TrotskistMarx
19th April 2012, 06:19
DEAR FRIENDS, READ THIS ARTICLE ABOUT THE NEED OF A BLACK NATIONALIST REVOLUTION AS PART OF A SOCIALIST REVOLUTION !!
On his return to the U.S., Sy spearheaded an effort to create a revolutionary Trotskyist organization, first by trying to convert the IS politically and organizationally. The goal could not be accomplished without major political advances that would inevitably provoke internal disputes. Some of these became factional battles, which helped concretize the necessary turn.
The first major advance was over the question of the Black struggle for liberation. What was the character of the Black population in the U.S. – a nation? a race? a class? – and with what strategy would Black people win equality and freedom?
Sy wrote a document, “Black Liberation,” for the 1972 I.S. convention that embodied his search for revolutionary Trotskyism. It was counterposed to the I.S.’s existing position, an amalgam of the most prominent views on the left: integrationism and nationalism. The integrationism perspective rejected the Jim Crow lie of “separate but equal” treatment of Blacks, but it embraced liberal illusions. “Integration” into the dominant capitalist economy and culture could only end up being another way of accepting the status quo. Black nationalism, on the other hand, recognized that racist oppression had formed Blacks into a distinct people, but proposed the way forward to be a struggle of Blacks of all classes.
Against both these perspectives, Sy argued that Blacks formed an oppressed race-caste, containing people of all classes but based on the super exploitation of the Black working class. He advanced a simple but bold thesis: that Black oppression was characterized by the denial of bourgeois-democratic rights, and that because racist oppression was a fundamental part of capitalism only the workers’ revolution could win these rights in the process of achieving socialism.
The American working class now included a large component of Black workers, and much of its militancy was spearheaded by their struggles. Thus the democratic and class struggles were already interrelated in reality. Not only was the fight for socialism necessary for Black people to secure genuine equality, but the working class as a whole could not fulfill its material interests without championing the anti-racist struggle. Sy wrote:
Blacks differ from most other minorities in that they have never been permitted to achieve most of the gains and rights of bourgeois democracy. ... By law, custom and force the chasm between blacks and others has been maintained. ... The bourgeois democratic revolutionary gains for blacks cannot “evolve” as they did for others, but must be achieved through revolution and the fusing with class-wide or socialist demands. There is little more room at the top, or the middle, in capitalism – only the bottom. ...
The coupling of the black bourgeois democratic revolution with class socialist demands can be the flame that ignites the American Revolution. The confluence of the bourgeois democratic revolution for the Russian peasant and the socialist revolution for the Russian worker ignited the Bolshevik Revolution. The even more entwined and fused revolutions of black and white workers on the American scene will be an even greater historical step.
This was in effect a deepening and updating of the strategy of permanent revolution that had originally been fashioned by Trotsky to advance the struggle for proletarian power in Tsarist Russia, counterposing it to the “orthodox Marxist” notion that the fight for socialism should be postponed until a stage of liberal bourgeois democracy was reached. Trotsky later applied that strategy to broader situations internationally, including the Black struggle in the U.S. Sy’s advocacy of the Trotskyist method on this vital question had wider implications. For example, Puerto Ricans in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and Mexicans mainly in the Southwest, also faced extreme racism. Largely inspired by the Black struggle, they were engaged in a similar radicalization. The permanent revolution perspective was also vital to a solution to the deeply entrenched oppression of women and gays. If socialism was the only real answer to all types of oppression under capitalism, then promoting revolutionary class consciousness was the primary task. (The most thorough presentation of Sy’s analysis as it developed is his pamphlet, Marxism, Interracialism and the Black Struggle.)
At the 1972 convention a majority bloc was formed that included Sy and his co-thinkers, the Taber-led group of ex-SDSers based in Chicago, plus groupings around Kim Moody and Steve Zeluck in New York. The bloc was vaguely united around the goals of cohering the I.S. politically and tightening it organizationally, in opposition to the more politically conservative leadership headed by Joel Geier and the group’s habitual sloppiness.
Sy and Moody had previously written a joint article which, among other things, argued for the use of transitional demands (class-wide political demands on the state), not just calls for economistic, day-to-day reforms, in the trade unions. (“The Unions under Monopoly Capitalism,” International Socialist, May 1970.) At that time Sy taught that the Transitional Program drafted by Trotsky was a handy tool for presenting the content of socialism without actually using the word. This was not a pedagogical adaptation to mass consciousness but a political adaptation to reformism. Unlike Moody and Zeluck, however, Sy was moving away from that perspective. The differences then were barely visible, and as the leader of the new majority bloc, Sy was elected National Secretary of the I.S., replacing Geier, and moved to Detroit to work in the group’s national headquarters.
FULL ARTICLE: http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/sylandy81.html
.
On his return to the U.S., Sy spearheaded an effort to create a revolutionary Trotskyist organization, first by trying to convert the IS politically and organizationally. The goal could not be accomplished without major political advances that would inevitably provoke internal disputes. Some of these became factional battles, which helped concretize the necessary turn.
The first major advance was over the question of the Black struggle for liberation. What was the character of the Black population in the U.S. – a nation? a race? a class? – and with what strategy would Black people win equality and freedom?
Sy wrote a document, “Black Liberation,” for the 1972 I.S. convention that embodied his search for revolutionary Trotskyism. It was counterposed to the I.S.’s existing position, an amalgam of the most prominent views on the left: integrationism and nationalism. The integrationism perspective rejected the Jim Crow lie of “separate but equal” treatment of Blacks, but it embraced liberal illusions. “Integration” into the dominant capitalist economy and culture could only end up being another way of accepting the status quo. Black nationalism, on the other hand, recognized that racist oppression had formed Blacks into a distinct people, but proposed the way forward to be a struggle of Blacks of all classes.
Against both these perspectives, Sy argued that Blacks formed an oppressed race-caste, containing people of all classes but based on the super exploitation of the Black working class. He advanced a simple but bold thesis: that Black oppression was characterized by the denial of bourgeois-democratic rights, and that because racist oppression was a fundamental part of capitalism only the workers’ revolution could win these rights in the process of achieving socialism.
The American working class now included a large component of Black workers, and much of its militancy was spearheaded by their struggles. Thus the democratic and class struggles were already interrelated in reality. Not only was the fight for socialism necessary for Black people to secure genuine equality, but the working class as a whole could not fulfill its material interests without championing the anti-racist struggle. Sy wrote:
Blacks differ from most other minorities in that they have never been permitted to achieve most of the gains and rights of bourgeois democracy. ... By law, custom and force the chasm between blacks and others has been maintained. ... The bourgeois democratic revolutionary gains for blacks cannot “evolve” as they did for others, but must be achieved through revolution and the fusing with class-wide or socialist demands. There is little more room at the top, or the middle, in capitalism – only the bottom. ...
The coupling of the black bourgeois democratic revolution with class socialist demands can be the flame that ignites the American Revolution. The confluence of the bourgeois democratic revolution for the Russian peasant and the socialist revolution for the Russian worker ignited the Bolshevik Revolution. The even more entwined and fused revolutions of black and white workers on the American scene will be an even greater historical step.
This was in effect a deepening and updating of the strategy of permanent revolution that had originally been fashioned by Trotsky to advance the struggle for proletarian power in Tsarist Russia, counterposing it to the “orthodox Marxist” notion that the fight for socialism should be postponed until a stage of liberal bourgeois democracy was reached. Trotsky later applied that strategy to broader situations internationally, including the Black struggle in the U.S. Sy’s advocacy of the Trotskyist method on this vital question had wider implications. For example, Puerto Ricans in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and Mexicans mainly in the Southwest, also faced extreme racism. Largely inspired by the Black struggle, they were engaged in a similar radicalization. The permanent revolution perspective was also vital to a solution to the deeply entrenched oppression of women and gays. If socialism was the only real answer to all types of oppression under capitalism, then promoting revolutionary class consciousness was the primary task. (The most thorough presentation of Sy’s analysis as it developed is his pamphlet, Marxism, Interracialism and the Black Struggle.)
At the 1972 convention a majority bloc was formed that included Sy and his co-thinkers, the Taber-led group of ex-SDSers based in Chicago, plus groupings around Kim Moody and Steve Zeluck in New York. The bloc was vaguely united around the goals of cohering the I.S. politically and tightening it organizationally, in opposition to the more politically conservative leadership headed by Joel Geier and the group’s habitual sloppiness.
Sy and Moody had previously written a joint article which, among other things, argued for the use of transitional demands (class-wide political demands on the state), not just calls for economistic, day-to-day reforms, in the trade unions. (“The Unions under Monopoly Capitalism,” International Socialist, May 1970.) At that time Sy taught that the Transitional Program drafted by Trotsky was a handy tool for presenting the content of socialism without actually using the word. This was not a pedagogical adaptation to mass consciousness but a political adaptation to reformism. Unlike Moody and Zeluck, however, Sy was moving away from that perspective. The differences then were barely visible, and as the leader of the new majority bloc, Sy was elected National Secretary of the I.S., replacing Geier, and moved to Detroit to work in the group’s national headquarters.
FULL ARTICLE: http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/sylandy81.html
.