of global warming, are 57 percent higher than those of the Intrepid. And the Durango emissions of nitrogen oxides, the main cause of smog, are twice the level of the car it replaced.

That’ll teach them!

New figures from researcher at the London School of Economics, calculated for the Commons Education Select Committee, estimate a student paying full fees and his or her own living costs with no parental support will leave university with a £15,000 debt which could take 27 years to repay. Mail on Sunday, 22 February.

A black Mickey

In his office at Team Disney headquarters, Reggie Whitehead, vice-president of Special Markets, admitted that the sales pitch to the Afro-American community had broadly failed. “We haven’t made a good job of making Disney relevant,” says Whitehead, ruefully pointing out that blacks, even more than whites, would benefit from the realise from urban reality that a Disney holiday offers. “When Mickey and Minnie attend job fairs at black colleges they wear traditional African costumes,” Howard notes proudly. To ram home the “diversity” message, cast members are issued with a calendar that lists, for example, Black Poetry Day and First Female FBI Agents Day. There is a pecuniary as well as a moral motive to this. The real magic of Disney is its skilful conversion of dreams into dollars. In 1995 the company worldwide earned $13 billion. American blacks now generate $400 billion a year. “And that is bigger than the economy of Mexico,” murmurs the lady co-ordinator of the BET project, which intends to rollercoast a healthy proportion of those greenbacks into Mickey’s pockets. Guardian, 15 January.

Quote

"My formula for success is rise early, work late, and strike oil". Paul Getty.

They were expendable

South Africa’s high mine accident rate and the dangers of high dust levels in coal mines remained issues of great concern, Dick Bakker, the acting director-general of minerals and energy, said [Johannesburg Star, last November]. He told the parliamentary minerals and energy committee that between 1994 and last year [1996], transport-related accidents accounted for 49 percent of the 1484 fatalities in the mining industry while rockfalls and rockburts accounted for 47.7 percent. Environmental and health factors accounted for 3.2 percent.

Thou shalt pay

The number of households cut off from a gas supply because of debt has almost doubled in the two years since competition was introduced, according to the figures yesterday from the Gas Consumers Council. In 1995, BG cut off 14,511 customers, whereas in 1997 its successor, British Gas Trading, disconnected 29,767 consumers. Guardian, 12 February.

For the birds

Pigeons at the Sellafield nuclear plant are so contaminated that a thousand of them are being exterminated. Guardian, 12 March.

New Deal

“Any person refusing a New Deal option without good cause will first have their whole benefit suspended for 2 weeks followed by a 4 week period if they refuse again to take up the option after adjudication.” TEN Briefing, July 1997, p2.

Film Review: Jumping the Broom (2011)

Film Review from the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jumping the Broom is a black (and you can bet there’s no pun intended) comedy about class distinction in America’s black community.

Sabrina Watson (Paula Patton) a successful lawyer, from a wealthy family, falls for Jason (Laz Alonso), a Wall Street wiz-kid, whose mother Pam (Loretta Devine) is a postal worker. Tensions flare the day before the wedding, when the two families meet for the first time. Pam feels ultra defensive, especially when she observes the Watson’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, which she compares to the Kennedy compound. When she says grace at supper, the evening before the wedding, Pam sets the tone for the movie by being blatantly insulting.

The crux of the matter becomes her insistence that the ‘Happy Couple’ “Jump the Broom” This dates back to when African slaves were not allowed to marry and jumped over a broom, which was the equivalent of a ceremony.

Mrs. Watson (Angela Bassett) is totally opposed to this on the grounds that it was a slave ritual. She informs Pam that her family had never been slaves and, in fact, once owned them. That blacks themselves, sometimes, had black slaves is a little-known fact of American history. Class distinctions and the hostilities they create reach boiling point, causing family secrets, such as Sabrina’s real parentage, to be revealed. Disgusted with everything, the bride refuses to marry and flees the scene.

This is where the movie, which is Salim Akil’s directional debut, breaks down. When everyone’s been rubbed the wrong way and all hitherto concealed feelings are in the open, it becomes kiss and make up and “lets give the audience a happy ending” time. This is hardly believable of any family in such a previously volatile situation. What is believable is that, if capitalists invest in anything, they will want as good a return as they can get. If it means giving the public an unrealistic ending, they will do so.

There is nothing new about class distinctions based on money, nor hereditary titles among America’s black community. In 1948 when Nat King Cole married Maria Ellington, her wealthy aunt, Dr. Charlotte Hawkins, shunned him because, although wealthy at the time, Cole came from a poor family. Dr. Hawkins, coming from a more prosperous one, had founded America’s first finishing school for African American ladies and boasted of her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. When the happy couple returned from their honeymoon, Hawkins paid for a banquet in their honour as she considered it her duty, but refused to attend.

Capitalism is as divisive as it is corrupting whether the community be black, white, red, yellow or any other colour, economics will always cause distinctions between people.

Steve Shannon