game kings: September 2015

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Friday, September 4, 2015

The Lost Cause

“This is the beginning of communism.”

– Robert Lampley protesting the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds

Because the classic forms and organizations of working class politics have been assimilated or sidelined it can appear that the working class no longer has a political program. What is missed is that socialism, which is that program, is everywhere. It is even in South Carolina. But everywhere it is denied.

Partly, it's in hiding. In the upper reaches of the Democratic Party it is hidden out of shame, like an uneducated parent. But, in the class where it belongs, it is often hidden out of fear. Fear of the bosses and fear of those whose allegiance, taught or bought, lies with them.

The likely interpretation of Mr. Lampley’s comment is that he defines communism as the intrusion of the state into anything beyond the protection of the nation against external enemies. External here means both outside the borders and outside the dominant social pact, i.e. subversives. Mr. Lampley’s allegiance to the flag of the Confederacy is testimony to a belief that the greatest threat he can envision is the political program of the working class.

I don’t think we need to split hairs on the various historical manifestations of that program, past, present, and future. Mr. Lampley and his friends certainly will not. What we need to do is examine what the real connection is between socialism and the removal of the Confederate flag.

That connection is surplus value. Pursuing surplus value, capital undertook a project of inconceivable cruelty, reengineering the human population of three continents. Using its own resources and those of the colonial states it decimated and removed the native populations of the Americas and enslaved millions of Africans for use as a workforce on the lands of its American conquests.

By turning African labor into wealth it established the fact of its value and the fact that human labor is not racially distinguishable once it becomes money. These facts can be hidden from view but they cannot be undone. Capital and colonial powers have, in the last five centuries, assembled a formidable structure and ideology to deny this and to assert in its place a racist interpretation of human history. It is one of the emblems of this that has been removed from the grounds of the South Carolina capitol. That is why the assassin who struck the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston was so easily able to associate it with the flags of the colonial regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa.

Human equality is not the invention of socialist theory or the modern proletariat. It is an expression of our need to cooperate and an admission that stratification, whatever productive value it may have had historically, always carries a substantial cost.

As we dispersed from our African homeland we created cultures and economies on a variety of grounds. As our groups became more remote one from the other we have lost track of our unity. Or rather we have redefined our unity by our difference with those from whom we have separated but remained in contact. Or contacted again as our areas have grown

And now, under capital, we have not just dispersed to the entire world we have gathered our dispersal back into a world market. Capital has recreated the fact of human unity and equality but it remains trapped within antagonistic social relations which it cannot dissolve without dissolving itself.

Workers, who may personally still be bound to creeds of domination, cannot forswear, as a class, an end to the divisions of humanity. Wherever they have achieved political organization they have recognized its unity. Their political struggle and its need to overcome division objectively express the path which must be taken if humanity is to be united. The support, which might otherwise seem surprising, which working class organizations in the textile regions of England gave to the Union cause shows the strategic importance of equality.

And what of the Confederacy? Defeated in 1865 it reemerges within the Democratic Party as Jim Crow. Defeated in that garb it again mutates, now within the Republican Party. Now, once more it is unmasked, this time by a cold-hearted boy assassin. The willingness of those who have prospered politically by their allegiance to its flag to remove it from public sight may not be entirely explained by the horror of this crime. It may also, as Mr. Lampley has noticed, just be a sign of the times.

The soul of the Confederacy is the separation of the black worker from the white for the benefit of the owner, the capitalist. For that strategy to continue to serve it must, more and more, be disguised. Open advocacy of racism risks not only resistance from the African-American masses. It risks, in the current economic crisis, exposing itself as the tool it has always been for the continued dominance of one class over another.

Notes:

How the British workers’ movement helped end slavery in America:

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/05/linc-j05.html

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/07/linc-j07.html

A London Workers’ Meeting – Karl Marx:

http://marx.libcom.org/works/1862/02/02.htm

Radical and reactionary politics in the Civil War:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/first-red-scare-civil-war-european-socialists-bornstein-republicanism/

C.L.R. James on the role of African American political struggle in the U.S.:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/12/malcolm-x-clr-james-and-political-choices-today/