First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 10, March 14, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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While Alex Haley’s Roots sheds some light on the terrible oppression suffered by Black people under slavery, it basically portrays history from the standpoint of a bourgeois liberal mad as hell about slavery and oppression of hundreds of years ago, but with hardly an ounce of struggle against oppression today.
It is no wonder then that the social-chauvinists and revisionists who prance around disguised as “Marxists” are falling all over themselves with one-sided praise of Roots. These phony revolutionaries have launched one attack after another against the genuine movement and revolutionary culture of the masses in the fight for Black liberation. Opposing the right of the Afro-American people to self-determination with all their might, they have now taken Haley as their new hero of non-struggle.
As expected, the clearest case in point is the revisionist Communist Party USA, which claims that Roots is a “milestone on the road to freedom” and that it “brought basic realities of slavery home to millions in this country ... ”
Of course, to the liberal and revisionist spokesmen of the capitalist system “basic realities” don’t include the revolutionary struggle of the masses in their millions. It was this struggle which smashed the slave system and will ultimately do the same to capitalism – the system which stood behind slavery in the last century and which stands behind the naked exploitation and oppression of Black people and all workers today.
Haley’s view is that emancipation was handed to the slaves on a silver platter by the “great men”, in history, such as Lincoln. This view is appealing to the revisionists. They have historically fawned over the likes of Kennedy and McGovern while attacking SNCC, the Black Panther Party (in its revolutionary period), Malcolm X and the revolutionary Black workers’ movement of the 1960s.
Haley’s interpretation of slavery concentrates on the psychology of slave-owners and ship captains. He blurs over the fundamental character of the economic system and the role played by slave labor. This way of presenting the subject is also appealing to the “humanism” and idealism of the revisionists.
Even more disgusting is the phony praise for Roots coming from the social-chauvinists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In the February issue of their paper, the New York-New Jersey Worker, the RCP claims “the power of Roots comes from its being historical truth.” Throughout their review, there is not one word of criticism nor is there any analysis of the capitalists’ use of the series.
In Revolution, their paper aimed at intellectuals, the RCP makes a few superficial criticisms of Haley’s errors, but again makes no mention of the liberal ideology that lies behind them and which has historically been one of the strongest supports of capitalist oppression.
The power of liberalism can be seen today in the effect that Carter’s administration is having in diverting workers and sections of the intelligentsia away from the struggle against racial discrimination, just as Kennedy’s ideological influence paralyzed many during the early’60s.
Carter has opened the floodgates for the liberal opinion-makers to paint the illusion of a “unified nation,” free from those things that “divided us” during the Nixon-Ford days.
The extent to which the RCP chauvinists have been influenced by the liberal ideologues can be seen in their futile attempt to explain why the biggest monopolies in this country financed the showing of Roots on TV. “Clearly ABC TV’s motivation in producing the series was not to focus public attention on the abuses of slavery, but to line their pockets and make a coup in the Nielson ratings,” explains the Revolution article.
According to the RCP, the bourgeoisie had no political interests in showing Roots, but financial considerations. RCP’s economism can explain the world only in economic terms whether they are agitating within the workers; movement or analyzing the actions of the capitalists.
The facts show, however, that Roots is not some isolated money-making extravaganza, but rather part of a whole cultural wave of liberalism aimed at derailing the revolutionary struggle.
The RCP must amend their statement by saying: “Still, the fact that the series appeared on television at all shows that the film, by itself, does not lead to revolutionary conclusions – or it would have been killed, profits or no.” Very good, RCP. But, tell us please, if Roots does not lead to “revolutionary conclusions,” then what conclusions does it lead to?
By posing this question, we are by no means demanding that Haley take a Marxist-Leninist view of history, although the RCP accuses us of this. Haley is limited by his class background and lengthy education in the learning houses of the ruling class. However, the Black liberation struggle has produced dozens of historians and spokesmen who, although not Marxists, took an approach of class struggle, or at least kept themselves from promoting as many of the liberal pacifist myths as Haley does.
Revolutionary nationalists such as Dubois (before he became a Marxist), Malcolm X (whose life Haley helped chronicle) and scores of progressive scholars and bourgeois intellectuals have shown that Black oppression was completely bound up with the economic and social system under which we live. They rejected Haley’s line of liberalism and cultural freedom.
Our demand isn’t that Haley write from a Marxist stand. But we do demand this of the RCP, which claims to be Marxist. Their inability to draw a clear line of demarcation between themselves and Haley (especially in the propaganda they direct at workers) shows their rapid drift rightward more clearly than ever.
RCP mocks The Call’s analysis of Roots, saying: “OL’s whole approach in reviewing Roots substitutes dead dogma for living Marxist-Leninist analysis.” RCP goes on to claim that, by trying to answer the question, “Which class does it serve? ” the October league is “standing the world on its head.”
They conclude: “Apparently the October league believes that it should direct its ’main blow’ at those who, while having a bourgeois world outlook, expose aspects of the oppression of the people and strike a chord of anger and hatred for this oppression in the hearts of the masses.”
Here, while directly backing Haley’s non-struggle view of history, the RCP indirectly puts forward their defense of reformism and revisionism. They do this through their now-customary attack on OL’s policy of directing the main blow against those within the people’s struggle who promote conciliation with the bourgeoisie.
After all, in describing those with a “bourgeois world outlook” who “expose aspects of the oppression of the people,” the RCP is not only describing Haley. They are also describing all the liberal, revisionist and reformist trade union leaders who make these exposures only for the purpose of covering up the system behind the oppression.
What is the terrible “dogma” the RCP IS attacking? How can we judge a cultural work without using the criterion of “what class does it serve?”
Mao Tsetung pointed out, “ ... when we say that literature and art are subordinate to politics, we mean class politics, the politics of the masses, not the politics of a few so-called statesmen.“
To the RCP, the fundamental question in evaluating the positive and negative aspects of Roots is not which class it serves, but rather: “Does Roots instill in people a burning hatred for the system of slavery?”
It is to his credit that Haley exposes many of the outrages of the slave system. H is documentation of the crimes of that system is precisely why millions of people, Black and white, sat glued to their sets every night for a week, deeply sympathizing with the plight of Kunta Kinte and his family. Today, none of the apologists for capitalism could survive with a pro-slavery stand.
But there are different ways of attacking the slave system. Presentations are being put forward in the schools and textbooks which, while paying lip service to abolition, use this opposition to slavery to defend capitalism. Such presentations try to portray the lives of Black people today as having nothing in common with the oppression of 150 years ago.
This is why the lessons of the anti-slavery struggle are so important to the working class. It is crucial to understand that, while the abolition of slavery was a great victory, the betrayal of Reconstruction in the 1870s condemned Black people to a future nearly as bad as chattel slavery. It left the basic system of national and class oppression intact, and the Afro-American people remain an oppressed nation to this day.
While exposing some of the myths perpetuated in the schools and, the media about slavery, Haley defends and supports some of the most important of these myths. His negation of the hundreds of slave rebellions. portraying Nat Turner as someone looked upon as “crazy” by the masses of slaves, the whitewash of the role of Black fighters during the Civil War, and the view of emancipation being handed down from above are but a few of the pro-capitalist myths in Roots.
RCP has the nerve to justify their stand of unqualified praise for Roots by quoting Lenin on the national question: “The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support.”
Those who recall Revolution’s headlines attacking “Black nationalism“ as the “main danger“ in our movement, or their chauvinist calls to “Smash the Boston Busing Plan,“ or even the attack in the February issue against the concept of the Black united front, may become furious at the RCP’s demagogic use of the quotation from Lenin.
RCP’s whole history of liquidating the national question has made them notorious enemies of the Black liberation movement. Even though they now quote Lenin’s defense of the nationalism of an oppressed people, they have in no way given up their earlier chauvinist attacks on revolutionary nationalism. RCP is only praising bourgeois cultural nationalism, which preaches non-struggle and accommodation with imperialism instead of genuine revolutionary nationalism.
In doing this, the RCP picked the quotes it needed in an opportunist fashion. Lenin, on the very same page, says: “But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against.” (Lenin, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” CollectedWorks, Vol. 20, p. 412).
Lenin’s teachings on the national question expose the RCP and cannot be used to defend their chauvinist outlook. This is why the RCP has so often distorted Lenin and said that his teachings are no longer applicable. For example, they have claimed that the Black national question has entered a “new stage” where it is no longer a component part of the anti- imperialist struggle. They have also attacked the demand for the right of self-determination as “not being central to the struggle for Black people’s rights.”
In promoting this chauvinist view, the RCP has chosen to ignore yet another statement of Lenin, which can be found on the very same page they quote from. There, Lenin clearly criticized those who failed “to advance and advocate the slogan of the right to secession” for playing “into the hands ... of the bourgeoisie .... ” RCP’s support for bourgeois nationalism is combined with opposition to raising the right of self-determination in practice within the workers’ movement.
RCP reveals once again nothing but opportunism and chauvinism on the national question. Their support for the non-struggle nationalism of Haley is just the flip side of their attacks on revolutionary nationalism as the “main danger.” It is a reflection of their drift rightward into the arms of revisionism and the CPUSA, with whom they share common ground on the question of Roots.
RCP’s stand on the struggle of Black people is in. essence the, same as that of the revisionist Communist Party and in opposition to Marxism-Leninism.