Criticism, Self-Criticism, and a few other things.

[David Schanoes]

I think CC is on the right track.  The history of capitalism, of the world
market, is the history of the movement and exploitation of black labor. As
an aside, we have Marx, producing Capital, as the fruit of his research and
development of historical materialism, and producing it at the same time as
a work regarding capital as abstracted from its real evolution with the
slave trade,  Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, producing,
paradoxically,  Capital almost ahistorically, as a separate analysis of
labor process.  It's not as if British capital would have ever developed
beyond mercantilism without the slave trade.  Dr. Eric F. Williams in two
fantastic books, Capitalism and Slavery, and From Columbus to Castro,
provides the necessary historical material detail for "fulfilling" the
Marxist exposure of capitalism.

In the US, it is almost, more than almost, that we have, not two different
working classes, but a working class that has two separate historical
origins, with black labor representing the underpinning of capital in its
role as a pre-industrial proletariat in the plantation economy.  The
"non-black" portion has a  different history, and  the inability of workers
movements in the US to even pose the question of power when it was posing
the question of power--i.e the great workers struggles in Toledo, Flint,
Twin Cities, San Francisco in the 30s was a manifestation of its inability
to strike at the core of US capital, racism.


Message -----
From: <billbartlett at dodo.com.au>
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2003 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: Criticism, Self-Criticism, and a few other things.


> At 10:07 PM -0600 31/12/02, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > > That means, at the start, jettisoning all analyses that
> >> don't focus on class, and class as the revolutionary agent.
> >
> >But that is ALWAYS the question: What, under given historical
> >conditions, does focusing on class _mean_. My assumption is that in the
> >United States focusing on class means focusing on the struggle against
> >working-class racism, which means uniting those parts of the class
> >(white or black, male or female) who will struggle under that banner.
>
> At a guess, I'd say that in the context "focus on class" means focusing on
class as opposed to focusing on race. You seem to disagree?
>
> Anyhow, my impression is that we are so far from any agreement on even a
definition of class under current historical conditions that perhaps the
focus of race is a way of avoiding the issue. But it seems to me that lack
of class consciousness is a root cause of racism, so to focus on race is
perhaps to focus on symptoms rather than cause. You could persuade me
otherwise though, why do you reason otherwise? Is class just too hard?
>
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas