Was The Civil Rights Movement A Black Bourgeois Revolution??

[Rakhmetov]

Surely, the Black working class took part and spearheaded the movement but what did they exactly gain???? Meanwhile, the black leadership have gotten fat and rich.

[Jazzhands]

Surely, the Black working class took part and spearheaded the movement but what did they exactly gain???? Meanwhile, the black leadership have gotten fat and rich.

They gained equality of oppression. The ruling class saw fit to enslave the African people for cheap labor. Then once the slaves were freed, they sought to divide the white and black proletarians from each other and divert their attention from the oppression of capital. This resulted in the Jim Crow Laws. Some black people like Paul Robeson and Huey Newton recognized that racism was caused by the ruling class and they joined/founded proletarian revolutionary leftist parties. The others, the mainstream blacks, did not recognize it to the same extent, although they did realize the presence of The Man. Of course, they didn't know where or who The Man was.

But all of the black working class rallied together and achieved formalized civil rights. They achieved equality of oppression (the right to be oppressed the same amount as whites), but as anyone from the city will tell you, blacks still are socially and economically underdeveloped compared to whites. So the next step is a revolution against their socio-economic status as proletarians.

In short, yes.

[hobo8675309]

black leadership never got rich until modern times

[mykittyhasaboner]

No...it was a "civil rights movment" which won concessions from the government to make racist policies 'unconstitutional' or whatever. There was no revolutionary movement....and I don't see how there could be a "black" bourgeois revolution.

Certainly there are sections of the bourgeoise opposed to racism and of course in the past, slavery. These members of the bourgeoisie likely supported the civil rights movment, just like organizations reprsentative of black workers (panthers, etc).

[Os Cangaceiros]

Viewing the Civil Rights movement as a "black bourgeois revolution" seems really, really reductionist and ahistorical.

[HEAD ICE]

As already stated, it ended formalized discrimination in the US. This is a noble goal and a great achievement. It was a cross class movement, however the most powerful segments of the civil rights movement were not people like George Washington Carver who called upon black people to become petit-bourgeois but Malcolm X and Martin Luther King who organized outside the realm of electoral politics and lead a social movement not a voter registration drive. Neither were revolutionaries but their historical contexts are important and they are both positive figures in history.

Many people say Martin Luther King was more successful than Malcolm X because he was "less scary to white people" or whatever nonsense. I say the reason Martin Luther King was more successful was because his activism was based on a class interpretation, even if it was elementary. He understood that the racial order was a construct of elite class interests and his activism reflected that. To repeat he never endorsed a single candidate and cared less about electing whatever candidate to congress. In decadent capitalism, civil rights can not be won through the ballot box. Instead, it was an autonomous social struggle that the state responded to by ending state sanctioned discrimination.

Martin Luther King scared the elite and he died organizing the poor. He pointed out early in the war in Vietnam that it was a war on the poor, and he was reviled for it. Not so much his opposition to the war but the basis in which his opposition was rooted.

The Civil Rights Movement was a cross class movement, it didn't achieve racial equality, but it accomplished a whole lot and the victories can not be discounted. The next step is international workers revolution.

[Rakhmetov]

Why so??? Before the civil rights movement there were no rich black bourgeois. After they cropped up. Also look at South
Africa. There are black bourgeois now in S.A.

[The Red Next Door]

I think it a little unfair, to just broad paint the whole civil rights movement as such, before none of these black bourgeoisie; you see today, was not apart of that class then. They were apart of the working class, now days most of them are misguided bourgeoisies progressives.

[RED DAVE]

The Civil Rights Movement was a cross class movement, it didn't achieve racial equality, but it accomplished a whole lot and the victories can not be discounted. The next step is international workers revolution.This is basically correct. There always was a black bourgeoisie, but it was, essentially, a petit-bourgeoisie. Only when a small group of these people gained access to capital did a proper black bourgeoisie, still very small emerge.

The heart of the civil rights movement was the working class. They were organized in unions, churches and community groups but not, alas, as a class. Also, the Black Panthers were emphatically not a working class based organization, and they eventually developed a revolutionary theory based on the lumpen proletariat. In the 1970s, a few small groups like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Dodge Revolutionary Movement, etc., reached full working class consciousness, but, just about then, the wave of working class militancy of the early and mid-70s faded.

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

It offered more positive lessons and less negative lessons than May 1968 in France did.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Point of fact:

There were "rich black people" long before the Civil Rights movement.

Madam C.J. Walker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam_C._J._Walker) was a millionaire and she died in 1919. She was also a supporter/funder of the NAACP.

[S.Artesian]

This is basically correct. There always was a black bourgeoisie, but it was, essentially, a petit-bourgeoisie. Only when a small group of these people gained access to capital did a proper black bourgeoisie, still very small emerge.

The heart of the civil rights movement was the working class. They were organized in unions, churches and community groups but not, alas, as a class. Also, the Black Panthers were emphatically not a working class based organization, and they eventually developed a revolutionary theory based on the lumpen proletariat. In the 1970s, a few small groups like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Dodge Revolutionary Movement, etc., reached full working class consciousness, but, just about then, the wave of working class militancy of the early and mid-70s faded.

RED DAVE


The origin of the civil rights movement in the 2nd half of the twentieth century was in the mechanization of Southern agriculture that began right before WW2, was accelerated throughout the war. This mechanization made the old tenant/share-cropping relations of production and property obsolete. It was those relations that Jim Crow meant to enforce, preserve, and protect-- binding black labor as an impoverished, and near-indentured rural work force.

Coincident with the transformation of Southern agriculture, and part and parcel of the recovery of US capitalism that involved that same transformation, was the movement of black labor off the land and into the industrial centers of North and South. "Free labor" means free access to labor by capital, unencumbered by the archaic restrictions of segregation. Of course, capital can initiate a process, but, wedded, and welded, as it is to private property, it never completes or fulfills the process.

While the appearance of the struggle in its earlier manifestations was about equality, civil rights, voting rights, the essence of the struggle, its core, is the condition of black labor, and the changing relations of that labor to the whole of US capitalist reproduction.

The civil rights movement was never a "bourgeois" movement. It never was about establishing, nor was it possible to establish, a black bourgeoisie as a class since no black bourgeoisie exists as a class; it exists as individuals, as agents, as under-represented elements of the bourgeoisie. It does not exist with any special relationship, any exclusivity, any unique power to exploit black labor.

To say the Black Panthers were emphatically not a working class organization and then contrast them with the LRBW [or DRUM, the founding section of the LRBW] misses the point. In fact at one time in Detroit DRUM and the Black Panthers shared the same memberships and even some leaders.

It also misses the point in the historical development of organizations. The membership of the Black Panther Party was no more lumpenproletariat than the membership of any organization. To even use the word lumpenproletariat to describe the social conditions of African-Americans in th US post WW2 is nonsense. The super-exploitation, the higher unemployment, the increased physical oppression by the state are indexes to the "core status" of black labor as labor, as workers.

Unfortunately, the Panthers running up against the limits of their ideology of "community control," suffering tremendous physical assaults by police forces, could not make that critical recognition and transition as to the economic forces driving the movement. Instead the Panthers themselves embarked on a glorification of "lumpen-proletariat," which was not ever the social condition of black-Americans as a class.

The LRBW was the most important moment of organization of black labor since the creation of the "Union Leagues" and "Loyal Leagues" in the Reconstruction South after the Civil War.

The LRBW certainly achieved a level of class consciousness, and class organization way ahead of everything else at that time. But it ran smack into the mobilization of the bourgeoisie for their offensive after 1973, after suppressing the strike wave that peaked in 1974. That offensive was of course intensified automation, reducing the numbers of workers, liquidating assets, breaking unions, transferring wealth up the social ladder, rolling back any and every gain made in the 1945-1970 period. It's an offensive that has pretty much been sustained for 35 years.

Good book on the League is Detroit: I Do Mind Dying.

As for DNZ's assertions that the civil rights movement holds more positive and negative lessons that France 68, well let's have DNZ open his books and display his accounting to all of us.

Give us those positive and negative lessons from each.

[hobo8675309]

the would never be an african american president or wealthy hip hop star untill at least 20 years after civil right movement.

[Invader Zim]

the would never be an african american president or wealthy hip hop star untill at least 20 years after civil right movement.

Civil rights movement draws to a close in 1968. Artists such as Grand Master Flash were making music long before 1988.

[RadioRaheem84]

Civil Rights was a staple of the American Communist Party, was it not? I am thinking of the Scottboro Trial when Civil Rights were still taboo to the liberals.