Rip Van Winkle awoke after twenty years; the old radicals sleep on 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as they did at the outbreak of the Civil War when Marx considered their high-sounding "Marxist" opposition to wage slavery "as well as" chattel slavery as no more than escapism from reality. After Marx's death, Friedrich Engels, his life-long collaborator, was so aroused against the American socialists for isolating themselves from the existing trade unions, that he wrote a friend that Bismark's anti-socialist laws "were a misfortune, not for Germany, but for America to which they consigned the 'Knoten.
Insofar as American Marxism is concerned, the 20th century was no improvement on the 19th. Just as the world significance of the struggle to abolish slavery, and the national importance of the existing trade unions escaped them in the 1860's and 1880's, so did the new national-international pivot of the Negro struggle in the early 1920's. Neither the actual struggles led by Marcus Garvey, nor the prolific writings of Lenin on the National Question, could arouse them from their torpor on the "Negro Question."
By 1941 the policy of jingoistic American Communists bore no resemblance whatever to the Marxist theory of liberation either on the question of the emancipation of labor or the self-determination of oppressed nations. Long before this transformation into opposite, however, Claude McKay rightly accused American Communists of being unwilling "to face the Negro Question." In a word, they too are products of the bourgeois society in which they live and thus do not see in full the contradictory foundation of American Civilization; its Achilles heel is enclosed not in the "general" class struggle, but in the specifics of the "additive" of color in these class struggles. Precisely because of this the theory of liberation must be as comprehensive as when Marx first unfurled the banner of Humanism.
From its birth in 1843, Marx, at one and the same time, fought capitalism and "vulgar communism"; exposed alienation at its root - not alone in ownership of property or even in exploitation of labor, but also in the fetishisms of its philosophy, "popular culture," political superstructure. It is this total underlying philosophy of the ruling class which assumes the "fixity" of a law of nature.44 It must be abolished, uprooted. Abolition of the profit motive and transformation of private into state property could not achieve this unless what was most degrading of all in class societies - the division between mental and manual labor - was abolished and a new society established on truly human foundations.
Because slavery stained American civilization as it wrenched freedom from Great Britain, the Negro gave the lie to its democracy. At first he was alone in so doing. But with the birth of Abolitionism, and for three stormy decades thereafter, American civilization was placed on trial by whites as well as Negroes who together focused on the antagonism between the ideal of freedom and the reality of slavery. The Negro became the touchstone of this class-ridden, color-conscious, defaced civilization which had an ever-expanding frontier but no unifying philosophy.
To achieve unity between North and South not only did a Civil War become inevitable but it was compelled to unfurl a new banner - Emancipation Proclamation - before it could win this long, bloody war. Thereby it also proved that, at bottom, the sectional struggle was in fact a class struggle. For those who thought that this truth was limited to the struggle between North and South, but did not hold for the "classless" Western democracy, where "everyman" could become a property owner, an independent farmer, the argicultural crises of the 1880's and 1890's came as a greater shock than the Civil War.
For the first time since this country achieved its independence, it became clear to all that capital, rather than the pioneer in the covered wagon, put its mark on this nation. The theoretician of the frontier - the historian, Frederick J. Turner - rightly records this mark upon the expansion westward which dominated the development of this new nation "conceived in liberty":
"But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expansive irrigation works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required . . . Iron and coal mines, transportation fleets, railroad systems, and iron manufactories are concentrated in a few corporations, principally the United States Steel Corporation. The world has never seen such a consolidation of capital and so complete a systematization of economic processes."
What Professor Turner does not record is that, with the destruction of Populism, the frontier dream "passed into" monopoly capital. That is to say, from being the distinguishing mark of the American Civilization, the frontier disappeared as a way out from the class-begotten civilization. Monopoly capital and its thrust into imperialism, no doubt, did not mean for the white working people what it meant for the Negroes: the total collapse of their aspirations. That's precisely why the Negro remained the Achilles heel of this civilization.
But while material progress and "reforms" may have helped sustain an illusion long since passed among the rest of the population, the frontier became an illusion, not the reality of American Civilization which by the turn of the century took its place alongside the other capitalist civilizations carving empires out of the African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. What is pivotal to the study of the role of the Negro in American Civilization is that, at each turning point in history, he anticipates the next stage of development of labor in its relationship with capital. Because of his dual oppression, it could not be otherwise.
Take the present shift of the Negro struggle from the North to the South. Although at the moment it seems predominantly student youth in leadership, this new force did not arise in a vacuum. It arose within the context of a growing urbanization and industrialization of the South. The most important effect of the post-war industrialization of the South has been that cotton is no longer the main source of Southern wealth. Although cotton remains the second most important crop in the United States, the South - so permeated with the ideology stemming from slavery and its economic remains which had dominated the South from 1790 to 1940 - cannot hold on to the quasi-totalitarian relations when its economic basis has gone. Of 11,666,000 production workers in the United States in 1958, three million were in the South (including the border states), and in the deep South there were two million production workers.
By 1959, there was an increase of half million production workers in the United States (total: 12,238,000); the number remained substantially unchanged in the Southern border states, but in the Deep South there was a 10 per cent increase, to 2.2 million.
The urbanization of the Negro when, for the first time in his history, there is a slight majority of Negroes living North, has meant a phenomenal move from country to city right within the South. Between 1950 to 1960 the move of the Negro population has been most dramatic as it fell in rural areas from 37 per cent to 27 per cent. Indeed, both North and South, according to the 1960 census, the Negro is more urbanized than the white: 72 per cent for the Negro against 70 per cent for whites. The trend has continued.
This movement from country to city shows itself in yet another way when we consider the total non-white civilian labor force 14-years old and over. (In this case, the term "non-white" includes also American Indians, Orientals, etc., who total less than one per cent of the population, even after the inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii since 1960.)
In 1950, this age group numbered almost 40 per cent of the total non-white population, or about six million out of some 16 million. Of these, more than four million, or about 69 per cent were urban, and nearly two million, or about 31 per cent were rural. By 1960, the group had dropped to 35 per cent of the total of non-whites, or 7.25 million out of 20.5 million; but its urban-rural ratio had increased to 78 per cent urban as against 22 per cent rural, or 5.75 million to one-and-a-half million. In 1950, 17.5 per cent of this group worked in agriculture; ten years later it was only 7.5 per cent. That 92.5 per cent of the non-white labor force over 14 years of age is either working or looking for work in America's cities is the imperative human motive force behind the unfolding struggle in the South.
If the great strength and surge of the Negro struggle, from the post-World War I years to the post-World War II years, was centered in the North - and at the beginning of World War II, it was Far West45 - the great strength and surge of the past decade has been in the South where the Negro masses are remaining to fight for new human relations in the very heart and stronghold of American repression. The new stage of Negro struggle that began with the Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott movement revealed the proletarian stamp in the organization of the protest - 100,000 Negroes walked for one year - and in the creative self-activity of organizing its own transport and weekly mass meetings to assure and develop its own working existence.
The new stage of struggle deepened when high school and college youths in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960 sat down at a department store's segregated lunch counter.46 From an entirely different source, it was as spontaneous as the refusal of Mrs. Rosa Parks to move to the back in the Montgomery bus. The climax these struggles reached, when the Freedom Rides did finally originate North and included whites as well as Negroes, was inspired by the movement in the South. The South, not the North, led. The committees which sprang up to coordinate the work followed, rather than led, these spontaneous movements which were outside the scope of the established organizations.
This is true not only in relationship to the stillbirth of the CIO called "Operation Dixie," but also of the Negro organizations from the NAACP to the CORE, from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). All followed the spontaneously evolving movement. None anticipated either the Bus Boycott of 1956 or the Sit-ins of 1960 or Freedom Rides of 1961. As the movement which first arose around a working-woman, then sprang up among high school youth, and now seems most predominant among college youth, there is, however, also more of a tendency to make it appear as an individual's fight for education rather than a people's fight for total democracy, economic as well as political, educational as well as social.
It is not an individual fight. The social dynamite with which the South is charged is exploding at a time of unprecedented industrialization there.
It is true that in the South, even less than in the North, industrialization has not raised the Negro to the status of the white worker nor dissolved his struggle for elementary democratic rights into the general class struggle. Differentials in wages, seniority, upgrading have by no means been abolished.
There is not the illusion of 1937 when the birth of the CIO seemed to open a totally new life. The national trade union leadership, long since transformed into a bureaucracy, seems to live on a different planet altogether. It is too busy travelling all over the globe - all over that is except South USA - too busy selling the State Department line on "the American way of life," to be overly concerned with white labor, much less the Negro, though he numbers nearly two million within the AFL-CIO and many more unorganized outside.
The Negro is still the last to be hired and the first to be fired. The duality of this era of proletarianization when the new stage in production - Automation - is daily throwing people by the thousands and tens of thousands into a permanent army of unemployed intensifies the Negro's feeling of frustration both against capitalism and the labor bureucracy.
In its report of August 1962, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that, as compared to a 4.6 per cent of the white labor force being unemployed, the Negro unemployed number 11.4 per cent. But it is precisely around Automation and precisely among miners where the Negro is most numerous and most integrated that the American worker has, ever since 1950, raised the most fundamental question of any society: what kind of labor must man perform, why must there be such a division between thinking and doing, between work and life.
This search for a philosophy of life, that is to say a link between theory and practice, received a world-shaking impetus from the African Revolutions which showed the indivisibility of the Freedom NOW movement.
The most exciting chapter in human affairs since World War II was written by the African Revolutions. The first All-African People's Conference, in 1958 when Ghana was the only independent state, disclosed not just Pan-Africanism but the making of a Negro International.
Tiny Guinea's "No!" to France won her freedom and thereby reaffirmed that the greatest force for remaking the world remains the human being. In less than a decade no fewer than 22 African nations won their independence.
The banner under which this freedom from colonialism has been achieved - Pan-Africanism - is not a purely African phenomenon. It has had a multiple birth and development in which the American contribution is important. Where standard history texts, in their vulgar materialistic way, still dwell in detail on the long-dead triangular trade of rum, molasses and slaves - between Africa, the West Indies and the United States - it is the ever-live triangular development of internationalism, masses in action and ideas which is the dominant force today.
All the "Utopian" ideas that have since become facts of life, underlying philosophies of actual revolutions - from the theory of Nigritude to the slogan of "Africa for the Africans"; from nationalism to an international of the Negro; and from freedom from colonialism to socialist Humanism - have had their origin in this vital traffic between Africa, the West Indies and the United States. With human relations spanning the continents, came also the true history of Africa. As the pioneer Negro historian, Carter G. Woodson, put it, "The race has a past and it did not begin on the cotton and sugar plantations of America." Greater than the intellectual interchange at the turn of the century was the history of Negro struggles in this country - from the time of slave revolts to Populism - which inspired such revolts in Nyasaland as the Chilembwe Rising of 1915.47 As we saw, the greatest mass movement among Negroes in the United States was led by a West Indian, Marcus Garvey.
Whether many ideas came to Africa from actual slave revolts and continuous struggles since the end of slavery in this country, or was transmitted there through intellectual channels - and the Negro colleges played no small part in training many of the present leaders of the independent African states - it would be forcing the point beyond recognition to try to attribute to the Negro American the actual world-shaking events that the Africans themselves participated in during the 1950's. The absurdity of such a claim would be seen at once were we to move from what was British Africa to what was French Africa, and attempt to give France credit for the socialism of Sekou Toure in Guinea because he participated in Paris congresses. No, in stressing the exchange of ideas we do not mean to impute a one-to-one relationship - that is, a direct, immediate, invariable, or automatic connection - between ideas and revolution either in the past or presently, either in the United States, the West Indies or Africa.
The historic greatness of today's development, no matter what the roots are, flow from the spontaneity, the timing, the political maturity of our age and our world. It is not just black, or even colored, but white as well. Nor is it directed only against Western imperialism as the East German and Hungarian Revolutions for freedom from Russian totalitarianism showed. The shock of recognition comes from the Humanism underlying all revolts - in advanced as in technologically underdeveloped countries, the United States or Africa, Asia or Latin America, the Middle East or Western Europe. The internationalization of such words as "Uhuru," "Sit-In," "Independance," "Freedom Ride," "Freedom Fighter," have merged into the world-wide Freedom NOW.
Recently, NBC interviewed some newly-arrived African students. One Nigerian student was asked how he happened to choose this country although a scholarship had also been offered him in London where there is less discrimination than here. His reply what that the African does get "a good education in Great Britain - and enters the career service." But the same education in the United States - precisely because any Negro, the African included, encounters discrimination - "makes the African into a revolutionary and that is what I want to be."
The African student summed up the two-way road from and to African Revolutions more correctly than all the standard history texts and the current liberal journalistic reports. Also pointed to is the stage we may call "What Happens AFTER?" - what happens after independence is won? Is a new aristocracy, only this time of "intellect" rather than imperialism, to take over? Is the relationship between African and Negro American, as rank and filers, to be subordinated to inter-governmental aid programs? And are ideas to be forced into the narrow confines of immediate needs?
Of all the African socialists, Sekou Toure is the one who appeals most to the left in both Africa and the United States because of the historic sweep of his deeds and the passion of his views. His little country's "No!" to the mighty (but not almighty) De Gaulle France, electrified the world with its daring and its challenging philosophy: "The science resulting from all human knowledge has no nationality. The ridiculous disputes about the origin of such and such a discovery do not interest us since they add nothing to the value of the discovery. It can therefore be said that African unity offers the world a new humanism essentially founded on the universal solidarity and cooperation between people without any racial and cultural antagonism and without narrow egoism and privilege. This is above and beyond the problem of West Africa and as far removed from the quarrels which divide the highly developed countries as are the conditions and aspirations of the African people."
The confidence in the African masses - "all peoples are capable at any time of administering themselves and of developing their personality. There are no minor peoples, except under slavery or foreign oppression" - had the sweep of Lenin on the eve of the Russian Revolution when he maintained that "only from below" can the revolution become invincible. But, in the "rediscovery of its African personality," in contrast to the discovery of the genius of the Russian proletariat as "merely" the beginning of the international revolution, this great African leader excludes all "foreign" ideologies - of the working class, as of oppressor: "Africa cannot agree, to the detriment of respect for her personality, her civilization and her proper structure, to become an organic structure of any system of states or ideologies whatsoever." As if Marxism were not the unity of theory and practice, he maintains that "philosophy does not interest us. We have concrete needs."
This same preoccupation is to be found in Nigeria. As Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe expressed it: "I cannot divorce theory from practice. What philosophy we have has not been systematized in such a way as to make it appreciated outside our shores. Let me give you the basis. Our way of life is tied with land tenure. Here it is communal - the implication is that every person has a stake in the land. He cannot sell it but his sons are heirs. It belongs to them. You don't own it as individuals in the sense that you can sell it for profit, and it became communalistic. They hold the land in common. Thus we have no landless peasantry . . . and there is no permanent laboring class, although this is becoming so. Since there is no landless peasantry, nor a permanent wage earning class, Marxian socialism doesn't apply to us; African, Nigerian socialism does. No doubt the theory should be systematized, but it has not yet been done.
"Welfare state, our own brand of socialism, is not Communism or Marxism or Fabian guild, but something to suit our way of life. To this we will stick. Welfare state is rooted fundamentally in socialist beliefs. Most of our people believe in free enterprise but not that it should mean profit at all costs."
In spite of these sentiments from the established Leaders, the Nigerian masses do not feel that there have been any fundamental changes in their lives as a result of their recently-won political Independence. From opposition meetings it is obvious that there is a difference in the conception of African socialism between those in office and those on the outside. The same is true in Senegal. Yet President Leopold Senghor admits neither to these differences nor to any fundamental difference between the Casablanca and Monrovia blocs into which the African states are divided. Of that he says: "The difference is not serious. What is serious is the division between the United States and the Soviet Union."
This is certainly true if one is concerned with the world power struggle rather than with relations among socialists, as well as with the world ramifications of the theoretical development of African socialism. Especially attractive was Senghor's June, 1959, speech at the Constitutive Congress of his Party of African Federation where he singled out "Marx's positive contributions. They are: the philosophy of Humanism, economic theory, dialectic method," and of these he chose the Humanism as the most basic. More recently (May, 1962) his statement about the affinity of Russian Communism and American capitalism was both true and hilarious. "The program of the 22nd Russian Communist Party Congress is like that of the United States - completely materialistic - a civilization of frigidaires and TV. You have Communism, you have American free enterprise, and you have the plan in Western Europe.
"Each ideology has a truth, but only in part. Where is the ideology which is not all materialistic, which permits room for the spiritual? That is our ideology. I think I should say in all justice that we use the socialist method. We are socialists and use the democratic method which preserves liberty. That is why here in Senegal we have a dual direction: (1) Economically, it is the direction of the plan. (2) Culturally, we are for the Negro African blending with that of Europe. Here (turning to the wall of his presidential suite) is a beautiful painting that is authentically African, but the Senegalese artist is a product of the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris.
"I think that the division between Monrovia and Casablanca is a superficial division. We are for the unity of the two African Blocs. The vocabulary they use now is that of East and West, but in Africa the problem is not one of class, or state capitalism. The problem which is supreme is the new cultural existence. We want a culture which is African. The division between Monrovia and Casablanca is not the real problem. The real problem is a struggle between the USA and the USSR. "When President Sekou Toure calls for full re-Africanization, the problem is one of Negritude. But Africa is economically greatly retarded and the need is for the scientific technology that Europe has, the efficiency of the American. We have a dual problem, a situation of undevelopment and the problem of Negritude. It is a problem of method. It is necessary to have a method with which to approach this reality.
"Negritude isn't pure resurrection. It is a modern adaptation of African history and culture. We take the technique of Europe in order to permit the creation of a new civilization for the Africa of the 20th century.
"There is a socialism, but the socialism in Europe is depasse because the African reality is spiritual. In Marxism there is determinism, scientific and discursive reason and humanism. The revolution is scientific and it is philosophic. Einstein is 20th century, but so is the artist 20th century. The 20th century culture is more than scientific. Communism is not the whole truth. It is abstract and scientific. In this, capitalism resembles communism.
"The culture which today finds a method for Black African where we can take science from Communism and capitalism, and from African poetry and knowledge is the culture we need. From this point of view, both in the United States and the Soviet Union there is not this sense of reality. We want a culture that is African, the conclusion of the PHENOMENOLOGY of Teilhard de Chardin."
The trouble with President Senghor's humanism is that it is general and abstract where it should be concrete and specific. The fundamental difference between Senegalese socialism and that envisaged by Marx does not reside in the difference between "spiritualism" and "materialism" but between theory and practice. The tragedy of the African Revolutions stems from the fact that its leaders are so weighted down by the consciousness of the backwardness of the technology, the need to industrialize, and rapidly, that they turn for aid almost exclusively to the powers-that-be in the technologically advanced countries, instead of the proletariat in those lands. Naturally, we do not oppose any African country accepting aid from any source whatever, be that De Gaulle's France, Kennedy's America, or Khrushchev's Russia. Western imperialism has plundered Africa for centuries, plundered it both of its manpower and its natural resources. It is high time for at least some of this African wealth to return to the country of its real origin. This, however, is not the point at issue for Humanists. The point at issue is the relationship, first to one's own people, the very ones who made independence possible; second, to the underlying philosophy of freedom which is not to be degraded to a changing tactic dependent on the relationship of forces with the enemy; and third, above all to the world proletariat which is equally desirous with the African to put an end to the crisis-ridden, capitalistic world that is presently hell-bent for nuclear destruction.
The ideology, the Freedom NOW, which elicited the elemental creativity of the masses that reshaped Africa, and thus the world, in less than a decade, will surely need a more international content for the forward move of humanity. This is an inescapable feeling when, daily in Africa, one meets young Africans who are increasingly concerned with new human relations, new world relations, that is to say, a totally new human dimension. In the Gambia, for example, new world relations meant to the youth, not government-to-government, but people-to-people. The Young Workers Movement wanted to hear about socialism the world over, and they specified the Freedom Riders in the United States as well as the Zengakuren of Japan, the Socialist Youth of Great Britain as well as the Nigerian Youth Congress. Here is a country which, with the elections in May, 1962, was the last of the British colonies in West Africa to have taken the first step toward self-government. It looked up to independent Africa, wanted to be part of Pan-Africanism, but also did not fear to admit that Pan-Africanism had become "an umbrella" for a competitive variety of African movements. The Gambia youth asked, with true humility, couldn't they, just because they were the last to gain freedom in West Africa, not separate Black Africa from the socialist movement - from the working people in America, Europe, Russia, the Orient - "to create a new world on human beginnings?"
The same thought has been expressed repeatedly in the United States by the courageous young Freedom Fighters in their unflagging struggles against the Southern racists. As we wrote in "SOUTH AFRICA, SOUTH U.S.A." (News & Letters, April, 1960): "Despite (the) use of force, added to mass arrests and the harassing Imposition of insulting 'local laws,' the young Freedom Fighters of the South refuse to be intimidated. Far from abating, the sitdown movement and mass demonstrations for basic human rights grow daily in scope and volume . . .
"The example of the Southern protest movement has electrified Negro and white youth throughout the country, including some in the South itself . . . By their self-activity, the students in South U.S.A. have lighted the only path to freedom - mass activity."
In "NEW FREEDOM CAMPAIGNS MARK FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF SIT-INS" (News & Letters, Feb. 1961), we wrote: "Just as the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 was followed by a bus boycott by Africans, a year later, in Johannesburg, South Africa, so the current South U.S.A. sit-ins have inspired a bi-racial sit-in against tearoom segregation in Captown, South Africa . . . the self-activity of the Negro masses . . . illuminate (s) the road to the reconstruction of society on new, truly human beginnings."
44 See chapter on "Fetishism of Commodities" in Capital, by Karl Marx, Vol. I.
45 See the special issue of The Journal of Educational Sociology, November, 1945, which was devoted to "Race Relations on the Pacific Coast," edited by L. D. Reddick.
46 Unfinished Revolution, by Tom Kahn, New York. 1960, has a chronological list of sit-in and other protest demonstrations from Feb. 1 through August 1, 1960.
47 We have limited ourselves, of necessity, to the aspects of the African Revolutions which relate to the development of the historic role of the Negro American. For further views of Africa in its own right, see our News & Letters Pamphlet, "Nationalism, Communism, Marxist-Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions." See also our POLITICAL LETTERS: No. 26, "The American Katanga Lobby and the Congo Crisis"; and Nos. 33 - 38, a series of letters from West Africa which ends with "Which Way Now? Under the Impact of Communism and Neo-Colonialism." For an account of the Chilembwe Rising see Shepperson and Price, Independent African. See also, Africa Seen By American Negroes, published by Presence Africaine, and available from American Society for African Culture, New York, N.Y.