“This is the beginning of communism.”
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:
A London Workers’ Meeting – Karl Marx:
Radical and reactionary politics in the Civil War:
C.L.R. James on the role of African American political struggle in the
U.S.:
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