First Published: Revolution, Vol. 2, No. 5, March 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Last month’s televised showing of Roots was more than a television series – it was a major social event. In the subways and on the shop floors, in living rooms, in taverns and coffee shops from coast to coast people discussed and struggled over the film and over the questions of society in the U.S. today that Roots gave rise to.
What did Roots do? While in form it was the dramatized account of the history of the family of its author, Alex Haley, its significance lay in the fact that it shed light on a whole epoch in the history of the country and took on a whole series of well-constructed lies and myths that have been carefully woven around the slave period over the decades.
In recent years there have been a few superficial “exposures” of the slave system and the history of Black people which portray the slaves as passive and promote the “quiet dignity of the oppressed.” But generally when the slave system has been dealt with at all in the popular media it is to paint a nostalgic and totally false picture of the pre-Civil War South in which the slave masters are chivalrous, cultured and benevolent, and the slaves, to the extent they figure in at all, are meek, dumb, happy and obedient.
The facts surrounding how slaves got to America in the first place is one of the “unmentionables” of official history. From childhood we have been bombarded with a picture of Africa consisting of cannibals and semi-humans, with the clear implication being that Africans were probably better off being kidnapped and dragged off in chains to Christian civilization.
Roots deals a heavy blow to this fiction. The trappings of the slave-masters’ culture is shown to be but a thin veil covering a brutal regime of the whip and the auction block. The onus of barbarism is correctly placed on those who made fortunes in the trade in human flesh, while the victims of their piracy are portrayed in a sympathetic light. The resistance of the slaves is both portrayed and supported. In short, Roots takes the side of the oppressed and condemns the oppressor.
It is this that gives Roots its significance and explains its tremendous impact on the American people. This is not mainly because of some abstract interest on the part of the masses in setting the historical record straight. Rather it is because the slave system left deep scars on present-day society, principally the continuing national oppression of Black people. The whole web of cover-ups, apologies – even glorifications – of slavery, which Roots effectively takes on, is part of the super-structure of this continuing oppression.
Because of this, the discussion and controversy over Roots was bound to go beyond an assessment of its artistic or historical merit, and focus on broader social questions. Were Black people “free at last” as the movie contended when the author’s family arrived in Tennessee? Where do whites fit into the picture, are they responsible for the oppression of Blacks? How is it that such a vicious system could come into being and why did it fall? Why hasn’t the truth about slavery come out before? What is the solution, the way out, of the oppression of Black people today? Does the position of workers of different nationalities have any similarity with that of slaves in the past? These, and similar questions, were hotly contested around the country.
Alex Haley does not directly address most of these questions in his work. Nevertheless, the way Roots presents the past has a bearing on how those who read the book or saw the series will look at them. Without belittling in the slightest the overall positive effect of Roots, it must be understood that there is much in Haley’s presentation that can lead away from drawing revolutionary conclusions.
In Roots Haley concentrates his fire on the super-structure of slavery, that is, the laws, customs, ideas, etc. that grew up on the basis of, the slave system and in turn enforced it. He lashes out at the enforced illiteracy, the rape of slave women, the humiliation and degradation. While he exposes the profit motive of the slaveowners, what does not come through clearly is that all of this existed to serve the fundamental feature of the slave system – the squeezing of wealth out of the back-breaking labor of the slaves. Indeed, the heart of daily life for the great majority of slaves, being driven virtually every waking hour in labor to produce the cotton and other export crops of the old South, is hardly pictured at all in the television series. This problem is exaggerated by the fact that most of the characters in Roots were either domestic servants or had a particular skill like chicken raising or blacksmithing and were not field hands as were the majority of slaves.
In the book, for example, Haley contends that the worst feature of slavery was that it prevented the slaves from “knowing who they were,” by which he means their African heritage and their family background. But while the splitting apart of families and the forcible eradication of their African heritage are certainly vicious crimes, they were perpetrated precisely to further a still greater crime –the robbery of the labor of the slaves, forcing a whole people to spend their entire lives as outright property, slaving in poverty to enrich a small handful of others.
Not only is understanding the essence of slavery as a system of the exploitation of labor important for an accurate picture of the slave system, it is absolutely critical for understanding how slavery came about in the first place and how it was integrally connected with the whole development of capitalism. It also makes clearer what is in common between slavery and the position of workers in this country today.
In Capital Marx points out how slavery and the slave trade were key components of the rise of the industrial capitalist. “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” He goes on to point out later, “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of wage-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.” This historical fact is a powerful weapon for exposing the capitalist class and building the unity of working people of all nationalities.
Contrast, for example, Marx’s approach with the way in which Haley addresses the question of unity between Black and white. Haley certainly does not blame white people as a whole for the oppression of Black people, and includes a commendable (and historically based) account of a white family making common cause with ex-slaves during the Reconstruction period. Since the objective, material interests of the, majority of whites in uniting with the freed slaves isn’t shown, the whole example comes off somewhat strained. The audience is left to draw the possible conclusion that the white family was acting against its own interests, out of some sort of philanthropic spirit.
The lack of a materialist point of view comes out in various ways in both the book and the television series. In particular, it comes out in divorcing the question of freedom from the material conditions of life and especially the material conditions of labor and production. This is particularly true of his treatment of tribal Africa which forms an important part of Roots. To the extent that Haley’s portrayal of African society knocks a hole in the chauvinist image built up by missionary movies, Tarzan stories and trash like Rudyard Kipling’s proclamation of the “white man’s burden,” it is a positive contribution. But by romanticizing tribal life, Roots misses the mark.
The basic message that comes through in Haley’s description of an African village, especially when contrasted to horrors that face his family later, is that African people were free. Watching the first television episode you sense that in this primitive village society there is no division into classes and no exploitation of man by man. There is certainly a great deal of truth in at least this latter aspect of Haley’s picture. For, in the history of all peoples, there was a period before the emergence of classes when society was based on people working together communally to produce the necessities of life (a stage referred to as “primitive communalism”). This fact itself is a blow against the capitalist lies that it is “human nature” and the “natural order of things” for some people to live off the labor of others.
But what comes out only slightly in Haley’s book, and not at all in the televised version is the extent to which people In primitive society are enslaved, not to each other but to necessity. Because the methods and means of producing things were so backward, society was almost completely at the mercy of disease, periodic famine and a life of intense labor to scratch out the barest existence. Under such circumstances, freedom is tremendously limited. It is hardly a way of life one would care to go back to.
In fact in the book Haley describes some of the developments within tribal society that lead to its breakdown, for example the earliest forms of a type of patriarchal slavery, trade between different villages and tribes, private property in the form of individually owned herds of goats, etc. (most of which is also missing from the television series). In dealing with the rudimentary development of slavery within the African village he describes, Haley essentially takes the position of apologizing for it by stressing its extremely primitive nature that slaves lived at almost the same standard of living as those who owned them, that they participated fully in the life of the village, etc.
But what Haley does not understand is that tribal society (assuming, for the sake of argument, it doesn’t come into contact with more advanced forms of society) inevitably is replaced by the slave system. This is the actual process of development of society, as can be seen by the relatively independent development of the slave system in ancient Egypt, Greece, India and China, for example.
This type of ancient slavery was different in many aspects, of course, from the slavery existing in the United States which was (as pointed out in the quote from Marx cited earlier) a “system of commercial exploitation,” which meant driving slaves to produce for the needs of the capitalist world market. The advance from primitive communalism to ancient slavery was progressive in the sense that it enabled the development of civilization, increasing the freedom of society as a whole to harness the forces of nature, thus laying the basis for society to advance beyond this. Furthermore, everywhere in the world primitive communal society was just that – primitive. It was characterized by a low level of material, cultural and ideological life and for this reason tribes often went to war, with the victors generally killing the captives.
When society developed to the point where someone’s labor could produce a surplus beyond his own survival needs, such captives were often not killed but made into slaves. This was an historically progressive step, not only from the point of view of the development of mankind as a whole, but even for the individual slaves, who at least were better off than if they had been killed.
The danger in Haley’s idealist view of tribal life and freedom is mainly in its implications for the future. Under today’s conditions the struggle for freedom can mean only one thing: the fight led by the working class to eliminate the exploitation of man by man and, by overthrowing and wiping out the fetters placed on society by the misery ridden and outmoded capitalist system of production, enable the masses of people to use their collective labor, unshackled from the blind necessity of working to enrich a handful, to constantly expand society’s mastery over nature.
This is certainly not the conception of freedom presented in Roots. Not only is freedom presented somewhat detached from the question of exploitation, at times it takes on an almost mystical quality, especially when it is portrayed as regaining “freedom” as it existed in Africa; This can feed a tendency toward Pan-Africanism, a political current that has cropped up from time to time among sections of Black people. Pan-Africanism holds that everyone of African origin, be they in the Caribbean, Africa, the United States or anywhere else, comprise One African People. While Blacks throughout the world do share part of a common heritage, this view negates the actual historical development in these areas. In the U.S. this means, among others, failing to come to grips with the actual conditions of oppression of Black people in this country – the development of a separate oppressed Black nation in the South and their history over more recent decades of being driven into the industrial centers of the North and South where Blacks have, in their great majority, become part of the multinational U.S. working class, while continuing to suffer oppression as a nation.
Politically, Pan-Africanism basically tells Blacks in this country that their liberation hinges principally on developments in Africa. While Pan-Africanism has played a certain progressive role in bringing people into struggle – especially against imperialist domination of Africa and against some aspects of the national oppression of Black people in this country – as a fully developed political line it steers the struggle of Black people in this country away from attacking the source of their oppression, the capitalist system of wage-slavery and drives a wedge between the Black people’s struggle and the struggle of the U.S. multinational working class.
Pan-Africanism is also a dead end for the struggle in Africa as well, in that it ignores the fact that nations and states have arisen in Africa itself on the basis of different material and historical conditions, are at different levels of development, and have different internal class relations; as a result of all this, the tasks facing the people in Africa, while certainly sharing common features, differ from one country to another.
Clearly ABC TV’s motivation in producing the series was not to focus public attention on the abuses of slavery, but to line their own pockets and make a coup in the Nielson ratings. The fact that ABC had difficulty in rounding up sponsors and charged rates far below those usually charged for audiences of huge magnitude, indicates that many capitalists were squeamish about the film. 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.
There is no doubt that ABC and the rest of the capitalist class grossly underestimate the hatred of the masses for oppression. Precisely because Roots did bring out such a huge swell of hatred for slavery and became such a mammoth topic of debate and because Its effect was to further the idea that it’s right to resist oppression, the capitalists and their representatives in the mass media stepped into the fray to cover up tile positive thrust of Roots, its exposure of a system of exploitation and its support for the oppressed, to build up all that was secondary, peripheral and wrong in Roots. Television reports and newspaper articles abounded on the subject of tracing one’s own family tree and tried to concentrate attention on Haley’s remarkable detective work in tracing the history of his family.
But what makes Haley’s search into his family origins something more than the scholastic exercise the bourgeoisie would like to reduce it to, lies partly in the fact that the search itself immediately confronted obstacles that were themselves a telling exposure of the national oppression of Black people. As was shown dramatically in Roots, Black people were systematically forbidden to read, write or keep records, their families were torn asunder when they stood in the way of the master’s profits and their African heritage was systematically stomped out. While there are certain weaknesses in Haley’s approach of focusing on individual life stories – especially in portraying the resistance of slaves to their oppression (almost exclusively in the TV version) as individual and not showing the organized, collective rebellion – on the whole his approach is quite moving and effective.
What the capitalists are seeking to do is divorce the form of Haley’s book (a study of family history) from its content. To the extent that studies such as Haley’s (and the whale movement for Black studies on the universities, for example) succeed in uncovering the history of resistance and struggle which the rulers have tried to stamp out and reveal the origin of the oppression of Blacks, they aid the struggle to eliminate that oppression. But the capitalists want to treat history simply as a matter of curiosity (which the study of family trees in fact is) and not something to be learned from in the struggle for a better future.
Haley himself seems torn between two assessments when it comes to assessing the significance of his own work. On the one hand he offers the history of his family as the common property of the twenty-five million Blacks in this country, and concludes his book by hoping that it will “help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.” On the other hand, he tends toward presenting the study of the heritage of Black people as a sort of culmination of their struggle, and in numerous interviews and speeches (which are currently number one on the lecture circuit) he claims the study of familial and cultural heritage is a sort of cure-all for Americans of all nationalities, even claiming it could provide an answer for the restlessness of the youth!
Besides trying to turn the interest generated by Roots into harmless reconnoitering through old birth certificates, the capitalists have also resorted to their typical divide and conquer techniques. There have been more than a few examples of the bourgeoisie trying to direct the anger of Blacks, brought to the surface by the television series, at ordinary white people, while trying to make whites feel that they were being blamed for slavery. A typical trick was a Milwaukee “man in the street” TV interview in which the responses were carefully edited to make exactly this point, with all the Blacks saying the series made them hate whites and all the whites saying they found the show objectionable.
Though the Milwaukee interview was clearly a bourgeois distortion, what is true is that the showing of Roots hit at a raw nerve-in American society – the oppression of Black people. Because this oppression is an objective fact, and because of the centuries old attempts of the bourgeoisie to foster social antagonisms that grow up on the basis of the real inequality and oppression that exists, it is hardly surprising that Roots did bring some of these conflicts to the surface, especially since the story did not paint a clear direction forward. As a result some have suggested that the principal social effect of Roots is to divide Blacks from whites.
Such a view not only fails to correspond to the facts (for the majority of white working people who saw Roots reacted positively to it) but has potentially dangerous implications. Because oppression and inequality exists, people will fight against it and writers will write about it. This is of course a very good thing, and must be united with.
To expect – or even worse, demand – that all who rise to expose and fight national oppression be fully class conscious or scientific would be grossly sectarian and would have the effect of furthering divisions that exist within the ranks of the people, and cutting off from the working class its most powerful ally in revolutionary struggle, the resistance of the oppressed nationalities.
What is necessary is for the working class, through the leadership of its Party, to unite with struggle against national oppression, to actively take it up, and in the course of this bring forward the picture of a common enemy and the fact that workers of all nationalities are one class with one class interest-to end exploitation and all oppression.
As pointed out earlier, Roots raises more questions than it answers. This underscores the necessity of communists and advanced workers taking a vigorous part in the discussion and struggle that the showing of Roots generated, bringing the light of Marxism-Leninism which can alone fully explain the origin and nature of the oppression of Black people and, more importantly, which alone can show the way to eliminate it by ending its source – capitalist rule, and thereby enable the construction of a whole new society in which all oppression and exploitation of man by man will be eliminated.
After writing the above article, we read the remarkable review of Roots entitled “ ’Roots’ TV Series – Which Class Does It Serve?” in the February 14 Call, the newspaper of the October League, which is worthy of comment – if nothing else. In their review they make the astounding discovery that the class outlook of the author, Alex Haley, is bourgeois. If they had restricted their comments to proving this obvious fact, perhaps they could have printed a mildly interesting scholastic article, which itself would have been a great improvement for the Call.
But all of their dancing up and down about Haley’s outlook and going out of their way to point out that Haley’ is making a lot of money off his book (obviously), that he spent 20 years in the Coast Guard and was a member of the Bicentennial Commission (all of which, by the way, is done completely one-sidedly, leaving out for instance that he co-authored the Autobiography of Malcolm X) is to justify the whole argument of their article: that Roots served the bourgeoisie.
In their review OL gives the following criterion for evaluating Roots saying, “to really understand Roots we must look at its class viewpoint. Which class does it serve and from what point of view does it look at this history? We must ask, does it portray this history as it really took place? What does it include and what does it skip over? Finally, what are the lessons that it offers the viewers? Do these lessons serve to further the struggle or to cripple it? Who does it show as the friends and enemies of the oppressed people?”
Certainly these questions are relevant “to understand Roots,” and in their pitiful and one-sided attempt to answer them they do stumble on many of the real weaknesses in Roots – that the “masses of Black slaves are portrayed as the objects of history rather than the makers of it,” that it blurs “the economic and social causes of slavery,” that “the extreme hardships and sunup to sundown toil” is not shown, etc. However, most of what we learn from OL’s list of crimes is that Alex Haley is not a Marxist-Leninist and that Nat Turner, Malcolm X and W.E.B. Dubois had a revolutionary stand and Haley doesn’t.
But, to borrow a phrase from the October League, what does their review include and what does it skip over? What questions do they pose and what do they omit? Since OL set out to prove not just that Haley isn’t a Marxist-Leninist or even a revolutionary nationalist but that Roots serves the bourgeoisie, one would expect even the October League to assess the television series principally on the basis of its social effect and not on the ideology of its author.
Ironically, the only two points that OL makes about Roots’ actual social affect are that “130 million people viewed Roots and are discussing it daily” and that “to some degree, it has awakened pride and awareness in a society where Black people and all working people are usually portrayed in the most degrading manner,” hardly convincing proof that it serves the ruling class.
To the October League’s series of questions we would like to add a few of our own: Does Roots instill in people a burning hatred for the system of slavery? Is its overall effect among the masses to encourage or discourage resistance to exploitation and oppression? In the main, does it build up and strengthen or does it attack and expose the ways in which the ruling class tries to justify its oppression of Black people? In short, is it a good thing or a bad thing that 130 million people watched it and were influenced by it to one degree or another? The answers to these questions, in our opinion, are obvious.
These types of questions, questions of the actual effect on the class struggle must be the starting point for assessing it. Avoiding such questions, the questions of the real way the masses of people took up this show and the basic message they got from it, makes a mockery out of OL’s criticism of Haley for not proceeding from the point of view that the masses are the makers of history.
These are the same types of considerations that led genuine communists in 1974 to criticize the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a television movie of the life story of a fictional Black woman whose life spanned the period between slavery and the modern civil rights movement. Unlike Roots, the overall effect of Jane Pittman was to promote passivity in the form of the quiet dignity of the oppressed. The October League, on the other hand, wrote in the May 1974 Call (in an article that is more than a little amusing to read in conjunction with their Roots review) that “the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was an excellent document of a hundred years of struggle in the mass movement for racial equality from the viewpoint of a participant. It was both informative and engrossing.” All this without one word of criticism. Wasn’t it the wishy-washy and passive character of the show that resulted in the fact that it had no striking effect on the masses of people, while Roots will be remembered for years?
OL’s 1974 review, written when they were in their heyday of unabashedly trailing reformism and liberalism of all varieties, has in common with their dogmatic and seemingly “left” Roots review, the characteristic that neither proceeds from the actual effects on the working class struggle in evaluating works of culture.
Lenin pointed out that the concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the “living soul of Marxism.” This certainly applies to analyzing works of art and their social impact. How does the content of a book, for example, interact with the experience and the understanding of the masses? What questions does it raise, what answers does it give or imply? Marxist-Leninists must certainly bring the light of scientific class analysis into the discussion and ideological struggle that something like Roots engenders among the masses. But only on the basis of this type of concrete analysis is it possible to formulate correct criticisms of shortcomings, inaccuracies and wrong answers that will be of any use to the masses in advancing their struggle and steering clear of pitfalls.
OL’s whole approach in reviewing Roots substitutes dead dogma for living Marxist-Leninist analysis. By standing the world on its head and trying to determine “which class does it serve?” primarily on the basis of its “class viewpoint” abstracted from the actual battles between classes raging in society, they arrive at a fundamentally wrong answer to their own question. 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. Despite all the constant prattling about “liquidating the national question,” OL insists that the answer to their question “which class does it serve” is provided by their discovery that the class viewpoint of Roots is bourgeois. Has the OL forgotten that, as Lenin said, “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.” (Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 412, Lenin’s emphasis)
In attacking the main thrust of Roots and thus opposing its overall positive social effect, the “Marxist- Leninist” October League stinks compared with the bourgeois Haley.