A new stage of Negro struggle opened the same year as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Many a radical who acknowledges the high Stage of world development by the outbreak of the latter, refuses so much as to mention the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the same breath. For those who think that the snobbery is due to the fact that the Hungarian Revolution culminated in such recognizable proletarian forms of struggle as Workers' Councils as against Montgomery's continuous mass meetings are blind entirely to the underlying philosophy of both - a new type of humanism - which likewise remains unacknowledged by these self-proclaimed "vanguardists."
The truth is old radicals are forever blind to the positive, the subjective new dimensions of any spontaneous struggle. Each struggle is fought out in separateness, and remains isolated. While the way to hell may be paved with Little Rocks, the way to a new society must have totally new foundations not alone in action but in thought.
The Second American Revolution was left unfinished by the Emancipation Proclamation which straddled the fence between human liberation and a union of states. It will be kept in the same state of suspended animation by all who think that tokenism - the appointing to high Administration posts of a few Negroes - can meet the challenge of 100 years of struggle for Freedom NQW.
The President may make headlines in April, 1963, as he did during his 1960 election campaign, by a solicitous phone call to the imprisoned Martin Luther King's family. All the more damning then is the true measure of tokenism: the Administration's tolerance of police dog attacks against vote registrants in Mississippi and Alabama. In today's unleashing of the hounds we see more than the shades of Simon Legree chasing Little Eva across the ice. We see the killer dogs of Hitler's Storm Troops and of the Communist "vopos" guarding the Berlin wall.
As the Freedom NOW movement expands from the struggle for desgregation to the fight for voting rights, it enlists the active support of Northern artists: comedian Dick Gregory in Greenwood, Miss.; Michigan painter G. Ray Kerciu in Oxford, Miss.; Al Hibblerin Birmingham, Ala.
The Birmingham outburst is not only the latest incident in which Rev. Shuttlesworth continues to play a leading role. It is the beginning of a most fundamental chapter in the freedom struggle because it involves the South's most industrialized city.
American civilization has been on trial from the day of its birth. It hollow slogans of democracy have been found wanting from the very start of the labor and Negro struggles at the beginning of the 19th century. The first appearance of trade unions and workingmen's parties in the United States paralleled the greatest of the slave revolts and the emergence of the Abolitionist movement. This parallelism is the characteristic feature of American class struggle. Only when these two great movements coalesce do we reach decisive turning points in United States development. In drawing together all the lines of theory and struggle for freedom which have gone into the making of the American mind, we have seen such a climax in the rise of the CIO and the inevitable break from the Garvey movement, on the one hand, and from the exclusiveness of the old craft unions on the other.
The AFL-CIO's current failure seriously to relate its struggles with those of the Southern student youth is not only a result of the organizational failure of "Operation Dixie," but of the lack of a unifying philosophy. At the same time it must be clear to the young Freedom Fighters that the many separate organizations in their struggle also lack a unifying philosophy. It is wrong to think that a "coordinating committee" is all that is needed. The great forces of student youth have now been enlarged by the adult Negro workers in Greenwood and Birmingham to write today's dramatic page in Southern history. Yet this is only a manifestation of the vast forces gathering below the surface to put all of American civilization on trial. What is needed as you penetrate deeper into both the struggles and the aspirations of the Negroes is not still another organization "to coordinate" the work. What is needed is a new Humanism.
It is the unifying, philosophy of Marxist-Humanism which, in the years of our existence, has "enabled us not only to follow, support and participate in the Negro struggles,' but in some ways to anticipate their development. As one of our Freedom riders said in our pamphlet, FREEDOM RIDERS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES:
"I feel that because the Negro question has always been the most critical one in the United States, Civil Rights is the name of Freedom in this country for both black and white, and for both student and worker. Since the mid '50's there has been no other movement which has expressed such creativity and determination to be free NOW. This is why I think that whether the Freedom Rides continue, or whether the struggle to end segregation and discrimination once and for all takes a different form, the fight for freedom will not stop until we have torn up the old, from root to branch, and established truly new human relations based on new beginnings. I think that the Freedom Rides, and whatever may come after them, are a form of just such new beginnings!"
We have heard the new voices ever since 1943, the year of the growth of the National Resistance Movement in Europe, the year of the miners' strike and Negro demonstrations in the United States. For the first time in American history right in the midst of a war, a section of the proletariat and a minority grouping representing one tenth of the nation, were saying: our main enemy is at home. As has happened throughout U.S. history, an activity by the Negroes demands that all others "take sides." Whereupon the American Communists showed up on the same platform as the police and the established forces of "law and order" to demand that the demonstrators "go home."
The Negro intelligentsia, on the other hand, deaf to the new voices, were busy constructing theses and analyses for" use by Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish scholar, who was putting together a comprehensive study of the Negro, titled An American Dilemma. The dilemma, he said, arises from the contradiction between the American ideal of equality and the American reality of inequality. The only proposal he made was for the enfranchisement of the Negroes, starting with "the higher strata of the Negro population." (sic!) As we wrote then: "The appeal of the social scientist is not a challenge; it is a whimper.
"Here you have the political formula of this massive work in a nutshell! Here is a scholar who has digested the major part of the available literature on the subject of the Negro problem, who has conducted field studies and case histories, all of which lead him to uphold 'value premises' that demand the full participation of the Negro in all aspects of American life, who holds no brief for intellectual Uncle Tomism of either Negro or white variety, who says the South is as backward intellectually as economically, that its ignorance is, in fact, unique in non-fascist Western civilization, and yet so bourgeois is he that his class instinct prevails upon him to produce so impotent, so ludicrous a 'solution' as to turn the American tragedy into a Swedish farce!"
(While News & Letters did not appear until June, 1955, some of us who founded News & Letters had developed these Marxist-Humanist views of the role of the Negro in American history in 1943 and because we consider it as part of our present heritage, the views quoted here from "Negro Intellectuals in Dilemma" were reprinted in News & Letters, February, 1961.)
Too obvious to need to be told is that what was crucial in the situation were not "value premises" - either the immoral ones of the white South or the moral ones of Sweden's Gunnar Myrdal.
The way, the only way, a historic tradition can persist for a century is through being fed and nourished on economic roots deeply embedded in the community. And to get "reborn" each generation it must feed on new, national life-giving economic sustenance. This it gets now, as it did, at the turn of the century, from imperialism, reinforced by the totalitarianism in the air!
However, Myrdal would not concern us were it not for the ideological treachery of very nearly the entire talented tenth that did a great deal of the research and preparation for the work before it was published, and then, after they saw what conclusions he had drawn from their research, still praised him to the sky. Much as it may surprise those of today who are used to the conservative U.N. Undersecretary, Ralph Bunche in those years was a radical and, as such, presented the sorriest spectacle. Our review of American Dilemma continued: "The sorriest spectacle of the Negro 'talented tenth' is presented by Ralph Bunche. Mr. Bunche is critical not only of the economic, political and social status of the Negro but of all existing Negro organizations that strive to ameliorate this condition. He calls them 'philosophic and programmatic paupers.' In his pamphlet, A World View of Race, he even comes up with a solution to the Negro problem:
"The Negro must develop, therefore, a consciousness of class interest and purpose and must strive for an alliance with the white working class in a common struggle for economic and political equality and justice'."
Yet this most radical of radicals found it permissible to shelve his more radical conclusions in the Schomburg collection, while his research data are used by Mr. Myrdal for his own conservative ends. This is not at all accidental. Mr. Bunche's revolutionary thunder is no more than radicalism of the chair.
Mr. Myrdal at least did see that not only is there nothing to fear from such professorial radicalism but that a study of the one Negro leader that was part of a mass movement, Marcus Garvey, could not be entrusted to such hands. Why Mr. Myrdal himself had not undertaken "intensive historical investigation" for a study lasting four years covering 1,400 pages of text, into which the Carnegie Corporation sank a quarter of a million dollars, may remain inexplicable to most readers. But we correctly concluded then: "To anyone who is concerned about the Negro question today, this neglect of the Garvey movement has just about reached its end.
"There is stirring in the Negro people in the United States today a racial consciousness which has at present found its most extreme expression in the writings of Richard Wright. Wilfred H. Kerr, co-chairman of the Lynn Committee to Abolish Segregation in the Armed Forces, has noted the phenomenon, which calls 'Negroism.' These are portents on the horizon which can be ignored only to the peril of the labor movement."
"The self-determination therefore in which alone the Idea is, is to hear itself speak."
- Hegel
Because we did foresee the portents on the horizon of the Negro's national and international development, we foresaw the dynamism of ideas that would arise both from the American class struggles and from the African independence movements. Thus, in 1950, when once again the miners, a great proportion of whom are Negroes, came out on general strike, this time against what was later popularized as Automation, we had our ears attuned to the new Humanism. It was in the great tradition of Marxism and Abolitionism, but on a much higher historical level since the participants of the struggles of our era have absorbed the rich experiences of the last century.
This time the worker was out to abolish alienated labor under capitalism, and was searching for ways to unify within himself all his talents, manual and mental. As one Negro miner put it ; during the 1950 strike: "There is a time for praying. We do that-on Sundays. There is a time for acting. We took matters in our hands during the Depression, building up our union and seeing that our families did not starve. There is a time for thinking. The time is now. What I want to know is: how and when will the working man - all working men - have such confidence in their own abilities to make a better world that they will not let others do their thinking for them."
This desire to break with those who want to do the thinking for the workers - the labor leaders made into labor bureaucrats - led to the break between the rank and file and John L. Lewis. When he asked them to return to work, they remained out, demanding answers to the new man-killer, the continuous miner. They didn't win, it is true, but the process of doing their own thinking on the question of Automation started something entirely new on the part of workers in all other industries, and not only on the question of labor, but on civil rights and African revolutions, on war and peace, on new human relations.
Consider this discussion in an auto factory in Detroit as we recorded it in our pamphlet, Workers Battle Automation:
"Three years in a row Automation has reduced the number of weeks we worked. It sure gives you time to think. The other day I read where a scientist in California said that it didn't really matter who threw the first H-bomb. Once it's released, we would be only 'one-half hour away from total annihilation'."
A Negro then began talking about the last war: "You don't think I would have gone to war if I had a choice. I didn't want to give my life. I almost dropped dead when they swore me in. I almost said, 'No.'
"I couldn't say I had a recognition in this country. I'm not classed as a first-class citizen. Other people come here and they get first-class citizenship. We're born here, my mother and her mother before her and she could list four generations before that. Still we're not first-class citizens.
"I didn't class myself as an American. I was just thinking of myself as a man. They're integrated since then but we were strictly segregated. Even if you went to the front line you were separated. You might fight next to whites and sleep in the mud with them, but when you got back, you were segregated.
"I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I know the way here. But I want conditions to be improved one hundred per cent. It makes you think what the college kids are doing down South."
In another section of the same pamphlet, we wrote:
"It has been said that 'Revolution is evolution in the fullness of time.' It seems to me that evolution has now reached that point of change where men can thrust forward in a way that will leave the H-bomb, sputniks, and the like as part of the 'pre-history of man.' The youth of the world in the year 1960, with the Hungarian Revolution and its Workers' Councils behind them, facing guns and demanding that their voices be heard are putting Marxist-Humanism into practice.
"A new man will emerge. A new society.
"I feel like I can almost hold it in my hand or taste it - I believe it to be so close.
"At the moment I think the form of organization of the workers is all in their thinking. They are organizing their thinking."
Unfortunately, intellectuals seem unable to believe workers have thoughts of their own. Much less are they capable of listening to them. This of course is not restricted to the United States. Until 1953, all one heard about totalitarian regimes, outside of the horror it is to live under them, concerned their invincibility and success in brainwashing the people, and particularly so the workers. Suddenly, in one single day - June 17 - the East German workers exploded against the work norms, raised the slogan of "Bread and Freedom." Thus they put an end not only to the myth of totalitarian invincibility and ability to brainwash workers, but they opened an entirely new page in world history.
The very people who said it could never happen now began to play down what did happen. In contrast to those who were blind to the continuous daily revolts of workers against capitalism, private or state, our very analysis of how Russia, from a workers' state had been transformed into its opposite - a state-capitalist society - led us to see the new form of workers' revolts, both as workers and as an oppressed nationality.48
The very people who played down the East European Revolts, from Stalin's death, in 1953, through the Hungarian Revolution, in 1956, also played down the Negro struggles from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1956, through the Freedom Rides, in 1961, to the current struggles in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. We, on the other hand, do not divide the underlying philosophy from participation in all these struggles.
Above all, we hold fast to the one-worldedness and the new Humanist thinking of all oppressed from the East German worker to the West Virginia miner; from the Hungarian revolutionary to the Montgomery Bus Boy cotter; as well as from the North Carolina Sit-inner to the African Freedom Fighter. The elements of the new society, submerged the world over by the might of capital, are emerging in all sorts of unexpected and unrelated places. What is missing is the unity of these movements from practice with the movement from theory into an overall philosophy that can form the foundation of a totally new social order.
Thus, in 1958, we wrote in Marxism and Freedom: "The modern intellectuals will lose their sense of guilt and bondage when they will react to 'the compulsion of thought to proceed to these concrete truths' - the actions of the Negro school children in Little Rock, Arkansas, to break down segregation, the wildcats in Detroit for a different kind of labor than that under present-day Automation, the struggles the world over for freedom. The alignment precisely with such struggles in the days of the Abolitionists and of Marx is what gave these intellectuals that extra dimension as theoreticians and as human beings which enable them to become part of the new society. It will do so again . . .
"A new unity of theory and practice can evolve only when the movement from theory to practice meets the movement from practice to theory. The totality of the world crisis has a new form - fear at the 'beep-beep' from the new man-made moon. The American rush 'to catch up' with the sputnik, like the Russian determination to be the first to launch the satellite, is not in the interest of 'pure! science' but for the purpose of total war. Launching satellites into outer space cannot solve the problems of this earth. The challenge of our times is not to machines, but to men. Intercontinental missiles can destroy mankind, they cannot solve its human relations. The creation of a new society remains the human endeavor. The totality of the crisis demands, and will create, a total solution. It can be nothing short of a New Humanism."
In the five years since Marxism and Freedom appeared, the Freedom movements have given ample proof of the Humanist surge of masses in action seeking to reconstruct society. Today, as in the days of the Abolitionists, we see the new beginning. It is high time now to proceed to a middle, a theory; and an end - the culmination of the creative drama of human liberation into a new society freed from exploitation and discrimination and the wars that go with it. Only then can all man's innate talents first develop and man gain a new dimension that puts an end once and for all to his pre-history in class societies. The ideal and the real are never as far apart as the Philistines, in and out of power, would make it appear. Whether we take the 200 years of American development, or the last 20 years of world development, one thing is clear: the turning point for the reconstruction of society occurs when theory and practice finally evolve a unified organizational form. We have reached the turning point.
48 See Chapter 15 "The Beginning of the End of Russian Totalitarianism" in Marxism and Freedom, by Raya Dunayevskaya.